Have you been feeling stressed lately?

Stress. It’s everywhere. Like a bad penny, it keeps turning up, affecting your mood, your personality, your effectiveness, and often causing anxiety or irritability on the job, at school, or at home. It’s not a pleasant feeling when you want to enjoy life, but can’t. Wouldn’t it be nice to live your life stress free? Now you can. Through education and identification, we can help you better cope with stress and rescue you from this daily demon.

As a professional, I needed to find a way to reduce stress in my own life and studied and researched stress and methods of coping with it. That’s when I discovered SIT – Stress Inoculation Training. It is a prescribed program of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that can help individuals cope with stressful situations. This methodology helps us to better understand the nature and cause of stress in our lives and teaches effective coping mechanisms to release and cope with stress effectively.

SIT is a treatment that is flexible and can be tailored to fit your needs. The goal of SIT is to enhance your artillery of coping skills and increase your confidence in applying these skills by employing three phases of intervention:

1st Phase: Conceptual Education
2nd Phase: Skills Acquisition and Consolidation
3rd Phase: Application and Follow-through

How does SIT work?

1. Conceptual Education

The first phase of SIT focuses on enhancing awareness and understanding of what is causing your stress, how it is impacting your life, and how well you are or are not able to deal with it or cope effectively.

2. Skills Acquisition and Consolidation

The second phase of SIT helps you learn about and acquire the coping tools and the necessary skills you need to add to your current skill arsenal. In this phase, you will also learn about and rehearse the coping skills you need to combat stress so that your responses become more natural in the face of immediate stressors.

3. Application and Follow-through

The final phase of SIT provides opportunities for you to practice your newly acquired coping skills in increasingly stressful situations. We all know that practice makes perfect. It can turn a learned response into a natural habit. Through guided practice, you will become more confident and better able to handle stress naturally and effectively.

I’ve tried this on my own and with groups of individuals like you. It works! SIT is a widely successful intervention in helping us cope with stress in a healthy manner. If you are interested in learning more about SIT and want to live a happier, healthier, stress-free life, please join us in our upcoming workshop on Monday, May 7, 2012. You are welcome to call me today to set up your appointment and make this the first day in the best of your life.

Best regards to you,
Erika Bent, B.A., Graduate Student Intern
UCF Clinical Psychology Masters Program