Several ways to calm down in an extreme situation

There have been plenty of stressful situations in recent months - we were worried about our health, work, children, restrictions... Why did some suffer more, while for others, little seemed to have changed in their lives? What does our reaction to stress depend on – and is it possible for a person to change it?

Let's ask ourselves a question: what causes a person to experience negative mental (emotional) states? What makes us afraid, angry, anxious, irritated, guilty and ashamed, angry, remorseful, or any other negative emotion? What is the cause of all these conditions, which in everyday life are often called in one word - stress?

Yes, there is physiological (biological) and psychological stress. Let me give you a simple example. Biological stress is the physiological tension that a person will experience if you pour cold water on them on a hot day. What will happen? The head will be pulled into the shoulders, the face will wrinkle, trembling will go through the body, and vascular spasm will occur. These physiological reactions will manifest themselves in the vast majority of people in a given situation.

But psychologically , people will react differently to what will happen to them. Most likely, the majority will be dissatisfied with this event, will begin to complain, be indignant: “Oh-oh! Stop it immediately, I feel bad!” And someone will react joyfully: “Hey, hey! Let's! Hooray!". Obviously, the former can reach the point of emotional overload and stress, while the latter cannot. Although their physiological reaction will be the same.

We are, of course, interested in psychological stress, not biological. Therefore, in the future, by the word “stress” we will mean exclusively emotional stress of high intensity.

The most stressful life events, table

There are quite a few definitions of stress, but we will take the one that is most understandable to a wide range of readers. So, stress (from the English stress - load, tension; a state of increased tension) is a state of excessively strong and prolonged psychological stress that occurs in a person when his nervous system receives emotional overload. Stress disorganizes a person’s activity and disrupts the normal course of his behavior1.

What is the cause of stress (emotional tension) from the point of view of modern scientific psychological thought? What causes people stress? According to many researchers (fortunately, not all, and why fortunately - read on), the cause of stress is the so-called stress factors, or stressors, that is, events and situations.

A huge number of classifications of stress factors have been created, which even provide an assessment of the intensity of stress. I will give only one of them. This scale was created by psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Ray based on a survey of more than 400 men and women of different ages, with different education, marital status and from different cultures. They were asked to rate their level of stress when each of these events occurred.

Two types of stress

Stress is of a mental-emotional or physical nature. Psycho-emotional stress is common to both animals and people. Often occurs due to environmental changes and there is a high degree of ambiguity and psychological stress. They, in turn, cause tension, which is psychological emotional stress.

Sometimes stress overexertion is caused by certain physical phenomena or external stimuli, such as various weather changes or even an infection that has entered the body. In any of these cases, the body's reaction is the same. The body needs to be able to adapt and adapt to new conditions. Adaptation occurs due to the coordinated work of the adrenal glands, the pituitary gland and the brain.

Disease is the body’s adaptation to new conditions through stress.

During times of stress, all the adaptation mechanisms of your body are activated, increasing the stability of psychological perception and performance, all reactions are activated, and you feel a surge of vitality. All this contributes to adaptation to new situations, which has a beneficial effect on survival.

The body has the ability to eliminate the causes of stress itself if its adaptation mechanisms are strong enough. But if such mechanisms are weakened, then the pathogens will act for a long time. With constant and prolonged stress, the immune system is depleted and suppressed. All body systems respond to stress to varying degrees. In most cases, stress is the main cause of various disorders of a psychological nature, the endocrine system and diseases such as stomach ulcers, hypertension, atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction.

In order to save himself in moments of danger, a person is capable of many things that he had never even thought of doing before. All your body’s resources are directed towards fighting and overcoming all obstacles.

It has been proven that minor stress is not only not harmful to the body, but even beneficial. Because they encourage you to find a way out of current difficult situations. Developing willpower and self-education will prevent stress from moving into a more serious stage - depression, and helps maintain psychological balance.

Why do people experience stress differently?

There are many other scales and classifications that can be cited, with only one big and bold “but”. The approach on which this study was conducted is fundamentally flawed . In fact, researchers and scientists who say that stress (emotional tension) is a consequence of events and situations are wrong! Let me explain my point.

