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What's Your Favorite Stress Management Tip?

Do you have a favorite stress management tip? Probably everybody does, and it could be interesting to ask a bunch of people, “What’s your favorite stress management tip?” We’d get quite a collection of tips, I’m sure, but I wonder if there would be any relationship between stress management and personality. What I mean is, I wonder if a person’s favorite tip would tell you something about his/her personality.

Maybe we could come up with a stress management tip or two for each of the Meyers-Briggs personality types.

Relating: Extraverts and Introverts

In Meyers-Briggs terms, people relate either as extraverts—those who like being around other people and interacting with them—or as introverts—those who prefer to be alone.

An extravert’s stress management tip might have to do with developing strong social support, or spending time with friends. An introvert’s stress management tip could be to spend time meditating or getting plenty of rest.

Gathering Information: Sensing and Intuiting

Sensing people gather information with their senses, objectively and from the environment. A sensing person might suggest progressive muscle relaxation, where you pay attention to your body and concentrate on feeling tension in the muscles, as a stress management tip.

An intuitive person uses their “sixth” sense, or intuition, to gather information. An intuitive person’s stress management tip could be visualization, or imagining yourself somewhere peaceful.

Cognition: Thinking and Feeling

Thinkers come to conclusions by logical, fact based, objective thinking. A thinker might use reframing as their favorite stress management tip. Reframing is looking at the situation from a different point of view so that it is not so threatening. For instance, if your job is threatened, you could reframe the threat so that it is an opportunity to develop new skills.

Feelers think with their emotions, and while they may collect data, they make decisions based on their “gut feeling.” A feeler’s best stress management tip might be to take some deep slow breaths so that you can be more aware of what you are feeling.

Deciding: Judging and Perceiving

Judgers like to plan things out and have all their ducks in a row. A stress management tip that a judger might suggest would be to get your work area completely organized so that everything is right where you need it.

Perceivers, on the other hand, are more flexible. They like to improvise and be impromptu. A perceiver’s favorite stress management tip might be to take up a creative hobby or to do something fun and spontaneous.

It would be interesting to see if we could identify a person’s personality type by asking what his favorite stress management tip is. There probably is a pretty high correlation between the two. All personalities have stress, and everybody has a favorite stress management technique, so personality and stress management probably goes together.