Definition: Anxiety Management:Stress management encompasses strategies intended to equip a individual with successful coping mechanisms for dealing with psychological tension, with tension defined as a person’s physiological response to an internal or external stimulus that triggers the fight-or-flight response. Stress management is successful when a person utilizes methods to cope with or alter stressful situations.
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman suggested in 1984 that stress can be thought of as resulting from an “imbalance between demands and resources” or as occurring when “pressure exceeds one’s perceived capacity to cope”. Anxiety management was developed and premised on the idea that stress is not a direct response to a stressor but rather one’s resources and ability to cope mediate the pressure response and are amenable to alter, therefore allowing stress to be controllable.
In order to create an effective stress management programme it is first required to identify the elements that are central to a individual controlling his/her stress, and to identify the intervention methods which efficiently target these factors. Lazarus and Folkman’s interpretation of stress focuses on the transaction among folks and their external environment (identified as the Transactional Model). The model conceptualizes tension as a result of how a stressor is appraised and how a individual appraises his/her resources to cope with the stressor. The model breaks the stressor-anxiety link by proposing that if stressors are perceived as positive or challenging rather than a threat, and if the stressed person is confident that he/she possesses sufficient rather than deficient coping strategies, pressure may not necessarily follow the presence of a prospective stressor. The model proposes that anxiety can be reduced by helping stressed men and women alter their perceptions of stressors, providing them with strategies to support them cope and improving their confidence in their capability to do so.