Let's take any situation, even the most stressful: the death of a person. And we will find out that, it turns out, there are people on earth who rejoice at the death of their beloved relatives. These people were brought up in other cultural and philosophical-religious traditions. For example, it is known for sure that Buddhists view death differently than Europeans. This is not about the emotional state of a person, but about the intensity of the manifestation of this experience.

Again. It is important. We analyze not different, but identical situations. For example, we do not consider the death of a rich relative who left an inheritance, and the death of a poor relative who left only debts. And it turns out that in absolutely the same situation people can have very different emotional reactions:

• Some people will indulge in grief all their lives. This will deprive them of the strength and opportunity to create something valuable. It is precisely such people, having lost a loved one, who become drunkards or die;
• others will grieve, but it will not deprive them of life itself. After some time, they will recover from grief and move on;
• still others will smile sincerely, beat the drums and dance around the fires, rejoicing that their loved one has finally left this world and is now in a place where he is incomparably better.

We can take a situation that is less traumatic for a person raised in our culture, for example, a traffic jam. And we will also see different psychological reactions. For one person, traffic jams will be a strong stress factor, but for another it will not be at all, although they are both late for work and their bosses are angry. One will arrive exhausted and devastated, and the second will be in quite a resourceful state.

We can continue to give examples where, in very similar life situations, people experience mental states that are different in intensity and sometimes in sign. This means that not everyone will experience stress equally.

Stress: main stages of development

The range of reactions to a stressful event includes a variety of states of excitation and inhibition, including states called affective. The process of a stressful state consists of three stages.

Stage 1. Emotional reaction of anxiety.

At this stage, the body’s first response to stress factors appears. The duration of this phase is strictly individual: for some people, the increase in tension goes away in a matter of minutes, for others, the increase in anxiety occurs over several weeks. The body's resistance to external stimuli decreases, and self-control weakens. A person gradually loses the ability to fully control his actions and loses self-control. His behavior changes to completely opposite actions (for example: a calm, self-controlled person becomes impulsive, aggressive). The person avoids social contacts, alienation appears in relationships with loved ones, and the distance in communication with friends and colleagues increases. The impact of distress has a devastating effect on the psyche. Excessive emotional stress can cause disorganization, disorientation and depersonalization.

Stage 2. Resistance and adaptation.

In this phase, maximum activation and strengthening of the body’s resistance to the stimulus occurs. Prolonged exposure to a stress factor ensures gradual adaptation to its effects. The body's resistance significantly exceeds the norm. It is at this stage that the individual is able to analyze, choose the most effective way and cope with the stressor.

Stage 3. Exhaustion.

Having exhausted available energy resources due to exposure to a stressor for a long period of time, a person feels severe fatigue, devastation, and weariness. A feeling of guilt sets in, and signs of the anxiety stage appear again. However, in this phase, the body’s ability to readapt is lost, and the person becomes powerless to take any action. Disorders of an organic nature appear, and severe pathological psychosomatic conditions arise.

Each person has been “programmed” from childhood with their own personal scenario of behavior in a stressful situation, reproduced in frequency and form of manifestation of the stress reaction. Some experience stressors daily in small doses, others experience distress rarely, but in full, painful manifestations. Also, each person has an individual orientation of aggression under stress. One blames himself exclusively, triggering the development of depressive states. Another person finds the causes of her troubles in the people around her and puts forward unfounded claims, often in an extremely aggressive form, becoming a socially dangerous person.

The cause of stress is within a person

From this we can conclude that the cause of stress is not a situation or event, but something that is hidden inside a person! And many scientists agree with our conclusions.

For example, American specialists J. S. Everly and Robert Rosenfeld published the book “Stress: Nature and Treatment” in 1985. Its main idea is that not all events and phenomena (external or internal) become stressors, that is, they perform a stress-generating function. If the stimulus is not interpreted by a particular person as a threat or something that has a negative consequence, then the stress reaction does not occur at all! Thus, most of the stress reactions people experience are actually self-created, according to Everly and Rosenfeld! I specifically highlighted the word interpreted, for which in Russian there is a good synonym interpreted.

