...58 PsychSim 5: All Stressed Out PsychSim 5: ALL STRESSED OUT Name: __________________________________________ Section: ________________________ Date: 9/17/12 This activity examines the way that psychologists conceptualize stress, emphasizing that stress is a biopsycho-social process. You will explore the sources of stress in your own life, review your body’s response to stress, and then learn how cognitive appraisal dramatically affects how much stress you actually experience. Checking the Level of Stress in Your Life • What was your “Stress Test” score? ____39________ • Do you think that such a test accurately captures your experience? What other stressors should be included? I think it give you a general idea of the amount of stress your under, also adding something about your children should be included. Stress, Stressors, and Coping • Psychologists differentiate stressors, strain, and stress. What does each of these terms mean? A stressor is an externalsituation or event that triggers coping adjustments in a person. Stress is the process in which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors that we believe to be threatening or challenging, and coping is the cognitive, behavioural, and emotional ways that people handle stressful situations. The General Adaptation Syndrome • Describe Selye’s general adaptation syndrome. Selye argued that every organism has a state of internal...
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...that today’s teenager has to deal with, and this causes stress. The most frequently cited reason for this stress is school related and often out of the teenager’s control. Teachers assign them “absurd quantities of mostly pointless homework that force students to work a second shift after having spent all day in school” (Kohn “Reconsider Attitudes”). A study done by Mediamark Research Inc. found that 60.2% of teens surveyed are stressed all the time or sometimes, and that 72.4% of the teens surveyed are stressed because they had a lot of school work ("Teens Want to Enjoy" 2-3). American teenagers are not the only ones with school related stress. In a survey done in Hong Kong, students were asked about what stressed them out, and school and standardized testing were the top two answers, with 25 of 40 and 27 of 40 students agreeing that those things stressed them out (“Are Teenagers Too Stressed?” 8). However, fretting about standardized testing isn’t just limited to teenagers in Hong Kong. It stresses American students out so much that it is not uncommon for a student to vomit during testing (Kalish). While these experts and studies have suggested that schoolwork and standardized tests are the specific problems that teens face, some teens might not agree, and it is necessary to find out; for this reason, my survey asks what is stressing teens out. While vomiting during a test is certainly a side effect of stress, there are many others as well. Teens experience both long term and...
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...leans against my door, eyebrows raised. Stressed me, Independent me, and Artistic me are also present.) Stressed: So, come on, what’s this meeting about? Logical: (Taking a deep breath) Well, it’s time we come together. It’s time we create “Jeremy.” Lighthearted: (Furrowing his brow, but smiling) What? Is this “Captain Planet,” where all the characters join fists and out bursts the superhero? Logical: No, this meeting is an opportunity to evaluate where we are in life, like a State of the Union Address. Existentialist: Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to ask all of you: college? Honestly, is it worth it? You . . . (gestures toward Logical) you’re writing that philosophy book, which should do well. And look at Artsy over there! He’s composing music, making beautiful art; why don’t we see where we can get with that? Not to mention the endless possibilities if Lighthearted aims for Saturday Night Live. Think about the number of successful people in this world who didn’t go to college! (Logical shakes his head) I mean, let’s be realistic: if we go to college, eventually we’ll be required to declare a major. Once we earn a degree, it might be harder to pursue our true passions—comedy, music, art . . . Logical: Not true. First of all, you failed to mention my fascinations with neurology and psychology, which are potential majors at every university. Furthermore, opportunities to study comedy, music, and art are available at all colleges too; we just have to go after...
