Health Psychology Intervention on Stress Attacks
...etimes I would talk about my problems or just chit-chat with my best friend in London, depending on how open I felt at the time. This approach seemed to alleviate some of the small stressors I encountered but it did not help prevent them from occurring or give any resolution to the problems that arose. In the following weeks I became highly interested in the topic Professor was lecturing about because it was directly related to my intervention. She was talking about stress and its effects on both physical and mental health. This confirmed that I had made the right decision to work at controlling this element in my life because it was definitely affecting my health now and possibly in the future. When the topic of coping with stress came up, it shed much insight on my intervention and the techniques I was using to manage my attacks. As I read through my past journal entries, I realized that when faced with stressors, I had been using a lot of emotion-focused coping, specifically escape-avoidance. If I was arguing with my parents or having a miscommunication with Kyle, I would simply hang up the phone, leave the room, or stop talking. This seemed like the only way I could stop the attack from escalating. At first, I was having moderate success using this method. It seemed to take me out of the stressful situation and give me time to calm down and think things through rationally. But after awhile I noticed that this was not enough. Even when I tried to escape the stressor, it seemed to linger in my mind and continued to frustrate me. It felt like all the other attacks that I tried to avoid were coming back to haunt me now. This was highly frustrating because I did not what the cause was or what a solution would be. All I knew was the antecedents and the consequences and sometimes I felt these were completely out of my control. I was beginning to feel like these attacks were originated inside of my head. It was the way I perceived and interpreted the stressors that caused me to reacts so volatile, both psychologically and physically. I had to teach myself to think and believe that sometimes you just have to let the small things slide because it is not worth it to take it too personally or overreact. Because I had experienced so many little stress attacks I began to learn what initiated my emotions to react and how to control them. When a stressor would present itself I would consciously think to myself what it meant and how it made me feel. It was almost as if the actively examining the situation and myself helped me to avoid interpreting and responding in a negative way. I could not control the presence of stressors, but I could now control the way I felt about them and my psychological reaction. However, I still had not conquered the large-scale stress attacks and these were perhaps the most damaging to my health. Escape-avoidance coping was definitely not helpful and sometimes seemed to be what turned a small stressor into a full-blown attack. I knew I needed a more direct way of resolution for these situations. I realized that the repression of my stress and anxiety highly contributed to the attack, its duration and intensity. I needed to express my feelings and talk out the situation with someone. This was very hard at first because I tend to keep my problems inside and try to deal with them on my own. But I knew that if I could use combative coping when I was feeling stressed I might having more successful results. Still, knowing what to do and actually doing it are two very different things. Sometimes it was easy to reach out, especially if it was to someone who was not directly involved in the stressor. However, sometimes I wanted to gain resolution with the person that was associated with my stress attack and it would take me a long time to finally open up ...