Long before Everly and Rosenfeld, in 1966, American psychiatrist Richard Lazarus published the book Psychological Stress and Coping Process, which conveys the opinion that the occurrence of psychological stress and its intensity depend on the personal characteristics of a particular individual. This approach is called Lazarus' cognitive theory of stress. A very bright and helpful theory, which for some reason is almost never used by psychotherapists...

And since we now know that people experience states of different intensity and sign during the same events and situations, it is important to find an answer to the question of what is the difference between these people. By answering this question, we can try to change within ourselves what is the true cause of stress, automatically receiving as a result a resource that was previously spent on negative states.

Psychological mechanisms of stress

The emergence of emotional tension during stress is an adaptive reaction of the body that appears and grows as a result of the interaction of physiological systems and mechanisms in combination with psychological methods of response.

The physiological group of stress mechanisms involves:

• Subcortical system, which activates the cerebral cortex;
• The sympathetic autonomic system, which prepares the body for unexpected stressors, intensifies cardiac activity, and stimulates the supply of glucose;
• Subcortical motor centers that control innate instinctive, motor, facial, pantomimic mechanisms;
• Endocrine organs;
• Mechanisms of reverse afferentation, transmitting nerve impulses through interoceptors and proprioceptors from internal organs and muscles back to areas of the brain.

Psychological mechanisms are attitudes formed and recorded at the subconscious level, arising as a response to the influence of stress factors. Psychological schemes are designed to protect the human psyche from the negative consequences of stressors. Not all of these mechanisms are harmless; they often do not allow an event to be assessed correctly, and often harm the social activity of the individual.

Psychological defense schemes include seven mechanisms:

• Suppression. The main mechanism, the purpose of which is to remove existing desires from consciousness if it is impossible to satisfy them. Repression of sensations and memories can be partial or complete, as a result of which the person gradually forgets past events. Often it is a source of new problems (for example: a person forgets previously made promises). It often causes somatic diseases (headaches, heart pathologies, cancer).
• Negation. The individual denies the fact of the occurrence of any event and “goes” into fantasy. Often a person does not notice the contradictions in his judgments and actions, and therefore is often perceived by others as a frivolous, irresponsible, inadequate person.
• Rationalization. A method of self-justification, the creation of supposedly logical moral arguments to explain and justify socially unacceptable behavior and one’s own desires and thoughts.
• Inversion. Conscious replacement of true thoughts and feelings, actually carried out actions with completely opposite ones.
• Projection. The individual projects onto others, ascribes to other people his own negative qualities, negative thoughts, and unhealthy feelings. It is a mechanism of self-justification.
• Insulation. The most dangerous response scheme. The individual separates the threatening component, the dangerous situation from his personality as a whole. It can lead to a split personality and cause the development of schizophrenia.
• Regression. The subject reverts to primitive ways of responding to stressors.

There is another classification of types of protective mechanisms, divided into two groups.

Group 1. Patterns of disruption of information reception

• Perceptual defense;
• Crowding out;
• Suppression;
• Negation.

Group 2. Patterns of impaired information processing

• Projection;
• Intellectualization;
• Separation;
• Overestimation (rationalization, defensive reaction, exploitation, illusion).

Why do people react differently to the same stressful situation?

In order to answer this question, I propose to introduce another model, according to which a person’s life is a journey, and the person himself is a traveler.

This traveler is each of us. We go through life, choosing a goal and moving towards it. The goal may be hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, but we are still trying to go our way, overcoming all obstacles, and get what we want.

Tell me, how exactly does a human traveler know that somewhere there is something that he can achieve?

Suppose a person wants to go to Brazil for a carnival, but at the same time he lives in a town forgotten by everyone. None of his friends had ever been to Brazil. He himself had never been there either. How does he know about the existence of Brazil? The answer is quite simple: he watched the carnival on TV, read a book about this country or saw it on the map.

So, society tells us about possible goals, we receive certain knowledge about the world from society. From parents, school teachers, friends, directors, writers, bloggers and so on. And this knowledge about the world, within the framework of the model we are talking about, will be called the word map.

That is, a person is a traveler exploring the real world. But in his head he has a map where this world is depicted. A map is an idea of ​​the world in which each of us moves and lives, or, if you like, a worldview (view of the world) given to us by the society that surrounds us.

