Our Approach
Stress consists of 2 parts. There is the situation that is stressful, and there is your reaction to that situation. How stressed you are often how you perceive the situation. It also depends on your personality. If you tend to be anxious, you will be under stress because you often think of the worst case situation. If you procrastinate, you will be late for deadlines, and therefore under stress.
There are three parts to treating stress. One is to teach you a set of problem solving protocols to change how you handle situations. The other is to show you the powerful Cognitive Therapy techniques developed by Dr. David Burns to change the way you see the situation. The third is to demonstrate a range of relaxation techniques to reverse the effect of stress on your body.
Event
Interpretation
Body's Response
Problem Solving
You have patterns you developed many years ago to cope. When you are in a situation, you probably do not think of the range of ways to handle it, you automatically do what you normally do. Sometimes, the problems that put you under stress have simple solutions, but you just don’t see them.
The Problem Solving Protocols we teach you are a proven set of procedures to help you organize how you look at a problem and then assess the range of things you can do. We use several approaches. One of them is the procedure developed by the CIA
TEAM Cognitive Therapy
TEAM is the approach developed by Dr. David Burns. Dr. Burns is one of the original Cognitive Therapy thinkers who wrote the book Feeling Good, The New Mood Therapy. He has developed a new more powerful form of Cognitive Therapy that can result in rapid changes in how you see a situation, how you feel and how you act.
Relaxation
The Relaxation techniques we teach you are a combination of physical and breathing exercises that relax your body. These are critical for reversing the tremendous toll stress takes on your body such as high blood pressure, headaches, gastrointestinal problems and others described later. We also teach you Mindfulness techniques from Dr. Schachter’s acclaimed book, Mindfulness for Stress Management.