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...Over Coming Stress While In College At any given point in time, most college students are stressed about something; it’s just part of going to school. While having stress in your life is normal, and often unavoidable, being stressed is one can control. When one is feeling stressed, one’s feels like one’s is on the edge, and everything is barely being held together. Don’t beat one’s self up to badly about it! It’s all normal, and the best way to handle stress is not to get more stress out about being stressed. If one’s is stressed out just admit it, and figure out how to handle it. Focusing on it will only make things seem worst. Being in college means one’s sleep schedule, is most likely to change. Getting more sleep can help one’s mind refocus, recharge, and rebalance. This can mean a quick nap; a night with one’s going to bed early, or even a promise to keep oneself on a regular sleep schedule. Similar to one’s sleeping habits, one’s eating may have gone by the wayside. When you started school you could also be feeling physical stress. If one’s body not fueling your body appropriately. Go eat something balanced, and healthy: fruits, veggies, whole grains, and protein. Take a moment, and think! When was the last time you had some quality quiet time alone? Personal space for students in college rarely happens. One’s may share rooms, bathroom, your classrooms, the gym, or even the library, or anywhere else you go during an average day. Finding a few moments of peace, and...
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...Stressed Out The word Stressed Out has so many different meanings to everyone. According to Woolfolk and Richardson “Stress is a perception of threat or expectation of future discomfort that arouses, alerts, or otherwise activates the organism” (9). To me stressed out is when you reach your limitation. There is a slight difference between stress and stressed out. Everyone deals with stress on a daily bases. Stressed out is when you cannot take any more stress. This plague can affect all ages and both genders. Stress has no restrictions on when, where and how it will affect to someone. It can affect us in two main ways both physical and emotional. Sometimes we may not show any signs of stress. Stress can be very dangerous to us because it can be fatal to a person’s health. By realizing stress factors, some types of stressors and learning ways to control it would play a big role in bettering one’s self. Although it sounds obvious, many people do not recognize they have stress factors. As Woolfolk and Richardson states “Since our perceptions and evaluations of the world actually causes stress, then changing some part of our basic outlook on life may be the most expedient way to reduce tension and anxiety” (11). Some common sings for people who have stress are fatigue or irritability. Sometimes family members can be the main cause of stress. We need to take in consideration that having a social life and even our own selves are all big factors of stress. We usually think of stressors...
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...What do you do when you’re stressed? If I’m starting to feel overwhelmed or as if I can’t handle all of the pressure that I’ve been dealt with, then I tend to either vent to my friends or family, listen to music, or I avoid or alter out unnecessary stress. Everyone has different ways that they cope with stress and these ways I find help myself the most. I cope with being stressed by venting to my friends and family due to the fact that they can add their input and help guide me in the right direction to my happiness again. If it’s self-inflicted stress, then they can help me get out of that with constructive words of criticism which if I’m stressed, is typically needed. I find that my family and friends almost always know what to says. Also, I like venting to my friends because they have a way of comforting me that sometimes my family cannot. They know what makes me calm down, and what also makes me smile and happy again. If my friends and family are knowing that I’m stressed they know very well how to not make me feel alone, because sometimes that’s all you want is someone to be there for you. It’s also not healthy to keep things bottled up inside for too long, and the people closest to us are what help us get by when we are in times of need. Another way that I find helpful when I’m stressed is to just find a place to seclude myself, such as my car, or my room, and just surround myself with music. I like listening to music when I’m stressed due to the fact that more times...
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...carry isn't normal. Everything in life stresses me out. My extreme OCD makes everything worse. I always see and hear things that no one else does. I feel like i'm going crazy, but act like everything is normal. The cold steel knife i carry means alot to me. I always expect the worse so if something happens im ready. This relates to the crazy things that go through my head. I don't feel comfortable with someone walking behind me, so i always have my hand in my pocket holding my knife. This doesnt mean im going to use it, holding the knife just makes me feel comfortable. Everyone experiences stress throughout their life. I become stressed and anxious over a noise or something so simple like the position my pencil on the desk. Like i mentioned before, my OCD makes everything worse. My hands shake, my palms sweat, my breathing speeds up, and i can feel little needles stabbing my back. The last part may sound crazy but that's how it feels. I may joke around and have a weird grin on my face, but behind that, there is someone who feels sad and stressed. I always...