Not all of the information on the map was created by us ourselves. Most of it has not been personally verified by us. But often we believe in it as an inviolable dogma, because we are used to thinking so. Because in childhood we were told something by people whom we trusted 100 percent - our emotional authorities (moms and dads and other loved ones).

So, on maps we mark our goals and plot routes. And we travel (live) in the real world. And now, attention, we are exploring the question: what is so different on the cards that people, finding themselves in the same life situation, react to it differently?

Stress concept

Stress is a nonspecific (abnormal) state or reaction of the body to various unfavorable factors (stressors) affecting it. Among the most popular stressors are fears, conflicts, and lack of funds.

Symptoms of stress include irritability, anger, insomnia, passivity, lethargy, dissatisfaction with the outside world and other signs.

An interesting fact is that small stressful situations are necessary for a person, because... they play an important role in further favorable changes in the life of the person himself. This is due to the release of adrenaline into a person’s blood during a stressful situation, as well as other biochemical reactions that help a person solve a particular problem, which may last for more than one year in a person’s life.

One example that clearly reflects this picture: In the 90s, one person went broke in business, and in such a way that he was also left in large debts, about 1 million dollars. This stressful situation forced the person to mobilize all his mental and other abilities to solve this issue. After some time, he decided to make several types of salads and offer them for sale in one of the capital’s stores. His salads quickly sold out, and literally a year later he was supplying salads to many metropolitan supermarkets, which allowed him to repay his debt.

Another example, which is often called the “instinct of self-preservation” - when a person is in mortal danger, he can solve this issue in a way that is simply impossible in a normal state.

Of course, the situations are different, and so are the solutions, but I think, in general, you understand the picture.

In addition to its positive effects, stress can also contribute to negative consequences. When a person is constantly exposed to stressful situations, his body intensively wastes its strength (energy), which leads to its rapid exhaustion. Since all organs are in a tense state, they are more susceptible to secondary adverse factors, for example, diseases.

A striking example is the situation when, under stress, a person gets sick with the flu, psoriasis, the speech apparatus is impaired (stuttering), etc.

In addition, severe stress or a sudden stressful situation sometimes leads a person to myocardial infarction.

Also, with strong, prolonged and frequent stress, a number of pathological changes develop, expressed in various diseases of the mental, nervous, cardiovascular, digestive, immune and other systems. The body becomes exhausted, weakens, and loses the ability to solve or get out of a stressful situation.

Thus, scientists have established two main types of stress - eustress (positive stress) and distress (negative stress). We’ll talk about the types later, but now let’s move on to considering the symptoms (reactions) of the body to stressful situations.

Human behavior in difficult situations

Bibliographic description:

Human behavior in difficult situations / M.K. Kadyrova, D.E. Abduvakhobova, O.E. Eshmuradov [and others]. — Text: immediate // Current issues of modern psychology: materials of the IV International. scientific conf. (Krasnodar, February 2020). — Krasnodar: Novation, 2020. — pp. 17-20. — URL: https://moluch.ru/conf/psy/archive/237/11761/ (access date: 10/08/2020).


This article is devoted to the consideration of conflict as a difficult life situation. Conflicts have always existed, but conflictology as a science arose quite recently. The ancient sages wrote about the conflict, although this word was not used in those days. Many of them viewed the conflict from the perspective of condemning quarrels and clashes between people and advising them to be avoided.

Key words and phrases: emotional experiences, situational anxiety, conflict resistance, motivational component-state

The word conflict came to Russian and other languages ​​from Latin. This is one of those international words that delight translators; they do not need translation, since they are clear as is: both their sound and meaning are approximately the same in all languages.

A person’s life is a series of all kinds of situations, many of which, due to their repetition and similarity, become familiar. In them, a person acts largely at the level of automatism. In such situations, the consumption of mental and physical strength is minimized. Due to its difficulty, it requires the mobilization of both mental and physical resources. A person in a difficult situation receives information about its various elements: about external conditions; about your internal states; about the results of their own actions. This information is processed through cognitive and emotional processes. The results of processing this information influence the behavior of the individual in a difficult situation. According to V. Merlin, when a person strives to satisfy any motive, he often encounters opposition. As a result of various external and internal counteractions, a difficult situation arises.

