The course was outstanding. A life-changing experience. Anyone can benefit fully. Particularly important for a fast-paced lifestyle.
One of the greatest inhibitors to academic and social learning & development is stress. “Unmanaged emotional reactions to stress not only lead to behavior problems in young people, but also create physiological conditions that inhibit learning and potentially increase the risk of disease later in life” (McCraty, Atkinson, Tomasino, Goelitz, Mayrovitz 1999). For college students and young professionals, stress comes in many forms, such as academic pressure, anxiety in making career choices, peer pressure, depression, violence, drugs, financial strain, and relationship issues. For learning and development, it is first necessary to lower the stress level within individuals. The YES+ workshop focuses on the individual's perception and reaction to their environment, their coping skills, which determine the impact of external stress factors. YES+ provides techniques to improve these coping skills through stress management, human values, and service.
Does stress help or hurt my studies?
One of the greatest inhibitors to academic and social learning & development is stress. “Unmanaged emotional reactions to stress not only lead to behavior problems in young people, but also create physiological conditions that inhibit learning and potentially increase the risk of disease later in life” (McCraty, Atkinson, Tomasino, Goelitz, Mayrovitz 1999). For college students and young professionals, stress comes in many forms, such as academic pressure, anxiety in making career choices, peer pressure, depression, violence, drugs, financial strain, and relationship issues. For learning and development, it is first necessary to lower the stress level within individuals. The YES+ workshop focuses on the individual's perception and reaction to their environment, their coping skills, which determine the impact of external stress factors. YES+ provides techniques to improve these coping skills through stress management, human values, and service.
Do Stress & Emotions Impact Happiness & Health?
YES! Our physical health and the quality of our lives are profoundly impacted by the state of our mind and emotions. Our thoughts and emotions can impact brain, endocrine, and immune system function. Whereas negative emotions, such as anger and stress, have been linked to physical problems such as cardiovascular disease (Suarez, 2004), positive emotions such as feeling happy and connected to others, are linked to many health benefits including better immune function and a longer life span (Berkman & Syme, 1979; Cacioppo, Hawkley, Crawford, et al. 2002; Pressman, Cohen, Miller, al.2005).
Got stress?
Awesome! That’s probably the reason you’re alive today! We’re equipped with a stress response to get our body pumped to run out of the way of a speeding car or to avoid becoming lunch for a hungry lion. Acute stress mobilizes energy and sharpens our attention to act immediately in the face of danger.
So then…isn’t Being Stressed All the Time ‘Normal’ and Good?
Uh, no! This is a time and age when being stressed may appear ‘normal’ but chronic stress is harmful. When it’s chronic stress actually weakens our ability to focus, concentrate, and remember things; it impacts our immune system and makes us more vulnerable to getting sick, as shown by the work of Dr. Sheldon Cohen. It compromises our ability to regulate our emotions (just think how easy it is to fly off the handle or burst into tears when we’re stressed); it makes us self-centered (Eysenck, 1997) and less capable of connecting with others which is something we fundamentally need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Chronic stress can result in lowered resistance to disease, exhaustion, depression, cardiovascular disease, and harmful coping behaviors, such as excessive consumption of food, drugs, and alcohol.
…Heck, stress even impacts how we look. It speeds the aging process (check out the 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Biology Elizabeth Blackburn’s work on how stress impacts “telomere” length – biomarkers of cellular aging). Frankly, stress gets in the way of being happy, healthy, and maybe even pretty!
So in sum, NO, stress shouldn’t be ‘normal’. It can, and should be the occasional experience to just highlight how good it feels not to be stressed!
How does the brain manage stress?
Human brains are unique in that we have much larger frontal lobes than other species. The frontal lobes are the part of the brain behind your forehead that guide your attention and keep your behavior and emotions in check. It turns out that under non-stress conditions, the frontal lobes regulate other parts of the brain that arouse the stress response. During stress, other brain structures that have a longer evolutionary history (e.g., amygdala), induce what we know as a stress response. Several studies show that during stressful situations, such as watching upsetting movies or trying to perform a demanding task while being distracted, the prefrontal cortex (part of the frontal lobe) shows a suppressed response, leading to the perception of less self-control (Arnsten et al., 2009).
What is the source of chronic stress?
Our experience of chronic stress is mostly driven by our perception of stress. The mind may wander into either to the future, building potentially fearful scenarios (e.g., “I’m going to fail this exam.”) or into the past, dredging up emotional events and often reliving them. A study at Stanford University showed that the mind tends to cling to the negative; a group of young adults showed a strong bias towards remembering negative versus positive past events (Kennedy, Mathur & Carstensen, 2004)