How To Handle Stressful Situations

Find And Eliminate Tolerations

Tolerations are those nagging stressors in your lifestyle that you put up with almost without realizing it, but which bring you constant low-grade stress. The thing about tolerations is that they add up to bigger stress. Cutting out tolerations can bring stress relief so you can tolerate more of the things you cant change.

Be More Realistic About Your Capabilities

It is helpful to remember that most people underestimate how long it will take to do something, and overestimate how much they can do. This means that they end up taking on too much, and then failing to deliver.

Develop the simple habit of doubling your time estimates for any task.

You are then far more likely to under-promise and over-deliver. This will make everyoneincluding youmuch happier than the other way round .

What Does A Military Study Mean For You

Some of you are wondering: What am I going to learn from the Air Force?

The Air Force divided from the regular army in around 1947 to 1948 and even then these men were impressive. From the modern-day paratrooper to the commandos of the 1944 operations these guys went all out to take care of other people first.

These men deal with incredibly high-stress situations on a daily basis from flying a jet-propelled aircraft to jumping out of an airplane and knowing that at every moment someone else’s life depends on what they do right now.

It’s the irony of most men in the military that they undergo grueling training to learn how to survive life-threatening situations only to go out and put that training to the test for the sake of their fellow man.

But how does this apply to a normal person and their family that’s not going to go through military training?

How can they use this information?

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Managing Stress During The Interview

Job interviews are stressful for most people. Even if you’ve interviewed a lot, it can still be challenging to stay calm and collected. You’re meeting new people in a new environment, and you’re trying to sell your credentials to someone who might be your next boss.

There are strategies you can use to handle interview stress and to sell yourself to the hiring manager.

A big part of handling stress is preparation. Be sure to research the company in advance and practice answering common interview questions. The more you practice, the more comfortable youll feel in the interview.

You can also reduce stress by avoiding negative thinking . Instead, visualize having a successful interview . Do this visualization in the hours right before the interview.

Use these relaxation techniques. If you start to feel stressed just before the interview, try taking a deep breath or two to relax. During the interview, feel free to take a breath or a sip of water before answering a question. This will give you some time to compose yourself and prepare your answer.

Watch your body language. Your body language during the interview can also help convey that you’re relaxed. Try to avoid fidgeting too much. Stand up straight and look the interviewer in the eye . By appearing calm and confident, you are more likely to feel calm and confident.

Being able to effectively handle a stressful job interview will indicate to employers that you’ll also be able to handle workplace stress.

Tips To Change The Way You Deal With Stress

Dr. James C. Dobson once said there are very few certainties that touch us all in this mortal experience, but one of the absolutes is that we will experience hardship and stress at some point. Stress may be inevitable, but how we handle it is our choice.

Stress is different for all individuals, so there is no cookie cutter solution to manage it. You may have to experiment to find what works best for you. Finding healthy, positive ways to deal with stress will add to your overall well-being.

When dealing with stressful situations, consider the four points below. They may aid in decreasing the amount of stress and changing the way you view it.

Last medically reviewed on May 17, 2016

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Focus On Your Positive Actions Not Your Negative Feelings

When it comes to stress, it’s easy to get caught in its emotion the frustration, the panic, the dread. It’s also easy to blame others: My manager didn’t clearly communicate with me, or My co-worker totally dropped the ball.

Instead of focusing on your feelings and blaming others for your stress, highlight how you overcame the situation. Think of those soft skills. Did you communicate with your team? Did you prioritize your goals?

Ultimately, you’ll impress your interviewer by staying positive not placing blame and highlighting your skills.

Helping Children And Youth Cope With Stress

Children and youth often struggle with how to cope with stress. Youth can be particularly overwhelmed when their stress is connected to a traumatic eventlike a natural disaster, family loss, school shootings, or community violence. Parents, caregivers, and educators can take steps to provide stability and support that help young people feel better.

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How To Handle Stressful Situations Examples

When an employer asks you to describe a stressful situation and how you handled it, we recommend that you prepare your answer and practice in advance, to ensure your body language stays completely confident and relaxed during the high-pressure interview environment. Here are some examples to help you construct your answer

What Are Stressful Situations

Stressful situations will look different for each person. What one person may be able to handle with little or no stress, someone else may experience a lot of stress over. And, you may experience stress over big life-changing events in your life or over small everyday problems.

