What Tough People Do During A Stressing Situation

Do you think what tough people do when stressed is different from normal people? Being mentally strong is one of the nice personalities that everyone should have. When you have strong mental, you won't easily give up and can adapt well in any situation. It's also what helps you to survive the ups and downs that life gives to you.

There are things that mentally strong people do when they face a stressful situation. Their actions help them to stay calm, keeping them from being consumed by their own stress. Below are the things that strong people do when they are stressed.

Changing Their Point of View

Citing a book titled Healing the Emptiness, some cross-cultural studies early in the coronavirus pandemic found that increasing meaning has a huge impact on mental health. These studies found that increased meaning was related to better resilience, reduced anxiety, and better functioning.

When tough people have a frustrating situation, they tend to change their point of view. Instead of thinking that what they have done is a waste, they believe that every small thing they did has an impact and meaning. This way, they can be stronger to keep going.

Paying Attention to the Surroundings

This is really helpful when you are involved in a situation that requires high concentration and creativity. Most people tend to focus on themselves when they are stressed. Whereas, you can distract your negative thoughts for a while by paying attention to your surroundings. This at least can reduce the load and burden on your mind.

Taking a look at your surroundings can help you to restore your focus, calm yourself, and change your view to be more rational on various things. So, amidst the heavy workload, spare some time to refresh your mind by walking around or just having a chat with others. Looking outside the window is also like an exhaust mechanism that helps you to reset your mind.

Embracing the Inconvenience

Most people will try hard to avoid any inconvenient situations. But instead of avoiding inconvenience, strong mentally people embrace the inconvenience. They fully realize that inconvenient and bad situations are just part of life, and no one can avoid it. Instead of running away from uncomfortable situations, tough people will focus on how to make things better.

Tough people are even brave enough to put themselves in challenging situations to improve their resilience and overcome their fear. They know that hard conditions will only help them to be a stronger, tougher person in the future.

Changing How They See Themselves

We all know that negatively seeing ourselves is not good at all. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. And instead of focusing on the weakness, focusing on your strengths and positive things will help you to be stronger, as well as more confident. Once you are able to accept yourself more positively, you'll be stronger in facing unexpected events in your life.

It's because you have a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Embracing your weaknesses while focusing on your strengths will make you a tougher person. Moreover, you'll also be able to make peace with yourself.

Focus on the Present

This might sound simple, but many people fail to focus on the present. They find it quite hard to stay in the present. Their thoughts and minds are either in the past or in the future. Focusing on the present can help to reduce anxiety and stress about worrying the future or regretting the past. And mentally strong people always train their awareness to be present, here and now.

Moreover, tough people are also proactively looking for solutions when they are in a stressful situation, exploring various strategies, and determined to overcome current problems. They're not even afraid to contact experts or look for guidance from others to find effective solutions for the problem they are facing.

Accepting Imperfections

Being a perfectionist frequently becomes one of the major factors that slows someone down. It unnecessarily makes you takes longer time to reach your goals. Instead of fighting for perfections, mentally tough people understand that mistakes and weaknesses are just natural part of humans. They learn from their mistakes and failures for self-improvement.

They might be down after failing, but they rise faster. They won't let sadness consumes them. Accepting imperfections also allows you to take calculated risks without being afraid of failing.

Changing How They Think

Mentally tough people never have a shallow, inflexible way of thinking. Instead, they have an adaptive one. Adaptive thoughts are flexible meaning that these thoughts help you to think according to the situations, making you feel better. Adaptive thoughts are also realistic and logic. By having these thoughts, you will be able to easily anticipate bad things that might happen in life.

Changing the way of thinking can also mean looking at different points of view. By doing this, you can be more creative, exploring various other strategies to look for solutions.

Humour As Coping Mechanism

Humour frequently becomes the only thing that can lift us up from the downturn. When facing a tensed or stressing situation, mentally strong people use humour to lighten their mood and lower the intensity of emotions. By making other people smile or laugh, they create a more relaxing situation so that they can reduce stress and constructively overcome the problems.

If you think that the situation is not possible to throw a joke, you can take a break and watch something fun to lighten your mood. This will refresh your mind so that you are ready again to face the situation and solve the issue.

Determining Responses to Show

The next thing of what tough people do when stressed is determining their reactions to be shown. You generally have 2 options when facing a stressing situation: you can opt for changing either the circumstance or how you respond to the situation. Although you are powerless to change the situation, you still have the power to determine your response to the situation.