If one’s own “I” is included in the aspiration of the individual, then such a threat is perceived as personal. Threat signals lead to an increase in activity, which, as a result of decoding the meaning of this information for the subject, takes the form of negative emotions of various modalities and strengths. The role of emotions in the psychological mechanism of behavior in difficult situations can be threefold. Emotions act as an indicator of difficulty, an assessment of the significance of the situation for the individual, and a factor leading to a change in behavior in the situation. Emotional experiences are an essential component of a person’s adaptive behavior in difficult situations.

The situation can be very significant for the individual, but without finding a way out of it or having lost faith in its constructive resolution, the person moves away from reality through activation and psychological defense mechanisms.

The situation may be objectively difficult, but the presence of knowledge and experience allows you to overcome it without significant mobilization of your resources. For example, the difficulty of a combat operation will be different for a beginner and an experienced warrior. Thus, a person reacts to a situation depending on how he perceives it and evaluates its meaning. A number of specialists (V. Nebylitsyn, B. Shvedin, Yu. Tkachenko) note the role of the properties of the nervous system in determining human behavior in a difficult situation. Thus, V. Nebylitsyn notes that only in extreme conditions and situations, and not in ordinary life, does a reduction of developed modes of behavior occur and the natural qualities of the individual nervous organization, hidden by layers of experience, are revealed, among which the main thing is the basic properties of the nervous system.

It is necessary to dwell in more detail on such a specific personality reaction to a difficult situation as mental tension. This is the mental state of an individual in a difficult situation, with the help of which a transition is made from one level of regulation to another, more adequate to the current situation. Mental tension is characterized by active restructuring and integration of mental processes in the direction of dominance of motivational and emotional components.

In the structure of mental tension, incentive-regulatory (motivational, emotional and volitional) and executive-regulatory (cognitive and motor) components are distinguished. Depending on the influence of tension on mental functions, the following forms are distinguished (M. Dyachenko):

1. Perceptual (arising from difficulties in perception);
2. Intellectual (when a person finds it difficult to solve a problem);
3. Emotional (when emotions arise that disorganize behavior and activity);
4. Strong-willed (when a person cannot control himself);
5. Motivational (related to the struggle of motives).

Mental tension is characterized by an increased level of activation and significant expenditure of the nervous system. Among the delayed effects of mental tension are the occurrence of prolonged negative shifts in mood, increased fatigue, the development of frustration, and reorientation of the motive for participation in interaction (activity). The level of mental tension varies from person to person. This is mainly due to the psychological stability of a person. Resilient and unstable people behave differently in difficult situations.

A difficult situation shows that situational anxiety is a decisive factor. At the same time, psychologically unstable children lack effective ways to overcome difficulties and are acutely aware of a personal threat. Sometimes they experience the phenomenon of self-induction of negative emotional tension: disorganized behavior increases the stress state, which further disorganizes behavior, leading to the emergence of a “wave of disorganization.”

In recent years, works have appeared devoted to the problems of psychological stability of the individual in situations of social interaction (S. Erina, A. Antsupov). What is mental toughness? This is a personality characteristic consisting in maintaining optimal mental functioning under the frustrating and stressful influence of difficult situations. It is not an innate property of personality, but is formed simultaneously with its development and depends on:

1. Type of human nervous system;
2. Human experience, professional training;
3. Skills and abilities of behavior and activity;
4. Level of development of the basic cognitive structures of the individual.

Among the components of psychological stability there are: emotional, volitional, intellectual cognitive), motivational and psychomotor. Some researchers consider the leading component to be cognitive. Often the emotional and volitional components are presented as emotional-volitional stability and are considered to be leading (M. Dyachenko, V. Vlasov, P. Korchemny, N. Fedenko, A. Stolyarenko). Some studies consider the motivational component to be the leading component of psychological resilience. Despite the difference in points of view regarding the hierarchy of components, according to most researchers, psychological stability is not just their sum, but an integral education.

The “specific weight” of the constituent structural components of psychological stability in a particular person cannot be the same. It is impossible to be resistant to everything, i.e. psychological stability is instability in general. The indicator of sustainability is not stability as such, but variability. Variability is considered as flexibility, speed of adaptability to constantly changing living conditions, high mental mobility when moving from task to task.

