Stress Management Training Course

The core value of stress management training courses is never to teach you to completely eliminate stress, but to help you establish a "stress perception-regulation-transformation" system that adapts to your own personality and career scenarios - 90% of similar courses on the market are ineffective. The essence is that they fundamentally mistake stress for the "enemy" that needs to be eliminated.

To be honest, I have been doing stress training related to corporate EAP for 6 years, and I have seen too many scenes where I failed after the class: I was doing in-house training for an e-commerce platform last month. The girl from the operations department had just finished 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation with the teacher, but she turned around and was kicked back for the third time because of the big promotion plan. She squatted in the fire escape while crying and cursing. The abdominal breathing method she learned in class had long been forgotten.

To put it bluntly, the stress management courses currently on the market are divided into three schools, each with its own approach. No one is right or wrong, only whether it is suitable or not. The first ones to take the academic route were basically teachers with a background in clinical psychology. They focused on the implementation of CBT cognitive behavioral therapy. They would teach you tools such as "Thinking Suspension Method" and "Dismantling Negative Beliefs." I have used this set before when I gave customized courses to the emergency team of a tertiary hospital. For people who frequently experience negative events, this method can quickly help you separate "things" from "emotions" and avoid emotional internal friction. However, the shortcomings are also obvious: the threshold is too high, and ordinary people without any psychological foundation will already have a headache just hearing the terms "automatic thinking" and "core beliefs", let alone using them in actual work.

Later, when demand from the enterprise side increased, a number of performance-oriented courses came out. The essence is to treat stress as a variable that affects productivity, teach you how to grade stress and match it to different jobs: for example, you are most focused under moderate pressure, which is suitable for creative work such as making plans and creativity. Under high pressure, your judgment will decline, so it is suitable for mechanical work that does not require too much brainpower, such as following procedures and filling out reports. I have recommended this method to the production and research teams of Internet companies before. It is very practical, but it is also the most controversial: many companies directly use this theory as a tool for PUA employees. After the class, they add KPIs to employees, euphemistically calling it "moderate pressure can improve productivity." In the end, a good stress class turned into a brainwashing class to give employees blood.

There are also the mind-body and soul schools that have become popular in recent years, such as mindfulness meditation, singing bowl healing, and aromatic stress reduction. They focus on instant relaxation. You will feel refreshed within two hours after finishing the class. However, it treats the symptoms but not the root cause. As soon as you return to your work station and see 99+ unread messages, the peace you just had will be shattered. The little operations girl I mentioned earlier took this kind of class.

The Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences mentioned in the 2023 survey on the current situation of workplace stress that among the respondents who had taken a general stress management course, only 17% said they were still using the methods in the course three months later. The rest either forgot or gave up after using it twice and found it useless. The core reason is that most courses are "I will teach you whatever I have", regardless of what kind of job you do, whether your personality is introverted or extroverted, and whether the source of stress is deadlines or interpersonal relationships.

Last year, I met a brother who was in To B sales. He won the team sales championship for three consecutive quarters. He took the initiative to sign up for my class. He said that he had been suffering from insomnia recently and there was nothing wrong with going to the hospital for a checkup. I recommended mindfulness meditation audio to him, but he found it too boring after listening to it for 5 minutes and said he couldn’t sit still. Later, after we talked more, I found out that he usually likes to run outdoors, so I asked him not to force himself to sit and meditate, but to spend two afternoons a week riding cross-country motorcycles, no matter how crazy he is. Two months later, he sent me a message, saying that his insomnia was gone and his performance had increased. He said that when he was riding a motorcycle, his mind was completely empty. Those difficult customers and unfinished orders came up with solutions when he got off the bike. You see, for his natural "stress-preferring" personality, letting him relieve stress is a hundred times more effective than calming him down.

Oh, by the way, don’t think that stress management classes are “necessary for people with poor mental endurance.” I had previously been exposed to the CTO of an Internet company, with an annual salary of seven figures. He was considered a winner in life by outsiders. He was admitted to the hospital due to acute myocardial infarction the year before last. After he was discharged from the hospital, he came to me specifically for one-on-one stress management. He said that he always felt that he could handle it. When he was stressed, he would smoke a cigarette and stay up all night. It was not until he was fixing online bugs one second before he fainted that he realized that stress is not something that you can just carry away. It will secretly accumulate in your body. Insomnia, hair loss, and high blood pressure are all signals to you. If you turn a blind eye, you will explode one day.

If you are wondering whether to sign up for a stress management class, let me give you a little suggestion. Instead of spending thousands to buy that kind of master class, take a week to do a small test on your own: when you are stressed today, go downstairs and walk for 10 minutes to get some air tomorrow. When you're stressed, talk to a friend for 10 minutes. The day after tomorrow, try taking a notebook and writing down all your worries and tearing them up. Whichever method makes your chest less congested after doing it, that's the adjustment method that's most suitable for you, and it's more effective than any expensive class.

After all, don’t believe the propaganda that says, “After taking this course, you will be able to say goodbye to stress.” As long as you live and want to move up, you can’t be stress-free. A good stress management course will never teach you how to avoid stress, but will only teach you how to live with it, and even make it a motivation to help you move forward - after all, the road to no stress at all is downhill.