Perception is defined as a person’s cognitive interpretation of events. It is the process of attaining awareness of understanding of sensory information. The way a person interprets something depends on their inner self and the way they feel about things. This simply means that perception varies from person to person. Different people perceive different things about the same situation. Furthermore, we assign different meanings to what we perceive. The role that perception plays in stress management is very important. Stress is the result of interacting and sometimes complex factors such as our perception of things. How we perceive an event plays a very large role in whether the stressors trigger our fight or flight response. For example, if our perception is influenced by a negative thinking style, the potential event will be perceived a threat. Often times people picture events to be much worse than they actually are. This is because there is a distorted way of thinking about things. This distorted way of thinking can exaggerate our perceived failings. We often see the worst as becoming true and our fear for the worst can cause stress. In addition, a good example is a traffic jam. One person in the traffic jam may rant and rave becoming very angry at the delay, while another person in the same traffic jam may quietly accept the situation, relaxing while listening to the radio and thinking that getting upset or irritable wont move the car any further. Although this is the same potential stressor for both drivers, there are two different responses. You can look at anything differently and it will have a different meaning. There is no fixed meaning to anything. Being that perceptions are based on beliefs, assumptions, values and conditioning, we can reduce our stress by simply changing our distorted