Report On Stress And It’S Management
Every person in the universe has gone through stress. It is abundant everywhere. It is a form of pressure person experiences while performing any task. People living a high standard life or people living under poverty, everyone experiences stress. Whether it is a student trying to perform well in class or the teacher trying to help students to do better, they both experience stress. Stress is natural and it is inherited by every human being. There is almost no way to totally get rid of stress however it can be controlled or maintained to some extent to boost up one’s confidence and motivation. This paper generally reflects about stress and management and some target behavioral goals that I tried to achieve during this semester.
What is Stress?
According to Hans Selye, “Stress is a scientific concept which has suffered from the mixed blessing of being too well known and too little understood. ” It can be good or bad, acute or chronic. Good stress are usually the stress created by joyful moment in one’s life like getting promotion at work, meeting your parents after year and so on. The examples of bad stress are suffering from chronic disease, divorce etc. Similarly, Acute stress is the stress experience for the short time which comes and go whereas chronic stress lasts for longer time. Chronic stress is dangerous because it can lead to suicide, heart attack and violences. Another topic that I learned about is the fight or flight response. It generally states about the automatic response of a body that helps a person to deal with any threat or dangerous situation. The sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system are two branches of autonomic nervous system that regulate this response. The four assessments that I select to look upon are :
Student Stress Scale.
Student stress scale focuses on the event that occurs in life of student to offer a different perspective to evaluating stress. This assessment is a good way of understanding my stress level while me myself being a student.
The score that I received upon completion of test was 700 which is a very high number and indicates that I might have 80 percentage chance of getting sick in the near future. I was surprised by this result it show more chances of getting sick which i never realized.
Stress Vulnerability Factors.
The second test I chose was Stress Vulnerability Factors and I chose this test because it would help me to understand the danger of stress. Upon completion the test, I received a score of 51 which indicates that I am vulnerable to stress. The result I received seems unsatisfying to me.
Ardell Wellness Stress Test
The third I selected was Ardell Wellness Stress Test. This type of test incorporates physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and social aspect of the person. My result was +13 which mean I am wellness oriented person with an ability to prosper as a whole according to the chart provided by this test in book.
Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)
The last test I have applied was Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). This test considers the perception of what is happening in the life as most important. My score was 25 which implies it would be considered as moderate perceived stress.
Target Behaviours
Stress is highly dependent upon the work that we do daily. If we look upon our behaviors we can find some behaviors to focus on and which could provide positive changes in stress development in our body. Upon some research in internet and some analysis I decided to bring change in these two behaviours:
Standing and walking 2 minutes every hour. We may not notice but, it is very important for body to walk few minutes after sitting for a while. An instructive new study shows that standing up and walking for five minutes every hour during workday could lift a person’s mood and helps them in focusing and even dull hunger pangs. Our world today is so convenient that we usually end up stuck at one place for a while. When there is nothing to do, we look after the phone and loses track of what happens to nearby surroundings. Similarly, most of the jobs today are online so people have to work in front of their computers for hours. We can feel the presence of stress while we work. To measure this goal was pretty easy. I didn’t require any kind of device but a simple memo in my phone was useful to keep track of my standings. I kept a reminder every hour to remind me to have some walk every hour. Then I record it in my phone. I usually stay home which means I sit a lot. This change did bring some positive results. I still remember, after sitting for long times when you stand up instantly, we can feel weakness in my body and little dizziness could be experienced. So, while I was doing work or assignment reminder would have remind me walk few minutes. The result was pretty noticeable. Standing and walking would keep my active and I started feeling less tired.
During this goal approach, the only interference was sometimes I would be in a place where I couldn’t stand up and just walk. Like, while in classroom and in train. But, I think it doesn’t make quite difference. The reminder was helpful but sometimes it would be little annoying to adapt according to new routine. So, I believe it was mental interference. Drinking more water.
The another target behavior was to improve my nutrition by drinking more glasses of water than regular intake. It is very important for a body to be hydrated. Drinking proper amount of water can also help maintain the body weight and healthy body. The amount of water in our body is 60%. But we loss lots of water of our body. A study explains that even loss of 10% of body water could lead a person to nausea, weakness, hypothermia and dry skin. Similarly, not have adequate amount of water could bring psychological weakness in a person like having problem in focusing and impair short term memory. In order to track my water intake I downloaded an app called waterlogged. The app showed empty water bottle. The app let you keep goal for the user either in oz, millilitres and litres. So, once I drink water I would login to the app and fill the empty bottle of app with the amount of water I drank. It would give choice of cup which is 8 oz, water bottle 500 mL and sports bottle 24 oz. It looked very easy to determine the size of water consumed. I set my goal of 2. 5 litres of water to drink in a day. Another good thing about app is that I was able to set up a reminders in different hours. The app stores the information of every days in the week. The app helped me a lot in tracking the amount of water consumed. The only interference I faced during this practice was sometimes, I would forgot to keep proper track. Also, I have a habit of keeping phone in silent mode so I wouldn’t be reminded. However the results was pretty convincing through this test too. Although, it would make increase a bathroom schedule more, I could definitely see some changes. The skin is somehow less dry and it does bring attention.
Conclusion and Essential takeaways
At last, after performing self-assessment and targeting goal behaviors I came to learn many things about me, my stress and the control techniques. There are many reasons that can stress a person out but the bright side is there is even more way of managing the stress. Self-assessment test was very good way to understand about my stress. I liked the score meter in every test and how the scores were classified fto represent about the stress. After performing all these test I came to know that my stress level was high which is not good for my health. To be physically and mentally healthy I would have to manage my stress. Also, the test listed the activities which means that there is always a way to target the certain behaviors and track the activities and improve them in a way to manage the stress.
Similarly, upon understanding the behavioral goals, I came across lots of stress related topics. Like, how our change in behaviour can help us controlling stress. It is one of the effective way of managing the stress. Upon completion of goals, one can live a happier, healthier and more productive life. The main goal should be balancing the life with time, relationships, fun and stress. So, it is very important to keep on experimenting and finding out the new ways of managing the stress. The procedure that I used to achieve target goal was firstyly to list out the actions that needed to be looked out. After electing them, I tried to go through the journal which generally keeps record of the datas that I have been doing. Stress are automatic responses so, the practise of four A’s which means Avoid, Alter, Adapt and Accept can help in controlling them. Learn how to say “no” for the limits that we can’t get to, Avoid people who stress you out, taking control of environment and analyzing your schedules, responsibilities and daily tasks are the most efficient way to deal with stressful conditions.
