Stress has been called "the invisible disease". It is a disease that may affect you, your organization, and any of the people in it, so you cannot afford to ignore it.

Stress felt at work could affect your home life too, which will have a detrimental impact on family and friends. Stress will probably affect all of us at some point of time or the other.

Knowing how to manage this stress will enable us to continue our pursuit of personal goals without letting it affect us.

'The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives'………

......................................................................William James, Eminent American Psychologist

Let us look at some of the most common Visible Indications of Stress:

• Becoming unnecessarily overemotional or aggressive in conflict situations
• Loss of interest in personal appearance, other people, social events, or previously enjoyed activities, such as a favorite sport
• Difficulty in remembering,
• Inability to make decisions
• Sadness, guilt, fatigue, apathy, and a pronounced feeling of helplessness or failure
• Loss of confidence in one’s personal ability, often coupled with a lack of self-worth.

Every thought, emotion, or action that you are involved in or experiencing today, is based on the thoughts, emotions or actions of your past, that have been faithfully recorded in your mind in the form of mental image pictures. These pictures or experiences with your family, work, school, society, environment and every aspect of life that you have ever been involved in are like pieces of data in a computer and they program "your" computer.

It is this programming that has occurred in the past that determines the manner in which you respond to present circumstances.

These experiences or pictures are organized in our mind in specific ways after being filtered through three processes:

1. Distortion

2. Generalization and

3. Deletion.

Each memory or picture is then filed away in a specific manner, depending on the type of memory it is, and is connected to various parts of the brain and the nervous system-to be sensed at a physical, emotional and mental level.

Neuro Linguistic Programming ( NLP)  is a highly effective therapeutic technique based on the relationships between how we think (neuro), how we communicate (linguistic) and our patterns of behavior and emotion (programmes). NLP is based on the belief that all conditions and behavior have an internal, subjective sequence and structure that connects thoughts, images, feelings, and neuro-responses.

These interactions and processing methods can be used to help people transform the way they traditionally think and act, adopting new, far more successful models of human excellence.

In effect, NLP is a powerful change management tool. When applied to dealing with stress, NLP can be used to empower individuals to cope with or change non-resourceful or negative stress to resourceful or positive resources. With NLP one can change overwhelming, immobilizing feelings into powerful motivating forces.

NLP was developed by Dr. Richard Bandler and Prof.John Grinder in the early 1970's, based on the work of Dr. Milton Erickson and Moshe Feldenkrais, amongst others. NLP reviews the sequences and strategies an individual uses that produce desirable and undesirable results to then enable individuals to rearrange, redirect and reassemble their inner resources to produce new responses that achieve maximum desirability in accordance with the modeling of those successfully producing patterns.

How do we apply the concepts and techniques of NLP to manage stress?

NLP is all about changing one’s thinking. And one way to do this is through the power of precision questioning.

“ Q u e s t i o n s  a r e a l s o interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently,

'What is the most useful question to ask now?”

Let’s look at an example:

Job stress occurs because your thought triggers a painful emotional reaction.

There are three generic thoughts that do in:

1. I have to do_____________ (a certain task)______________ (perfectly) (on time) (so my boss will be pleased) or (something painful) will happen.
2. They are doing this to me and it is not fair.
3. I am trapped here.

Thought 1 makes you anxious

Thought 2 triggers anger, and

Thought 3 generates depression.

If you notice, all the three sentences have ambiguities. These ambiguities can be clarified by asking a set of precise questions which will help a person know the path to find solution.

Some of these questions are:

• Why do you have to do the task?
• Who has set the time frame?
• What will happen if it does not happen on time ?

This process of arriving at questions to get more clarity on the stressor is called ‘precision questioning’. Using the precision questioning model on aspects of the job that create stress, individuals get a clear idea on what specifically causes stress. The questions will give the individual an idea of what, where, when, who of the problem and how this is a problem.

The process which allows us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our future growth, if we commit the error of mistaking the representation for the reality. Hence the same 3 processes that our mind uses to filter and store data i.e.

The NLP model of distortion, generalization and deletion can be used to both generate stress as well as reduce it.

Let’s see how.

1. Distortion

Fantasy, for example, allows us to prepare for experiences which we may have before they occur. People will distort present reality when rehearsing a speech which they will later present. It is this process of distortion that has made possible all the artistic creations which we as humans have produced.

Distortion is the process which allows us to make shifts in our experience of sensory data.

Distortion can be used to combat stress very effectively. Individuals who are feeling stressed can simply distort the current reality by creating an image of what they would like to feel or by vividly recalling a person, picture or a scene from a movie or book, a song or piece of music which represents what they would like to feel. Such an image will immediately help them experience peace, relaxation or happiness and consequently reduce the current levels of Job Stress.

2. Generalization

Our ability to generalize is essential for coping with the world. For example, it is Using Distortion, Generalization and Deletion positively useful for us to be able to generalize from the experience of getting burnt when we touch a hot stove to a rule that hot stoves are not to be touched. But to generalize this experience to a perception that stoves are dangerous and, therefore, to refuse to be in the same room with one is to limit unnecessarily our movement in the world.

Generalization is the process by which elements of pieces of a person’s representation become detached from their original experience and come to represent the 'entire category' of which the experience is an example. An example is, “All BPO workers suffer from stress related diseases”.

These generalizations define the limits of the learner’s model of the world. Purposefully challenging these limits using precision questioning model can open the doorway to new possibilities.

3. Deletion:

Yet another mechanism which we can use either to cope effectively or to defeat ourselves is deletion. Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others.

For example, look at the ability that people have to filter out or exclude all other sound in a room full of people talking in order to listen to one particular person’s voice. Using the same process, people are able to block themselves from hearing messages of caring from other people who are important to them. 

To cite a practical real time example, a team member who was convinced that Generalization can be used to combat stress very effectively. He was not worth caring about, complained that, his reporting manager never gave him messages that were caring or supporting.

What actually was happening was, this team member’s reporting manager ( RM) did, indeed, express messages of caring to him. However, as these messages conflicted with the generalization that the team member had made about his own self- worth, he literally did not hear his RM. This was verified when the team member’s attention was called to some of these messages, and the team member stated that he had not even heard his RM when she had said those things.

Deletion reduces the world to proportions which we feel capable of handling. The reduction may be useful in some context and yet to be the source of pain for us in others.

(Examples of deletions are: never, none, cannot, must, should, etc.)

To Conclude:

NLP is a very powerful tool that gives the individual the power to combat stress by changing the way he or she views and thinks about situations. NLP is all about using one’s MIND FOR CHANGE.