The Importance Of Coping

The feeling of stress is inevitable to avoid and remove entirely from our lives. As we go through life and our stress levels rise, for various reasons, resulting in the feeling of worry, anxiety, insomnia, etc. We search for strategies to assist with decreasing the feeling of stress or to better help cope with it. Coping is defined as “managing taxing circumstances, expending effort to solve life’s problems, and seeking to master or reduce stress” (p521). Individuals perform a wide range of different activities to help manage stress and decrease its effects such as working out at a gym regularly, attending routine social gatherings, and reading books. One stress reducer that our society often overlooks is nature and its benefits. There have been studies on forest bathing, which involves walking a forest trail or sitting on a boulder and observing nature with all five senses, that proves to minimize stress.

It is the end of fall and leaves are beginning to disappear and the temperature is dropping. The demands of managing family, school, and work

At work there is a nearby park directly across the street and when I am feeling stressed, over my lunch break I often take a walk through it. Once, I began to take a walk to decrease the feeling of stress, I was quickly distracted by the children playing basketball and skateboarders performing dangerous tricks without wearing any safety gear. These activities I saw along my walk did not help reduce the feeling of stress but temporarily occupied my attention away from the stress itself. As a result, once lunch was over the feeling of stress returned as I headed back to work. Surprisingly, I did not experience the same feeling of self-efficacy that I had cultivated at Lake Calhoun. Self-efficacy is “an individual's belief that he or she can master a situation and produce positive outcome”