Benjamin Lahey's Coping With Stress

Coping with stress in inevitable but there are various strategies people can learn to cope with in our everyday life. Benjamin Lahey, a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, wrote an article “Coping with Stress” on how to handle them. Everybody is different in their own way so not everyone is going to deal with stress the same way. In the article, Professor Lahey mentions positive and negative, productive and non-productive methods people handle stress through effective coping, ineffective coping, and defense mechanisms.

According to Professor Benjamin Lahey “one effective way of dealing with stress is to remove or to reduce the source of stress from our lives” (564). In the article he mentions

Professor B. Lahey agrees “...that the ego possesses a small arsenal of defense mechanisms that are unconsciously used to cope with tension” (566). The following are nine methods identified by Freud. The first is displacement, where letting out your anger to a friend when it was meant for someone else. Secondly is sublimation's, is by putting your stressful feelings into activities like schoolwork, literature, and sports. Reading or drawing always seem to make me feel better. The third one is Projections, putting their feelings of desire or emotions onto someone else. After that is reaction, by conflict motives or feelings are avoided by doing the opposite. Then after that is regression, reducing stress by hiding behind earlier patterns of behavior like stomping and throwing tantrums when a setback has been suffered. Then there is rationalization, reducing stress by thinking logically and explaining to oneself “this happened for a reason”. Another is repression, Avoiding things that would make oneself stressful without knowing it. Another one is Denial, consciously denying one's feelings or desire even when facts are shown. Lastly is intellectualization, looking at the other way around instead of facing