You still have the option to learn new, useful techniques in responding to stressful situations. You can also choose to refocus your mind. There are some questions that you need to consider when determining an approach to the stressful situation:

Is it possible for you to avoid it? Sometimes, you can avoid a stressful situation, which is the source of your stress. In this case, you can change the situation. For instance, if you are often stressed due to a tight schedule, you can review your schedule to decide which activities that you can cancel or postpone. You can also learn to refuse requests and ask help from others.
Can you change it? There are some stressful situations that you can't avoid, but you can change your approach so that the situation can change. For example, you have arguments with your partner, which is a normal thing to happen to even the most romantic couples. The argument won't get worse if you are willing to change how you approach, such as compromising or directly showing your feelings without using passive aggression.
Is it possible for you to adapt to the situation? You can alter your approach and behaviour to relieve stress, even when you cannot change the situation. As an example, if you are frequently stressed spending hours on jammed roads to go to work, remember that you cannot change this situation. But you can change your approach to the problem source by, for example, taking public transport to work, looking for different routes to go home, or leaving earlier and going home a bit late.
Is the situation acceptable for you? You know that others' reactions, actions, and feelings are out of your control. It's out of your control that it's raining on your birthday garden party, or your boss is selfish, regardless of how much effort you put to communicate well. But you can accept these things as something out of your control and release your desire to control these things. You can also see it as a lesson that encourages you to be a tougher person.

Stress Management Strategies

Once we talked about what tough people do when stressed, let's get into stress management strategies. These strategies are categorized into 3 groups, which are:

Action-oriented approach: used to take actions to change a stressful situation.
Emotion-oriented approach: used to change how we see a stressing situation.
Acceptance-oriented approach: used to face a stressful situation that you can't control.

Below is the explanation and find the best combination to keep your stress level under control.

Action-Oriented Approach

Be assertive when it comes to what you need or what bothers you. The key is to do this fairly and assertively while still being empathetic to others. Make your boundaries and make sure everyone respects it.

Explain to others what behaviours and attitudes that you can't accept, how much time and space you need to have me time, and your priorities.

Time management is essential. Make priorities and organize your tasks so that you can create less stressful, more fun life. Also, sometimes it's better to not compete with your rushing mind. Sometimes you just need to take a break. So, don't feel guilty to take a walk, watch a movie, or hanging out with your friends to distract your minds for a while.

Emotion-Oriented Approach

The power of positive affirmations has been scientifically proven to be able to increase positive feelings and emotions. When you think about positive experiences or happy moments, the brain will consider it as reality. So, replace negative thoughts with positive ones. Also, change the way you see the world and all its challenges.

A psychologist named Albert Ellis created what is called an ABC technique, which was then adapted by Martin Seligman. ABC stands for Adversity, or stressful situations, Belief, or how you response to the stressful situation, and Consequence, the results of your belief lead to actions and the outcome of the stressful situation.

In a nutshell, the more optimistic you are about your beliefs, the more positive the result. Once again, you are suggested to give yourself positive affirmations. Mentally tough people frequently talk to themselves to strengthen positive affirmations, motivate themselves, and overcome complex problems. This internal dialogue is a form of self-encouragement, helping you to stay focused.

You can start self-talking by saying to yourself that you got this. Take a deep breath and say that you will overcome the problem. Self-talk like this can help you to handle your emotions and pressures during a stressful period.

Acceptance-Oriented Approach

Creating simple changes to your diet, such as reducing your intake of alcohol, caffeine, and sugar has been proven to decrease anxiety and stress. Regular workout is also beneficial for both physical and mental health. Working out is proven to be as effective as anti-depressants in relieving mild depression.

Mediation and physical relaxation like yoga can also help to make your body more relaxed. Build resilience with your abilities to bounce back from stressful or negative experiences. Tough people are skilled in accepting a situation that has happened. They learn from what has happened and just continue to live their lives.

Don't keep it all to yourself. Talk to someone who you trust about your worries or things that make you sad. Sharing your worries will give you a chance to laugh at potentially absurd situations that just don't make sense. Most of our worries sound less worrying when we talk about it out loud. If you don't want to share with others, writing is a good way to release your worries and stress.

Or you can also opt for seeing a professional like a psychologist. Psychologists tend to just listen to your stories without judging you so that you can feel better. Also, having a good night sleep is very important to recharge yourself so that you are ready to face a stressful situation at your best. You are suggested to have 8 hours of sleep, although this number varies, depending on some factors.

Those are the things of what tough people do when stressed. Are you interested to try it?