Do we need to learn how to prepare for adversity and read self help books and carry out self help activities?
(written by moderator)
(pardon the grammartical error if any)
When people suddenly face with accidents and sudden problems which they have no experience, they will feel stress. one reason is because they do not know what is the situation going to be. They cannot predict and they have no knowledge. Therefore the outcome to them becomes an unknown. When that happens, they can only anticipate and have to be constantly monitor which is a stressful thing. They by then should be feeling discomfort in terms of worrying in their body. This pain will then be translate and mix up with the being obsessed with the thoughts of the incident and this will create an exaggeration effect where they think that the problem is a serious problem.
Lets say there is a occupation accident on one of the workers and it may be caused by the error of you who is the supervisor. No previous experience and no idea what is the consequence. So many things to think about like the workers safety, your legal consequence, your job consequence, how they family of the injured worker will take what actions towards you and what your superiors is going to treat you.
Why cannot people handle such questions? The reason is that nobody will usually imagine what they should think in times of accident or some of the things that are happening in the world that are not so related to them. Instead, people do leisure activities, have fun and party all night because these are pleasurable activities. The downside of not learning how to deal with adversity and learning what is adversity is that when adversity really happens, people do not have the means and knowledge to handle them.
The counter argument for people who just play and enjoy most of the time is that in life, adversity really seldom happens. It still can happen to anybody but it is just that it is seldom. Hence, this may be the reason why people may think it is not necessary and efficiency to really study it. They may think that when adversity comes, they may indeed exaggerate the situation and become unduly stress but most of the time, there will be still automatic recovery and they will still be alright in the end.
So, the argument that people need to learn about stress management seems unimportant because the stress experience does not kill in the first place. It also depends really. A lucky person does not really need to undergo stress management while a unlucky needs a lot.
Personally, I have used the visualization method to simulate various problems in life. I have also try to learn about what is the correct belief system of life, what is reality really and what is right or wrong, what is the happening in the world, and what are the lesson we can learn from news around the world. Basically, by learning more about our beliefs, attitude and values and trying to understand them, to seek for truth will equip the brain with right knowledge so that when stress come along, you will understand the things that happen in it. For example, when a boss decides to sack you, how should you view it. If you have read news before, and try to understand it and put yourself into various cases, you might learn that firing people is quite common so it can happen to you one day. You might also understand from learning economics that reducing work staff is actually a tool for increasing profits sometimes. You might also study before the value of loyalty and so has a more accurate opinion of whether the firing of your job has any moral sins done by your boss.
The point is that in order to handle stress and misfortune in life well, you have to know all the various components of the stress case like the biological factor, the sociological factor, the ethical factor, the nature of reality. If you understanding of each factor is wrong in some sense, then you will not handle stress correctly. If you do not know and learn about stress management, then you will definitely be more stress.
Most people actually do learn about stress management through common media sources like radio, newspaper, television and talking with people encounter. Books are also available and is in fact more useful because there above mention sources cannot contain too much information to teach you. books on the other hand, can devote 300 pages of information to teach you.
However, most people do not really study and prepare for adversity or bad events in life because the truth is that most of the time we are in good times. Hence, it could be argued once again that there is no need to really read on books on self help, we will naturally mature and be wiser as we grow older.