First thing you need to know: stress ex­ists in every­one's life. There is no such thing as a stress-free life. Stress may be bad weath­er, traf­fic, debts, re­la­tion­ships, your job, your friends or it might be hav­ing no re­la­tion­ship or job or friends. But every­one's got to deal with it. This is the most im­por­tant point to re­mem­ber be­cause some­times peo­ple blame them­selves for hav­ing stress in their lives and think that it means they're do­ing some­thing wrong. Which, of course, cre­ates more stress!

So Les­son 1: stress is un­avoid­able.

Next thing is to de­fine just what con­sti­tutes stress. Stress is any sit­u­a­tion which is be­yond the ca­pac­i­ty of one's cop­ing strate­gies. So stress varies from per­son to per­son, sim­ply be­cause peo­ple have dif­fer­ent cop­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties. Again, some­times in­di­vid­u­als blame them­selves for be­ing stressed by a sit­u­a­tion which oth­ers seem to be able to man­age. You can't blame your­self for the cop­ing strate­gies you do or don't have.

Les­son 2: stress is a per­son­al is­sue.

And that brings us to the most im­por­tant les­son: What to do about it? Well, the good news is that there are plen­ty of choic­es.

First thing to do is to de­cide ex­act­ly what is caus­ing your stress and be as pre­cise as you can about it. For in­stance, say­ing, "It's my par­ents!" isn't clear enough. When and in what sit­u­a­tions do your par­ents cause you stress? Is it when you're try­ing to study and they want you to do chores? Is it on a week­end when you want to go places and they won't get out of bed? Is it when they're an­gry about your big­ger broth­er's be­hav­iour and won't stop quar­relling? Is it when you're sleepy and every­thing ir­ri­tates you? Make a list. Then de­cide which items are stress­ful all the time (this in­cludes the ones you can't get off your mind, even if they're not caus­ing you a prob­lem all the time) and which are stress­ful on­ly un­der cer­tain con­di­tions. This means you have to no­tice your­self – some­times you're bet­ter at han­dling stress than oth­er times. For the ones which are on­ly stress­ful some­times, how can you try to change sit­u­a­tions or con­di­tions in your favour? If it's your Span­ish teacher and you can't cope with her right af­ter P.E. when you're tired and sweaty and you can't change your Span­ish pe­ri­od be­cause that's what your timetable is, you might find a way to stop run­ning about five min­utes be­fore P.E. is over, so you don't feel so ex­haust­ed. Or you might make sure to eat some­thing at the end of P.E., so you feel more en­er­gised and bet­ter able to face Span­ish.

If you can change the sit­u­a­tion, rig things your way! Make sure you don't face your big sis­ter un­til you feel ready for her. Wait un­til af­ter 10 am on a Sat­ur­day be­fore you try to deal with your par­ents. Stay af­ter school to do study­ing so you don't have to try to do it in a noisy house. For the ones you can't han­dle this way, ask your­self this: is there any­thing on this list which you are choos­ing to make stress­ful? This is es­pe­cial­ly so with re­gards to school­work. For in­stance, some stu­dents choose not to fo­cus on their Form Five mock ex­ams, but to fo­cus on the re­al ex­ams, CXC, which come soon af­ter. For some peo­ple, try­ing to study for both sets of ex­ams is too much and sim­ply un­re­al­is­tic. So choos­ing one over the oth­er makes sense. The truth is, the mock ex­am marks don't mat­ter. No em­ploy­er or in­sti­tute of fur­ther ed­u­ca­tion is ever go­ing to re­quest them.

Ex­ams are a sig­nif­i­cant time of stress in this coun­try.

Next week, we'll look at more stress-fight­ing tech­niques.