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...a burnout, and then not even want to go to college. I believe that starting while you're in middle school, would be the best option for three main reasons. I believe that it will help students stay on track with their grades, I believe that it will give students the motivation for after high school, and I believe that the students will be less stressed when it does come to their senior year. To begin, I believe that if students start preparing for college earlier than high school than it will help them get better grades overall. I speak from experience, because if I would have started preparing and knowing what I needed to have in order to get into the colleges I wanted, I wouldn't have messed around with...
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...relieving stress. On average, women feel as though they have more stress than men and handle stress better than men. Many people experience different forms of stress. Be it personal, emotional, physical or work-related. How to handle these kinds of stress is essential to having a balanced life. We all get emotional occasionally or lose our temper once in a while. But if you are out of balance in either one of these areas, it is very important to get back in balance if you want your day or life to go right. If your feelings get hurt because someone looks at you the wrong way or because friends, family and even co-workers forget your birthday, some spend more time with God praying and asking for the hurt to be lifted off of you. You will be built up in your spirit and better able to overlook the offenses of others and forgive them. Forgiving is an excellent stress reliever. Releasing all of that tension and calming your spirit. Quite of few people relieve their stress by praying. Giving your issues, concerns and worries to God is the best thing you can do for yourself. Another form of stress relieving is listening to music. Music, they say, can soothe the savage beast and we all have a savage beast in us some times. It can be jazz, instrumental, classical or gospel just to name a few. Which ever is the one that works best? Some people prefer to drink and party to relieve stress, they may feel that it is a way to temporarily forget any stress that has been brought onto them...
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...Stress Tolerance People define stress in many different ways. There are also various reasons why people get stressed out. The time a person is in college is proven to be one of the most stressful eras in someone’s life. A study was done in 2009 concerning the cause and effects of stress. “The purpose of this study was to identify lifestyle habits and coping strategies that may be significantly associated with high or low stress tolerance among millennial college students.”(pg.362) There were different methods the professors used to test their purpose. Some of the stated causes of stress on college students were moving away from home, finding your identity, making new friends, and being in a new environment. Stress can be a major issue for a college student. When dealing with “academic, social, and personal changes” (pg.362), college student may get discouraged and become stressed. College students have pressure put on them to do well and adjust quickly. Whether it is from a professor or a parent, there is still an expectation to do well. Another stress causing aspect is the fact that your parents/guardians are no longer supervising every move you make. This can cause lots of stress, especially if you are used to someone making you do your schoolwork or forcing you to study. Some students get to college and have a hard time adjusting to all the freedom they have. In the study, they inability to cope with stress showed to harmfully impact health behaviors. This...
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...mistakenly fear that reducing employee stress requires reducing productivity or creating a "country club" atmosphere, which in today's marketplace could be fatal. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, the opposite is true. When organizations manage in ways that bring out the best in people, they also reduce employee stress. That's why most of Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" are industry leaders and enjoy high employee productivity. Employees in these companies are both happy and extremely productive. The key to maximizing productivity while minimizing stress is understanding the factors that influence whether someone working very hard will feel stressed out and burnt out, or whether they will feel motivated, excited, and committed. Scientific research on stress, combined with best practices of high performance companies offers clear clues about the key factors that determine whether employees will be stressed out or energized by workplace demands. To Maximize Employee Productivity And Performance, Organizations Can: Give Employees As Much Control Over Their Jobs As Possible - Research shows that control is the biggest factor in whether people feel stressed out or invigorated when facing a challenge. The more control people have over their work, the greater their job satisfaction, the higher their work quality, and the lower their stress level. Giving employees control includes giving them the power to make job-related decisions, the flexibility...