Large situations that could cause stress in your life could include things like:

• The death of a loved one
• Moving to a new area
• Switching jobs
• Getting divorced

Many people understand that large situations like that often come with stress. However, these same people may struggle to identify the source of stress in their own life. If you feel like you shouldnt have stress because youre not living through a large situation like one listed above, its important to give yourself a break.

Many things can cause stress in life. And, even small stresses can turn into chronic stress if not addressed. Some of the smaller causes of stress in life include things like:

• Living paycheck to paycheck
• Working long hours
• Fighting with a spouse or significant other

Many things can arise daily that can lead to stress. This is why it can be helpful to learn tips on how to handle stressful situations even if you dont feel like you need it at the moment. You never know when life is going to change, and youre going to face something unexpected.

Tips On How To Handle Stressful Situations

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Stress When Something Goes Wrong

There will always be something unexpected happening in our work. When it is a big thing, it can create stress, so you might have an example from your past like the ones below that you could use when youre asked this in an interview.

Example 13: Information gathering and knowing all the facts that I can is how I handle stress in an uncertain situation. In my last job, we didnt know if we might be affected by the global economic crisis, so I spent some time researching our industry and it gave me more peace to know a little more about what was happening.

Example 14: When our software system crashed at my last role, that was stressful for everyone, so I personally handled that by finding a similar software program as soon as the crash happened. I brought this to management to see if we could use that so that we didnt get overwhelmed. Problem-solving is one of my strengths.

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Example 15: I am thankfully a very adaptable person, so when we had a difficult day in the office with the power going out, I felt calm in knowing that we just needed to do what we could do, and thats it for that day. Being flexible and accepting what is out of my control was what made me stay fully calm in that situation.

For more tips, check out my post on some weaknesses you can include when being interviewed.

References

Look After Yourself Physically

When you are physically fit and well, it is much easier to cope with stress.

When you become stressed, it is harder to motivate yourself to care about what you eat, or whether you exercise. However, not doing so can also make you more stressed. Get into good habits while your stress levels are fairly low, and you may find that they never go up again. These good habits include:

• Taking regular exercise

  Stressful situations increase the level of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol in your body.

  These are the fight or flight hormones that evolution has hard-wired into our brains and which are designed to protect us from immediate bodily harm when we are under threat. However, stress in the modern age is rarely remedied by a fight or flight response. Physical exercise can be used as a surrogate to metabolise the excessive stress hormones and restore your body and mind to a calmer, more relaxed state.

  Try to incorporate some physical activity into your daily routine on a regular basis, either before or after work, or at lunchtime. Regular physical activity will also improve the quality of your sleep.

• There is more about this in our pages What is Sleep? and How to Sleep – The Importance of Sleep.

  You can assess your levels of daytime sleepiness with the Epworth Sleepiness Scale.

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What Not To Say

Dont mention an issue you created. Avoid mentioning a time when you put yourself in a needlessly stressful situation. You don’t want to come across as someone who causes workplace stress.

Dont say that you were really stressed. You shouldnt focus too much on how stressed out you felt. While you should certainly admit that stress happens, try to emphasize how you dealt with the stress rather than how much it bothered you.

What The Interviewer Wants To Know

The interviewer really wants to know whether you can handle job-related stress, and what you do in particularly stressful situations at work. This is especially important if youre interviewing for a position where stress is an integral part of the job. That’s because job stress can have a negative impact on workplace performance.

The hiring manager may also be wondering whether stressful issues outside of work can impact your job performance. Employers look for candidates who can deal with a range of stressful situations, whether these are personal or work-related.

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Focus On How You Overcame The Challenge

While people consider perfection impossible, hiring managers need candidates that show an in-depth understanding of the role. After giving your example, ensure the focus is on how you handled the stressful situation properly. This shows that you didn’t remove yourself from the stressful situation, but that you have the skills to persevere and deliver quality work.

Example:“During my time as a backend developer, my company had a massive increase in clients, and we all had to take on more work. The many deadlines had caused me stress and anxiety. I immediately planned a system to manage my projects. This helped me sort them based on their urgency and assign each task a timeline I could handle. I focused on completing each task, I met my deadlines, and reduced my stress levels.”

