Dr. Mort Orman here, and today I have an important question for you.
Do you know the difference between stress mastery, stress management and resilience?
I’ve been working in the stress field for more than 30 years now, and I’ve met very few people who truly understand that these three things are not at all the same.
Stress Management
I’m sure you know what stress management is, but for those who don’t, it is simply a collection of techniques and strategies for coping with stress and protecting yourself from both short-term and longer-term harm.
Some of these techniques, like yoga and meditation, are ones that have been used and practiced for thousands of years, in many different cultures.
Others, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), are more modern inventions.
But did you know that stress management is also a philosophy?
It’s not just a collection of many natural or health promoting techniques and strategies, but it is also a collective “mindset” about stress—a mindset that has been based on a number of false assumptions.
For example, pick up any popular self-help book or even an established textbook on stress management and you can easily find statements of “fact” such as these:
- Life itself is inherently stressful; we can’t hope to avoid having stress, we can only learn how to manage it effectively.
- There are two types of stress in life: good stress and bad stress.
- Some degree of stress is healthy for us; stress keeps us motivated and helps us perform at our best.
These are not statements of fact, they are components of a philosophy and a widely-held global mindset.
For example, I don’t believe in any of these false ideas, which clearly places me in a very tiny minority.
Resilience
In my previous post this week, I shared some thoughts about resilience that were largely inspired by the recently published book “Resilience” by ex-Navy Seal Eric Greitens.
I also shared my opinion that the terms “resilience” and “resilience training” are being used today, especially in the corporate world, as replacement terms for “stress management” and “stress management training,” which most people have lost interest in.
And while resilience does have something to do with stressful, painful, and otherwise adverse situations, it is basically about dealing with very bad things, should they unfortunately occur for you.
We talk about resilience in terms of people losing limbs, being wounded in battle, have a difficult life, living in poverty, surviving a natural disaster, losing a loved one, having a bad disease, etc.
We can also talk about it in terms of everyday stress, but the point here is that we are always talking about something that has already happened.
Once the bad thing has happened, or once you become stressed, we then start to ask how you can deal with these events in the very best way.
But resilience is not a virtue for preventing stress from happening in the first place. Stress management can do this sometimes, but it is still mostly geared to helping you mitigate the harmful effects of stress, once it has already afflicted you.
Stress Mastery
Stress mastery is actually the big brother to both stress management and resilience.
Does stress mastery include being resilient? Yes it does, but is also goes way beyond just being resilient.
Does stress mastery include knowing how to manage your stress? Yes it does, but it also goes way beyond the limited nature of stress management as well.
Stress mastery is all about learning how to better and more clearly understand the true nature and causes of all human stress.
Stress mastery is also a philosophy and a mindset, just as are stress management and resilience.
But it is a different philosophy, with a different view of what it means to be human and what it means to be stressed.
It’s a philosophy that shares and endorses the philosophy of true resilience, but it also goes beyond resilience in terms of its power and capacity to help people prevent becoming stressed in the first place.
For example, it’s one thing to feel hurt and personally “devastated” by the loss of a loved one, but what if you had a way of looking at that event, in advance, that avoided much of the hurt and devastation which others might typically feel?
And it is one thing to get angry all the time and then seek healthy outlets for your anger, while keeping it under control so it doesn’t affect others.
It is quite another thing, however, to simply STOP getting angry, which is something stress mastery principles can show us how to do.
Why Manage Your Stress When You Can Banish It Instead?
While stress mastery accepts and endorses stress management techniques, especially as a better and more healthy alternative to using cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, excessive shopping and other overindulgences to temporarily cope with one’s stress, it goes way beyond stress management in several important ways.
First, it thoroughly rejects the popular beliefs and widespread “mindset” about stress that comes along with most stress management techniques and the accompanying stress management philosophy.
Second, it favors a new and radically different understanding of what it means to be human. Since the stress we are concerned about is occurring for us as human beings, unlike stress that occurs for other animals and inanimate objects like a slab of metal, it is incumbent upon us to correctly understand what it means to be human, if we want to maximize our abilities to both understand and prevent much of our everyday stress.
This relatively new view of what it means to be human is called “Biolinguistics,” but the term has been used in several different contexts, so unfortunately not all Biolinguistic theories are the same, nor are they all well-grounded.
And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, stress mastery focuses mainly of the causes of our stress, whereas stress management mainly (with some exceptions) focuses mostly on helping us deal with just the symptoms of our stress problems in daily life.
Even more precisely, stress mastery recognizes the distinction between external and internal causes of stress and endeavors to teach people how to recognize their internal causes, with much greater clarity and a high degree of precision.
Thus, it is not about simply imploring people to take personal responsibility for generating much of their own stress, but it is a commitment to actually showing people “this is precisely how you are doing this” in different types of stressful situations.
The Stress Mastery Academy
In an effort to promote broader awareness of the principles of stress mastery, and how it differs from both stress management and resilience teachings, I founded The Stress Mastery Academy five years ago in 2011.
If you are interested in learning more about this academy, and the advanced stress relief programs and trainings we offer, simply follow me at my website link below and I will be providing updates on a periodic basis.
To your health, happiness and success,
Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com
GET THIS FREE REPORT SENT TO YOU VIA EMAIL
You'll also hear Dr. Orman talk to you directly about his excellent stress mastery introductory training program.