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...Anxiety What is stress and anxiety? Both adults and children can suffer from stress and anxiety. It is important to remember that just because someone may be small or young it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same feeling as adults do. Children can experience all sorts of strong feelings about what is happening to them. Therefore it is natural for some children to suffer from anxiety and stress. Young children will be experiencing a lot of new things in their lives such as leaving their parents for the first time, starting nursery and school, having to make new friends, being in new environments, learning to trust people who aren’t their parents, learning new skills such as speaking, walking and toilet training. These can all become stressful times for children. In some circumstances it can be made even worse by having parents who are arguing or going through a divorce. This can cause a lot of stress on the child and the parents may not even know the true affect that the circumstances are having on the child. Also a death of a family member or friend can cause a lot of stress on a child. When someone is stressed then this can also lead to having anxiety problems as well. This means that when someone is stressed they may have feelings of anxiety. Anxiety is defined as ‘apprehension without apparent cause’ this means that anxiety can occur even when there is no immediate threat. Anxiety often causes people to feel like they want to get away; this is known as fight or fight...
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...Abstract Athletic participation and academic stress has been a challenging topic and one that has made many question about. With all the extracurricular activities that students have, they don’t realize that their stress could be affecting them more than they may know. This study examines the stress level results amongst 10 college student athletes and 10 non-athletes. The results present a rare finding regarding stress amongst the students. Stress has become an on-going issue that has affected the college satisfaction of a student. Many people don’t realize that they have stress and it’s affecting them in some sort of way or some may know they have stress but don’t want to take any type of action towards getting help. Possible explanations for the findings and implications for stress amongst athletes and non-athletes of the University of Mount Union are provided. Introduction Stress has been a rising issue concerning not only college students but also college athletes. With all the extracurricular activities the students take on in college along with the academic part of it have led to very high stress level. Controlling time and having an organized schedule is the main fix to this problem. Whether you’re a college athlete or just a normal college student, everyone has stress or has experienced stress. The purpose of this study was to figure out whether or not there is a significant difference in stress levels amongst college athletes and non-athletes. There has been past...
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...Procrastination is defined as a habit of putting things off until the last minute. Many things can cause procrastination. For instance, when an individual is to feel stressed, overwhelmed, laziness, a lack of motivation, lack of discipline, poor time management habits, lack of skill, and perfectionism. All these things play a key role in why people procrastinate. When a person feels stressed, they do not work productively. Many people become stressed due to their heavy work loads, and they do not take enough time out for leisure time. Leisure time helps the body and mind to be at ease, this will help individuals to be more productive. Many people believe that when a person feels stressed they will use procrastination as a way to cope with everything that is going on in their lives. Other times, the individual have too many items on there to do list, and they become overwhelmed. Individuals who become overwhelmed usually have too much to do and little time to do them in. A good way for one to eliminate these overwhelming feelings is to go over the items that are on these lists, and cut as much out as they can, or prioritize things in order of there importance. According to (2009), “It's been shown that the optimal work week for most people is 40-45 hours. Working longer hours than this actually has such an adverse effect on productivity and motivation that less real work gets done. This is especially true for creative, information age work.” Now laziness is just a habit people...
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...greatly. If you are always in a bad mood you can cause your body to be unhealthy because of stress and just a bad attitude in general. Stress can cause a lot of health problems such as obesity, migraines, cardiovascular problems, stroke, and depression. Some people that get stressed can choose unhealthy ways of dealing with it such as smoking or eating fatty or unhealthy foods. Smoking can cause cancer, heart disease, and stroke. It can also lead to respiratory disorder that cannot be reversed. Eating fatty foods and unhealthy foods can lead to obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular disease. Good ways of dealing with stress are walking, working out, yoga, reading, getting a massage, and talking or writing about it. Doing all of this can reduce your stress along with your blood pressure. They can also put you into a better state of mental, physical and social state. Stress is a common issue in the workplace. In the workplace a person runs in the large workloads and not enough time. Feeling overwhelmed with the workload that you have can cause you to be stressed out and feeling cranky and crabby. This affects other co-workers. The bad attitude can spread until everyone is stressed and snapping at everyone. Along with a large workload, some people have to deal with the public on a daily basis. This can be overwhelming, it is not always easy to deal with the public...
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