It's one thing to know you're stressed. The next step is to know why you're stressed. Doing something about it, however, is the hard part. There are four principal ways in which stress overload can

Be reduced or alleviated: by changing your perceptions of the stressor; by learning Neat ion techniques; by changing your diet; and by conditioning your body through exercise. In addition, some stress management specialists also suggest assertiveness training and psychotherapy to reduce or alleviate stress. In keeping with our premise that a working woman should try to incorporate, without too much loss of time, good health habits into her daily life, we have chosen to emphasize the four most common methods of stress reduction, methods that can mesh most easily into our already busy lives.

Keep in mind that the goal is not to eliminate stress altogether. Without stress you would find yourself in a nearly moribund state. Rather, the goal is to try to change your perceptions about stressors and to reduce the stress overload that leads to disease.

Think of stress, for a moment, in terms of electric current. In the same way that a certain wire or appliance cannot withstand a sudden powerful surge of electricity without breaking a circuit or exploding, an individual whose tolerance to stress has been finely tuned over the years cannot withstand a sudden onslaught of stressful events without "the circuits breaking" in herself. This analogy is also useful in terms of long-term stress. In the same way that a light bulb will burn out if fed a steady stream of electricity over a long period of time, so will an individual "burn out" if fed a steady stream of stressful events without letup. It is these two phenomena that we want most to avoid or to learn to control if they cannot be avoided: the sudden onslaught of extreme high stress; and the ceaseless, enervating high-stress lifestyle that does not allow the body periods of rest in order to gather its resources.

PickYour Battles

The most successful way to eliminate the wear and tear on your body brought about by the stress reaction is to react differently to the stressors in your life. By changing your perceptions of potential stressors—that is, by reducing their importance in your life, thereby inhibiting their ability to threaten you—you can effectively lessen the sum total of stress overload. In short, pick your battles.

Consider, for a moment, what would have happened if Alison, at the beginning of this chapter, had been someone else—a woman we call Anne, for example. Although she wakes up half an hour after she intended to, Anne realizes that skipping her morning bowl of cereal and juice will only save her 10 minutes, and that it's more important for her well-being to eat than to save so little time. When she reaches the traffic jam at the George Washington bridge, she is momentarily concerned, but then shrugs. There's nothing she can do about it, Anne thinks to herself, so she might as well turn on the radio and catch the news while she has the chance. When her boss sends around the memo announcing that the meeting will be postponed, Anne, instead of feeling anxious, tries to figure out how she can outwit him. Upon hearing that the statistics she needs won't be ready until tomorrow, she hatches a plan. She will push for a one- day delay of the meeting, citing the need for the statistics and the need for repairs on the copy machine. He may not love the idea, she rationalizes, but he'll like it better in the end than having her walk out on the meeting. That problem solved, she takes herself out for a walk and lunch, spends the afternoon preparing for the meeting and getting ahead on other matters, and leaves the office at 4:30 as planned. Anticipating a cranky session with Katya in the supermarket, Anne decides to make scrambled eggs for supper instead, and go shopping after Katya is in bed and Sam is home. On the way home from work, Anne laughs to herself. The secret to her success, she thinks, is her ability always to put off until tomorrow what absolutely doesn't have to be done today.

Alison and Anne faced exactly the same stressors, yet one woman had a severe stress reaction, while the other did not. The sole difference between the two women was in the way each perceived the stressor. For Alison, time lost in a traffic jam was tension- producing. For Anne, it was an opportunity to get something she might not otherwise have had—the news. For Alison, the decision to postpone the meeting was a disaster; all she could think of was the way in which it would conflict with something else she had to do. For Anne, the postponement was a challenge—an opportunity to come up with a creative way to talk her boss into having the meeting the next day, when she wouldn't have to worry about it conflicting with picking up her daughter at the day care center. For Alison, food shopping was a necessity, an arduous chore that had to be done before the family could eat. For Anne, it was something she could get around, something that could be done later, so that the pleasure she and Katya could take from one another's company wouldn't be destroyed.

All well and good, but what about the Type A personality? What about the woman who seems almost destined to live with a high-stress reaction because of the very nature of her being?

The Type A behavior personality can be modified. Type As can and have learned to change their perceptions of their lifestyles and of the stressors surrounding them, and in so doing have significantly improved their health.

In a three-year study of 328 Type A men in California who had suffered one heart attack, 79 percent reduced their Type A behavior through counseling. Furthermore, this reduction in Type A behavior cut the risk of having a second attack by 50 percent. During this three-year period, the men were taught ways to reduce tension and eliminate hurry-up sickness by learning how to smile openly, admit to making mistakes, do something spontaneous and nice for a spouse or lover, let some minor error escape rather than harping on it, and laugh at themselves from time to time.

Hypnosis, thought control, and visualization are also ways in which perceptions of stressors can be altered. Studies have shown that negative and frightening thoughts stimulate negative and frightening emotions. If the thoughts can be controlled, so the reasoning goes, stress levels can be reduced. Self-hypnosis is really nothing more than being in a physiologically relaxed state, in which you are more susceptible to suggestions than you might normally be. Self- hypnosis invokes the relaxation response in the body and makes the subconscious more likely to respond to specific suggestions that are made by yourself to yourself while in the hypnotic trance. Obesity, chronic pain, smoking, and insomnia can often be controlled through self-hypnosis, because the hypnotic state increases the effectiveness of the suggestions that you make to yourself. Most individuals can be taught self-hypnosis in any one of a number of stress management courses that are springing up all over the country, and in some cases are even part of corporate health programs.

Thought-stopping is a very simple technique that allows an individual to stop a destructive thought mid-stream and replace it with a more pleasant thought, thus reducing the potential of the bad thought to be a stressor. Thoughts can have damaging effects upon us; they can provoke the stress response. The thought-stopping technique requires that the individual's thought be interrupted by a jarring sound or physical sensation, Bus allowing a more pleasant thought to fill the vacuum left by the unpleasant thought. In behavioral modification programs, an individual :nav be asked to set a timer. Then she will be asked to ruminate on an unpleasant thought for two minutes. When the bell goes off, the woman should let her mind go free for 30 seconds, and then fill her mind with a pleasant thought. If the bell of the timer itself doesn't do the trick, the woman may experiment by snapping a rubber band against her wrist when the bell goes off. Any technique that stops the thought process long enough to empty the mind and replace it with pleasant thoughts may be used. With enough practice, eventually she may be able to stop unpleasant or distressing thoughts automatically without the aid of external gadgets. Although the technique may strike some as unsettling and even Orwellian, clinical studies have shown that thought-stopping can be successful in reducing stress.

Visualization is another method of altering perceptions of stressors. faith this technique, the individual puts herself into a relaxed state using any of the relaxation methods discussed below, and visualizes herself in a pleasant, carefree situation, such as lounging on a beach. Eventually the subconscious begins to experience the visualizations as real events because it cannot differentiate between real and imagined experiences. Thus the body becomes even more relaxed and is able to turn a poten~lly stressful situation into a pleasant sensation.