Introduction
Stress is one factor that will always affect individuals. Regardless of their occupation or sphere of activity, a person will be stressed by various factors. These might include jobs, private life, education, or financial issues.
However, regardless of the cause, a person will feel uncomfortable, and their quality of life will worsen. For counselors, it is critical to teach individuals how to manage stress. Given that stress is essential to eliminate, it is critical to build resilience and ensure that a person feels better under pressure and can avoid severe outcomes.
Role of Resilience in Stress Management
In this way, resilience becomes a top priority among the desired conditions. It is the dynamic process by which a person adapts to stressful events or undesirable circumstances (Padmanabhanunni et al., 2023). This means that the central task of a specialist is to cultivate resilience rather than vulnerability and ensure that a person can avoid critical deterioration in the quality of their life. It can be achieved by altering the patterns of stress and making them more predictable, moderate, and controllable (Perry & Winfrey, 2021). These attributes are fundamental to ensuring that patients have lower fear of various events and can demonstrate behaviors that benefit them.
Therefore, different types of stress experience might lead to different outcomes. The unpredictable, extreme, and prolonged work of stress-response systems leads to sensitization. It, in turn, increases a person’s vulnerability. Additionally, stressful life events might trigger even more powerful responses and lead to mental diseases (Anderson et al., 2023).
For this reason, changing how the stress-response system is activated is critical to achieving better results and cultivating resilience. The counselor’s primary task is to guarantee that the person’s responses are predictable (Perry & Winfrey, 2021). It can be attained by offering additional training and explaining how to meet challenges and the peculiarities of coping strategies.
Establishing moderate and controllable stress-response patterns is the next step. For instance, overreacting might lead to higher cortisol levels, stronger emotions, and burnout. As a result, a person will become more vulnerable to new stressors. For this reason, the counselor’s primary task is to shape a person’s responses and clarify the necessity of moderate responses and flexibility.
Another critical step is to ensure the responses are controllable. It can be achieved by educating individuals about the existing coping strategies and their application in different settings. At the same time, controlling behavior is a complex task that might require analyzing current stressors and their connection to the vulnerability a person might acquire.
Conclusion
Altogether, cultivating resilience is one of the central tasks counselors have at the moment. High cortisol levels might activate stress-response mechanisms that might differ in their functioning. The unpredictable, extreme, and prolonged nature of these ways will lead to overreaction and the activation of all systems, which might be exhausting for a person.
That is why it is essential to ensure that a person knows how to build resilience. Predictable, moderate, and controllable responses can be promoted by educating an individual about current coping practices and by acknowledging that stress cannot be avoided. Instead, it is critical to learn how to manage it and avoid outcomes that might worsen a person’s well-being and emotional state.
References
Anderson, L. R., Monden, C. W. S., & Bukodi, E. (2022). Stressful life events, differential vulnerability, and depressive symptoms: Critique and new evidence. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 63(2), 283–300.
Padmanabhanunni, A., Pretorius, T. B., & Khamisa, N. (2023). The role of resilience in the relationship between role stress and psychological well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional study. BMC Psychology, 11(1), 45.
Perry, B., & Winfrey, O. (2021). What happened to you? Flatiron Books.