Of course, you can't banish stress by being unrealistically positive, but experts say learning to change your approach to stressful events may go a long way toward making them less stressful.
Stress often begins with events beyond one's control.
For nurses, uncontrollable events are a dime a dozen, so there's potential for stress at every turn, said Dan McIlwee, RN, mental health coordinator at Irving Healthcare System in Texas. And no one has a lock on the most stressful job in the hospital, because stress has a range of causes. Intensive care nurses have often bemoaned their high-stress job of keeping people alive, sometimes by the minute. McIlwee said healthcare providers dealing with patients' emotions, such as in oncology, and those dealing with high patient turnover, as on telemetry units, are also at risk for job stress. Most people in health care are nurturing, Osean said.