Stress is an emotional response; like all emotional responses, it emerges from the functioning of the motivational system. Your motivational system engages goals and gives them energy so that you can pursue them. Simply put, when you succeed at your goals, you feel good, and when you don’t succeed you feel bad.
Stress is a negative emotion, so the first thing we can see about stress is that it reflects a goal you are not currently achieving.
Learn to calm yourself. Another key element of stress is the energy or arousal related to it. Your motivational system needs energy to be engaged. When you find your stress levels climbing too high, and you can’t reframe the situation, then you need to remove the energy driving the feelings of stress.
The mindfulness meditation techniques that have become so popular can help you to find the objects driving your stress, but they are also good at helping you to diffuse some of the arousal driving the stress response. Taking a few minutes to disengage yourself from the workplace and to focus on your breathing can help you to calm down.
