By Tony Cheong

In what way can people turn their stress into positive energy, motivating them to do better jobs?

In Macao, very commonly, people tend to claim that they live under stress. A telephone survey conducted by the Association of Macao New Vision in 2011 reported that 22.46% of the respondents considered themselves living under extremely heavy stress.

People’s attitudes are the important factor which determines whether stress may help them or distress them in life.

Kit Lo, a secondary school teacher working for the Caritas Macau, shared her formula of perceiving and coping with stress in an interview. Lo claimed that she had been under heavy stress these few years because of her huge workload, but her healthy perspective has helped her a great deal to get rid of the negativity and gain positive energy from stress.

“I used to be very easily upset with my life pressure. However, now, I tell myself I cannot always fall into the negativity because I get several great challenges in front of me. I need to deal with these missions in a more productive and motivational way," said Lo.

Lo was a graduate of English Communication in 2007 in the University of Macau. Without a training in education, she has been under heavy stress as she is working in the secondary school and simultaneously has to study a postgraduate degree in education. This year, she even has to teach a class of students with mild Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and an autistic student after other regular classes. However, she is becoming wiser in dealing with her personal stress now.

“I feel less distressed compared to the past because now I pay more attention to the tasks in front of me than to the negative emotion. In this way, I feel my ‘shoulders’ are more relaxed," Lo shared in the interview.

One Social Psychology professional, who prefers to be anonymous, gave further advice. If people perceive stress as a process through which they can make progress or possibly gain rewards, it can turn into positive stress (eustress); on the other hand, if they consider stress as some constraints in life, it will become relatively unhealthy stress (distress), distressing them and impairing their work efficiency.

When stress is nowadays part of our lives, why don’t we try to take reference from Lo’s formula, and deal with our stress in a more healthy way?