Make Sure You Are In Good Shape And Maintain Presence Of Mind To Think Positively

If you are physically and mentally healthy, you will be more able to handle any stressful situations. This means that you should always look after yourself, which you can do in many ways like not getting yourself too tired, exercising, eating healthy, having fun, relaxing and maintaining a good work-life balance. You should also think positively, as this will develop in you the sense of control and confidence. You can visualize a positive outcome and contemplate on past challenges that you have overcome.

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Offer Grace To Others

Your emotional wellness is also influenced by how you treat others and yourself in patterns of laying blame. We are all people and we all drop the ball sometimes. Consciously choosing to offer grace to yourself and others in difficult situations will decrease the negativity and allow you the possibility to create a satisfying experience of resolution with others.

Don’t Deny Your Stress

If you pretend you don’t experience stress in your job, your interviewer won’t buy it. Or they’ll think you’re out of touch with your emotions or that you don’t take your job seriously enough.

If for some reason you can’t recall a specific time you’ve experienced pressure at your job, then focus on how you manage your daily stress. Do you practice mindfulness? Do you schedule in a 30-minute lunch break and force yourself to leave your desk? Do you run after work? This information will give interviewers a better glimpse into who you are and how you operate in and outside of the job.

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Deadlines Creating The Stress

When it comes to time constraints and deadlines, these examples can be used when answering describe a stressful situation and how you handled it.

Example 1: What helps me when there is a looming deadline is to set out a clear daily schedule of how I can not only devote time to this task but also what I need to focus on most in the whole project.

In my last job, I was getting close to handing in some work, and I still had a lot to complete, so I sat down and broke up all the parts that I needed to do and ordered them by the one that was the highest priority down to the one that could be done last. Then I made a schedule for what I could tackle each day. Taking it day by day and doing it segmented like that helps me reach deadlines.

Example 2: Something that really helps me stay motivated and inspired to reach a deadline is to actually focus on the end result that I want to create, and the impact that this will have on the greater work that is being done in the company.

That gives me the energy I need to do what I have to do in time because I know that it is serving a greater purpose. An example of this in my last job was when I knew that I had to finish off a proposal for my team to then start working on it. So I reminded myself that they would get so much value from the work that Im doing now to help them create the next steps, and that kept me on task.

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Relax Then Relax Some More

In the midst of a busy, hectic, stressful day, it is very easy to forget about taking care of your emotional and physical wellbeing. When your boss is acting like a dictator or you are late on a project, its very tempting to allow this negativity to take over your day.

Instead, try to use the extra downtime at work to relax and rejuvenate. When you have a break, take a few minutes to step away from everything and let go. Do some breathing exercises, read, or send a quick text to a loved one. Spend your lunch hour doing something enjoyable and forget about the negative that happened before. Remember, relaxation doesnt require a significant amount of time. Its what you do with this time that ultimately makes the big difference in your mindset.

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Is It Bad To Be In A Stressful Situation

Stressful situations are events that disturb the bodys equilibrium state. Stress can be a form of our bodys reaction to both positive and negative events. Those events in our life that affect the normal routine our body is adapted to are referred to as stressful situations. Research suggests that stress isnt always bad, in fact, it can be good.

Spend Some Time Thinking About How You Approach Stress

Start by considering the following questions to help you plan a positive, interviewer-focused answer that shows youve thought about your relationship to stress:

• What were the causes of the stressful situation?
• If you contributed to creating a stressful situation, what could you have done differently to avoid it?
• What was your reaction like?
• How did you reduce or mitigate the stress?
• If you could react to that situation again, what would you have done differently?
• In what ways did stress help or hurt your work?

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How To Deal With Stress At Work

Key takeaways:

• Employers ask this question to determine how you might handle challenging situations that come with the job.
• Explain the tools, methods and techniques you use to work under pressure.
• Use the STAR response technique to offer a specific example of a time you handled stress well.

If youve ever held a jobor even if youre new to the workforceyoure probably familiar with feelings of stress at work. Potential employers may sometimes ask about how you handle stress in a job interview. When they ask this question, interviewers are looking for information on how you will react in stressful moments, and how your reaction may affect your teammates and the company overall.

To prepare for this question, consider how youve dealt with stressful work experiences in the past. Then, think about how those moments may have helped you better understand your strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we share some helpful tips to guide your answer.