Buddhist Approaches to Managing Stress and lmproving Mental Health

Abstract

Humanity around the world is faced with tremendous stress in everyday life due to the rapid  changes in the world creating economic, social, political, and family problems. Each problem can lead to stress, which later on can result in poor work quality, poor productivity, morale problems, health problems, and other mental suffering. Stress can be real or imagined, which can be reduced and managed through implementation of religious teachings. This research paper presents the Buddhist approaches to managing stress and improving mental health such sa creating positive feelings, changing crisis to opportunity, creating inner peace, reframing thinking,practicing meditation, and following the eight-fold path. According to Buddhism, happiness is very mauch dependent on mental intelligence, or the wisdom within one^,s  mind, to respond and to react to the situations confronting each individual. Everyone needs to be consious of one^,s feeling, and avoid all mental disturbances and negative feelings, One needs to learn how to maintain mental well-beong so that the mind doesn^,t fall victim to unwholesome thoughts (Akusla). Additionally, one needs to learn how to manipulate the ways of thinking, see things more positively, and diminish the force of bad thoughts and develop the good ones.