The influence of psychological stability and professional skill on performance in difficult situations. Personal conflict resistance is a specific manifestation of psychological stability. It is considered as a person’s ability to optimally organize his behavior in difficult situations of social interaction, to solve problems in relationships with other people without conflict. As a type of psychological stability, conflict tolerance has its own structure, which includes emotional, volitional, cognitive, motivational and psychomotor components.

The emotional component of conflict tolerance reflects the emotional state of the individual in a situation of interaction, the level and nature of mental excitability and its influence on the success of communication in a difficult situation. It consists of the ability to manage one’s emotional state in pre-conflict and conflict situations, the ability to openly express one’s emotions without insulting the opponent’s personality.

Do not go into depression in the event of a protracted conflict or loss in it. The volitional component of stability conflicts is understood as the individual’s ability to consciously mobilize forces in accordance with the situation of interaction to consciously control and manage oneself, one’s behavior and mental state. It is the volitional component that allows you to regulate your emotional arousal in a conflict situation. In many ways, the volitional component provides tolerance, tolerance for other people’s opinions, disagreement with others, self-control and self-control.

The cognitive component is the stability of the functioning of the individual’s cognitive processes, immunity to the provocative actions of the opponent. It includes:

− ability to determine the beginning of a pre-conflict situation;

− analysis of the causes of the conflict;

− the ability to minimize distortion of the perception of a conflict situation and the opponent’s personality, as well as attacks on one’s behavior;

− the ability to give an objective assessment of the conflict, predict its development and possible consequences;

− ability to quickly make the right decisions;

− the ability to identify the main problem of the conflict, put forward and justify alternative solutions to the problem;

− the ability to argue in a civilized manner or in a dispute.

The motivational component is the state of internal motivating forces that contribute to optimal behavior in a difficult interaction situation, ensuring the adequacy of the motives of the developing situation, their focus on a joint search for ways to resolve the contradiction, the desire to solve the problem, the ability to adjust the defended interests depending on changes in the situation and the balance of power.

The psychomotor component ensures the correctness of actions, their clarity and compliance with the situation. It consists of the ability to control your body, control your gestures and facial expressions, control your postures, the position of your arms, legs, head, and prevent hand tremors, voice tremors, disturbances, coordination and stiffness of movements.

By its psychological essence, conflict can be considered as a type of difficult situation. A difficult situation in life is characterized by an imbalance in the “task—personal capabilities (or) aspirations—environmental conditions” system and causes mental tension in a person. Difficult situations of activity, social interaction and intrapersonal plan are distinguished. Among difficult situations of social interaction, problematic situations, pre-conflict situations and conflicts can be considered.

Human behavior in a difficult situation depends on cognitive, volitional and emotional processes. Basically, a person reacts to a situation and behaves in it depending on how he perceives it and evaluates its significance. In addition, the effectiveness of behavior in a difficult situation depends on the properties of the nervous system and the level of mental tension of a person. The higher the level of mental tension, the more disorganized a person’s behavior is in a difficult situation.

Optimal behavior of an individual in a difficult situation is facilitated by his ability to cope with stress factors. A specific manifestation of psychological stability is conflict tolerance - a person’s ability to optimally organize his behavior in difficult situations of social interaction.

Chapter levels of manifestation and typology of conflicts. An important task of any science is to organize and bring into a system knowledge about the totality of phenomena that are the object of its study. The validity and detail of classifications can be one of the criteria for the degree of development of science. Development of the problem of conflict classification is a necessary element of a systematic approach in conflictology.

Classification is a scientific method that consists in separating the entire set of objects and then combining them into groups based on some characteristic. A sign, the presence, absence or degree of expression of which acts as a criterion for assigning an object to one or another group, is called the basis of classification. Classification of conflicts is necessary for a comparative study of their essential features, connections, functions, relationships, levels of organization, etc.

If we choose essential features of conflicts as the basis for classification, then it will be called natural. Such classifications have cognitive significance.

In terms of the number of publications, psychology occupies a clear leading position among the branches of conflictology. More than a quarter of publications on the problem of conflict were prepared by psychologists.

