Stress Management – the goals of the stress management piece are to focus on examining our thoughts about our stressors. By doing this, we can then change our feelings and our stress responses. Another goal of stress management involves minimizing the stressors we experience in a typical day.  Effective stress management helps you break the hold stress has on your life, so you can be happier, healthier, and more productive. The ultimate goal is a balanced life, with time for work, relationships, relaxation, and fun—and the resilience to hold up under pressure and meet challenges head on.  Our students will be learning the five stress management techniques.

Five Stress Management Techniques:

1.)    Reduce endorphins in the system that causes stress – (Take a 10-minute walk)

2.)    Practice Mindfulness – (Focusing on breathing)

3.)    Create an exercise regimen – (45-minute workout)

4.)    Write a reflection journal – (Write down thoughts & process events that have happened)

5.)    Organize Yourself – (Set aside time each day to create a planner to get thoughts straight)

Mindfulness is also a process for each person to discover techniques of their own.

Some Benefits of Stress Management:

·         Sleep better.

·         Get sick less often.

·         Feel better faster when you do get sick.

·         Have less muscle tension.

·         Be in a better mood.

·         Get along better with family, friends, and others.

Mindfulness - the goals of the Mindfulness piece are to improve social & emotional well-being, increase classroom engagement, achieve a state of alert, focused relaxation by deliberately paying attention to thoughts and sensations without judgment (This allows the mind to refocus on the present moment), learning how to be mindful of staying in the present moment, while focusing on the five benefits of mindfulness.

The Five benefits of mindfulness:

1.      Reduced rumination. Several studies have shown that mindfulness reduces rumination. For example, in one study by Chambers et al. (2008), participants at a 10-day intensive mindfulness retreat reported significantly higher mindfulness and a decreased negative affect compared with participants who did not engage in the mindfulness retreat. They also experienced fewer depressive symptoms and less rumination.

2.       Stress reduction. Many studies show that practicing mindfulness reduces stress. In 2010, Hoffman et al. analyzed 39 studies that explored the use of mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. The researchers concluded that mindfulness-based therapy may be useful in altering affective and cognitive processes that underlie multiple clinical issues.

3.       Decrease in anxiety, negative affect, and emotional reactivity. The researchers found participants who experienced mindfulness-based stress reduction had significantly less anxiety, depression and somatic distress compared with the control group. Mindfulness meditation shifts people’s ability to use emotion regulation strategies in a way that enables them to experience emotion selectively, and that the emotions they experience may be processed differently in the brain (Farb et al., 2010; Williams, 2010). Mindfulness meditation practice helped people disengage from emotionally upsetting pictures and enabled them to focus better on a cognitive task as compared with people who saw the pictures but did not meditate (Ortner et al., 2007).

4.       Mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation affects our ability to focus attention and suppress distracting information. Individuals who practice mindful meditation had significantly better attention and higher mindfulness, which were directly correlated with cognitive flexibility and attentional functioning (Moore and Malinowski, 2009).

5.       Relationship satisfaction. A person’s ability to be mindful can help predict relationship satisfaction — the ability to respond well to relationship stress and the skill in communicating one’s emotions to a partner. Mindfulness: protects against the emotionally stressful effects of relationship conflict (Barnes et al., 2007); is positively associated with the ability to express oneself in various social situations (Dekeyser el al., 2008); and predicts relationship satisfaction (Barnes et al., 2007; Wachs & Cordova, 2007).

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