Stress, coping, and Family Life

Welcome back to the Kunzler Kronicles! This week we are taking a look at stress, coping strategies (the good and the bad), and how stressors can impact your life/your family's life.  So, what is stress? Doing a quick google search, according to the World Health Organization, the definition of stress is this: 

Stress can be defined as any type of change that causes physical, emotional or psychological strain. Stress is your body's response to anything that requires attention or action. Everyone experiences stress to some degree.

Simply put, stress is anything that causes 'pressure' or 'puts a burden' on your physical, mental, or emotional health. Our body responds to stress in many different ways. We can feel or have any number of side effects including but not limited to; getting tightness in your muscles, feeling incredibly lazy, having an insane work drive, wanting to hide from the world, getting small or major headaches, have cravings to eat unhealthily, or just lay in bed. Now, I do realize that most of those examples are more intense/exaggerated than the normal amount of stress will bring. If you have stress, first off, that is good and you won't have as intense of symptoms, like what was listed above. An unhealthy amount of stress can result in any of the above-mentioned symptoms. So, what do you do when you are stressed? You learn to cope with it.

 Before you continue to read, I want you to picture what coping looks like in your head. di you do it? Yes? Good. Now, you just had a mental image of someone coping that looked like someone either on their bed or couch and they probably had some comfort food like ice cream. What were they doing? Are they were watching the tv, reading a book, or just lying there crying/sleeping? Well, I'm here to tell you that that way of coping is not a good or an efficient way of coping. Coping is more than just "getting by" or "pushing through the problem." The definition for coping is "having the ability to effectively manage something that is difficult or hard" (Oxford Dictionary).  What are some ways to help you "effectively manage something difficult?" Having and keeping boundaries is a great way to help you manage stress! you can also maintain a routine, do things to keep your relationships with others (including your family), express your love to others by word and by actions, getting exercise, working -if you can- on the things causing stress by breaking it down into manageable pieces, or by practicing relaxation exercises. 

Stressors come in many ways and can impact not only in your life but also your family life. Earl Koos, a psychologist, studied stress and how it effected families. This study was done shortly after the first World War. he studied people living in poor housing in New York. Here is a picture describing what he found of how families recovered after experiencing a high stressor event:

The top left shows families that went through a hard stressor event and rose to the same level of functionality over time after the trial. this was not super common but could happen. The top right shows a family that actually reported being closer and functioning better then they were before the stressor event, which was rare. The bottom left shows what seemed to be more common, this is that a family would go through a stressor event and then be at a lower functioning ability then the determined "norm" of family functionality. The bottom right shows a trend of families that are like the bottom left but just never regained original functionality and just continued to regress.

So, how to make your family like the top two? What you have to do is implement your family life by taking ways to cope with stress and applying them to your family in large group scales. Try to draw nearer to each other, do things for each other, express your love in words and actions, control your thoughts about what the problem is, watch your temper, don't place blame on the others, focus on the real problem. There are many other ideas as well as what was listed here and above. If you are religious you may find help in reading scripture and praying together as a family. 

As always thanks for reading and, as always, if you have any questions or thoughts you would like to share, leave a comment. Also if you read this, leave a comment of your favorite healthy way to cope with stress in your life!

Picture found off of google search for "koos stress study"