WHETHER YOU are an executive making critical investment decisions, a graduate looking for a good career opportunity, or a student cramming for exams, stress is something you will have learned to accept as an unavoidable part of everyday life.
For the sake of your long-term mental health, however, it is important to understand stress, why it occurs and what can be done to limit any adverse effects.
Wong Chung-kwong has more than 30 years' experience in psychiatry, having been both a practising psychiatrist and a teacher on the subject at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He is also the chairman of the Whole Person Development Institute. Specialising in the study of stress, he has developed the ICAN model on how to understand and deal with stress. Importantly, he is working to overcome four common misconceptions about the subject.
'These misconceptions are potentially damaging and need to be well understood by people before they can start to cope with their own situations properly,' said Dr Wong.
The first involves recognising what a person means when they say they 'are' stressed. According to Dr Wong, the usual answer is that if individuals have a problem with something, they believe this equals stress and describe themselves as stressed.
More correctly, he said, this is a 'stressor', an encountered life event which is a source of stress and causes the feeling of pressure.