Psychology has not yet developed a generally accepted understanding of the essence of conflict. Some authors interpret it as a clash and opposition, a contradiction. Sometimes conflict is understood as a type of communication, situational incompatibility, a situation of an unfound solution, a type of competitive interaction. Among the essential features of a conflict are: the presence of a contradiction between subjects; their opposition; negative emotions towards each other.

Conflicts have always existed, but conflictology arose quite recently - in our century.

Even the ancient sages wrote about conflict—even without using this word. Some of them condemned quarrels and clashes between people and advised to avoid them. Others, on the contrary, emphasized that in disputes the truth is born, that clashes and contradictions are the driving cause of all change and development. The conflict as such in its general outlines was not a special subject of study.

Literature:

1. Antsupov A. Ya. Conflictology. "Ulyanovsk Printing House", 1996.
2. Karmin A. S. Conflictology. Publishing house "Lan", 1999.
3. Leonov N.I. Conflictology. Publishing house "Lan", 1997.

Key terms
(automatically generated)
: difficult situation, psychological stability, mental tension, situation, social interaction, conflict, nervous system, human behavior, volitional component, conflict situation.

Fighting stress: simple and effective methods

So, you have sorted out your emotions and experiences, made every effort to eliminate irritating factors and are on the warpath with stressful situations. This is commendable, but additional efforts need to be made to quickly eliminate the consequences of emotional experiences. The recommendations are extremely simple, but no less effective.

1. We spend more time in the fresh air.
   Walk every day for at least half an hour, preferably before bed. Jogging is no use for now – running won’t be fun anyway. Give preference to leisurely walks, breathe in as much fresh air as possible (to get the maximum benefit from the exercise, it is better to do it in nature), enjoy your surroundings. Look how beautiful the world around you is, how life is in full swing next to you. When you feel that you have had enough exercise, come home - firstly, you will feel much better during your rest, and secondly, you will fall asleep faster and more soundly, and your dreams will be more vivid and interesting.
2. We do breathing exercises. If you feel unnecessary worries and nervous tension, try to get rid of all this at the very first stages. Don't wait for minor worries to accumulate and become stressful. You can use the following simple exercise: sit more comfortably in a chair or on the sofa. Place your hands on your stomach. Breathe slowly through your nose. At the same time, the stomach should expand. Then exhale as you inhaled, i.e. slowly and through the nose. Repeat about 30 times. As a result, you will become much calmer - breathing exercises will help the body reconfigure to a normal rhythm and relieve stress.
3. We enjoy every little thing. When we feel emotional tension, we try with all our might to get rid of it. This is done very simply - just remember at least 5 happy moments: going to the cinema on the weekend, funny antics of a child, a fresh joke from a colleague, buying a new dress, and even just good weather! Put yourself in the most positive mood possible, and stress will surely subside.
4. We plan our day correctly. Often a person experiences stress due to the fact that he does not have time to cope with all the planned activities. The secret is simple and effective - make a schedule and strictly follow it. Put the most difficult and important tasks first. Once you begin to act in accordance with the plan, remain calm and do not get busy with other things until you close the current item. Having mastered the most difficult task, you will become more confident in yourself, and completing subsequent tasks will seem less difficult and burdensome.
5. Let's keep our brain unloaded. There are such wonderful things as organizers - a suitable application can be downloaded to any phone. Don't really trust electronics? Use a regular notepad. There is no need to keep in mind information about the birthdays of all your friends, phone numbers, purchases, planned trips to the clinic, etc. Write down as much as you can - your brain will thank you.
6. We bring order to the workplace. The desktop, both at the place of work and at home, must be in order. The absence of unnecessary items will allow you to better concentrate on current affairs and get rid of irritability.
7. Let's read. If emotional irritation or nervous excitement occurs, if possible, we distract ourselves from our main activity and devote time to an interesting book or any other activity that brings pleasure.
8. Let's talk. The recommendation is not relevant for all cases. Firstly, you should only tell someone about your problems if you are confident in the person, and secondly, if after “pouring out your soul” you really feel better.

The general recommendations listed above help combat the first signs of stress. Along with this, in many patients the condition can worsen and become much more severe. If you feel like you can't cope with stress on your own, consult a doctor.