How to Take Personal Responsibility

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There are multiple definitions of self-responsibility. Regardless of the actual definition, it is the key ingredient in your stress management. It represents your ability to make changes and choices about your health, thoughts and well-being in a positive manner.

Component Elements of Self-Responsibility

Social and Self Responsibility include:

· The acceptance and recognition of consequences of a person’s actions, including the ability to make good social and individual decisions.

· A caring attitude for others, as well as yourself.

· The ability to control your direction in social and self-settings.

· The acceptance and recognition of cultural and individual diversity.

· The ability to stay open-minded about diverse and new experiences and ideas.

· An understanding of how important it I to participate and volunteer in community and social activities to give yourself a sense of belonging to communities, cultures and families.

· An awareness of global and local issues, laws, cultural rules, and group and political processes.

· The development of cooperation, leadership, social skills and communication skills that encourage a sense of community and self-responsibility.

Stress and Your Health

Your health and well-being can be affected by beliefs and learned attitudes concerning self-efficacy, control, optimism and finding meaning in your life. These attitudes are essential to the self-responsibility concept. Using self-responsibility is critical to realizing the stress management benefits approaching your well-being and health.

It is very important to practice self-responsibility when you are trying to manage stress, whether it is a result of perceptions or physical conditions. We are responsible for our lifestyle choices that trigger stress, whether it is deciding what you put into your body, such as food, drugs, water, caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, or how much sleep or exercise you get.

Self-responsibility plays a role in your reactions to stress, not why you are stressed. Whether you are stressed because of injury, trauma, loss or disease, you are responsible for your reactions to the circumstances and how you choose to cope. An optimistic attitude is connected with long-term cancer and heart disease survival. It has been shown that self-efficacy decreases pain and depression symptoms and increases immune functions.

Positive Effects of Self-Responsibility

There is evidence that those who feel they having meaning in their lives have positive effects on their long-term health. Meaning was related to the survival of the severely traumatized people associated with the Nazi concentration camps.

Do not think that a natural negative response to life events will affect your health negatively. You shouldn’t ignore natural feelings of frustration, anger, bereavement and grief appropriate to life circumstances. The key is, once you allow yourself to feel those feelings, you have the chance to use your own resources and personal power to make the best of the circumstance.

Educate Yourself

Teach yourself about stress and how you can more effectively manage it. Many people are reluctant to do this because they are afraid of failing and instinctively know that guilt will follow failure. Such fears are often part of unhealthy and negative programming from past experiences. If you lose touch in yourself, you will be reluctant to take responsibility for yourself. You may have lost touch with your gut instincts and intuition you were born with. Instead of looking into yourself, you look outside of yourself to others.

Unfortunately, instead of most people wanting to change their behavior and beliefs, they would rather take medications. People feel helpless and lose motivation to participate in self-healing because the medical model today focuses on existing symptoms and pathology. Even psychoanalysis doesn’t support self-responsibility because it focuses mostly on the past and the present rather than the future. If mental and medical health professionals do not think their clients can improve or change, it undermines the self-responsibility process.

Self-responsibility doesn’t mean rejecting medical treatment, but to participate as much as possible in your own well-being and health. Accept your stress symptoms and learn to read your body and mind signals. View the signals as important messages informing you what may not be in balance.

Overall

You can’t develop the awareness that is necessary to identify stressors unique to yourself unless you can accept self-responsibility. When you can do this, you will understand how your stress is created. Self-responsibility shouldn’t be construed as a “must” or a “should” or a means of personal blame because these attitudes will lead you to trigger more stress by perceiving opportunities as threats. Healthy self-responsibility should be looked as an opportunity to take action with your personal power by accepting that you have the resources and capabilities to respond to stressors in better, different ways.