I found this article about a week ago. I began looking for an article that could somehow assess for stress, but I quickly came to the conclusion that in reality we are all stressed. Essentially stress is universal (Varivogli & Darviri, 2011). It may be different from person to person, but we all have it in some form. Before I wrote my review I wanted to discuss some of the techniques with my patients. The single largest hindrance to stress management techniques were most patients thought it was related to some type of religion. One patient even told me it was hocus-pocus. I must admit that prior to reading this, these thoughts had crossed my mind. However, stress management techniques can actually go hand in hand with a patient’s religion or culture. Most religions and cultures value some kind of meditation. When visiting with a patient about reducing stress, the patient agreed to use deep breathing to help with some of her anxiety. The patient told me the next morning that she had a great night sleep and felt rested. She also expressed gratitude for sharing her this new information. …show more content…
Specifically, the authors addresses Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MSBR), as well as other techniques.
I choose this type specifically because the author suggested that nurses can do this relaxation technique with their patients. This type of stress management helps the individual gain a better grasp of the here and now, while reducing negative effects. The resulting benefits include reduction of anxiety and depression, increased natural killer t-cells, reduction of pain, and reduction in cardiovascular variables (Varivogli & Darviri, 2011). However these are only a
few.
The authors discussed other types of stress reduction techniques and suggest that professional guidance would be needed. However, I wonder if that would necessarily need to be true. If a patient wanted to go deeper into these techniques, then I would definitely recommend professional guidance. As a clinician, our job would be expose these new ideas to the patient. The purpose of this article was to inform about the types of stress reduction techniques that are evidenced based. These technique were found to be easy to learn and beneficial to healthy individuals or those with disease (Varivogli & Darviri, 2011). It is now our job to share this information with our patients, so they can have better health.
Reference
Varivogli, L. & Darviri, C. (2011). Stress management techniques: evidence-based procedures
that reduce stress and promote health. Health Science Journal. 5(2), 74-89. Retrieved from http://www.hsj.gr