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Many of the ideas, suggestions, and
directions in this book are designed to help you cope with stress in highly
immediate, responsive ways. In various chapters I discuss how you can modify
your environment, change how you think, and master more effective behavioral
skills. The emphasis here is on doing, fixing, and changing.
While many of your stressors can be
changed, fixed, or even eliminated, many times this isn’t possible. Sadly but
realistically, your life will always be punctuated by major stressors. They may
take the form of the death of a loved one, a major illness, a divorce, or a
serious injury, to mention but a few of life’s major blows. Change may not be
easy or even possible. In such cases, your first step becomes acceptance.
Whenever you can’t change or fix a stressful situation, your most effective
stress-management strategy may be acceptance. But the value of acceptance
extends beyond coping with life’s major stressors. Effectively coping with any
stressor, big or small, starts with acceptance.
Understanding
acceptance
Acceptance, put most succinctly, means:
1.Recognizing and expecting that your
life will be punctuated by pain, sorrow, loss, discomfort, and disappointment.
2.Acknowledging and tolerating that
distress without denying it, fighting it, judging it, or immediately trying to
change it.
3.Looking at your reality and
accepting it the way it is, not demanding that it be the way you want it to be.
When you accept an unpleasant or
unwanted experience, be it a situation, an event, a feeling, or a thought, you
acknowledge that it is. You may not like it or want it, but it’s there. Your
smartphone is on the bottom of the lake. You have to wait for the plane to take
off. You didn’t get the job. Accept it! Acceptance is not always easy. Our
instincts tell us to fight it, change it, fix it, or get rid of it. And
sometimes you can. But a more effective way of coping is first learning to
accept what is. Without acceptance, you’re in a constant battle with the
stressors around you. Sometimes it’s best not to fight. Sometimes it’s best to
accept.
Copyright © Allen Elkin Phd – Originally appeared in Stress Management for Dummies 2nd edition by Allen Elkin
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