The Potential of Stress Management Training as a Coping Strategy for Stressors Experienced in Theater of Operation: A Systematic Review

Abstract

This chapter provides a literature review on Stress Management Training (SMT) as a potential tool to help military personnel cope with stressors experienced in the theater of operations. It is hoped that SMT techniques can be used to prepare soldiers for potential highly stressful situations in an effort to diminish their negative reactions to stress. The ultimate long-term prospective benefits would be that training military personnel with SMT would increase resilience and lower the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There are several definitions of stress, but essentially it can be considered an affective state that occurs in response to perceived demands and challenges in the environment with which one feels unable to cope [1]. A variety of stress management techniques have been developed over the years in order to help individuals prevent, eliminate or cope with stress. All these techniques have the objective to modify factors associated with stress (behavioral, cognitive, physiological, emotional and environmental). Early references to SMT date back to the work of Gottlieb, Strite and Koller et al. [2] who applied stress reduction strategies in behavioral medicine. SMT now represents an extremely diverse set of strategies and our literature review confirmed that notion several times. Authors include almost any available techniques, from Yoga [3] to prayer [4], along with exposure to feared situations [5], cognitive restructuring [6], problem solving [7], etc. In general, SMT can be defined as the application of any set of techniques aiming to improve the way people cope with stress. Coping represents efforts to manage demands, conflicts and pressures that drain, or exceed, a person’s resources [1]. Murphy and Sauter [8] offered to better integrate the applications of SMT strategies to contemporary notions of prevention by dividing SMT into primary, secondary and tertiary interventions. Primary interventions focus on changing the sources of the stress response (e.g., by modifying the environment) before stress becomes a problem, while secondary interventions aim at reducing the severity of symptoms associated with stress (much like secondary prevention, before non-clinical