Simplified Wellness – Workshop 3 (Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Simplified Wellness is provided by Mrs. Sciortino Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Mrs Sciortino is a Certified Learning Provider (CLP) with Appleton Greene. An internationally renowned author, Simplicity Expert and Professional Speaker, she spent almost two decades as a high-functioning, award-winning executive before she experienced a life-changing event that forced her to stop and ask the question: ‘What if there’s a better way to live?’.
Embarking on a journey to answer this question, Mrs Sciortino uncovered a simple system to challenge the status quo and use the power of questions to purposefully direct life.
A highly accomplished businesswoman, Mrs Sciortino is an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council, has received nominations for the Top Female Author awards, was awarded a prestigious silver Stevie International Business Women Award, named as the recipient of a 2022 CREA Global Award and has also been awarded over 20 international awards for the uniqueness of the tools and resources she offers.
Sought globally for expert comment by media, she’s been featured in podcasts, Facebook Live, YouTube, blog articles, print media and in live TV and Radio.
Mrs Sciortino works globally with corporate programs, conference platforms, retreats, professional mentoring and in the online environment to teach people how easy it is to live life in a very different way.
When not working, she can be found in nature, on the yoga mat, lost in a great book, meditating, hanging out with her husband and her house panthers or creating magic in her kitchen.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression – there’s been a lot of talk about the significant increase in the occurrence of stress and burnout and their link to depression and anxiety over the last few years. The truth is, these have been around for decades; we’re just talking openly about them now. This module explores the depth of stress and its impact in life, looks at the difference between stress and burnout and does a deep dive into the way you can understand what stress is, where yours is coming from and how you implement simple and effective steps to reduce your stress on a daily basis.
Objectives
01. Stress – understand what stress is, look at the common causes of stress, the way you respond to stress and stress as a health problem.
02. Stress versus Distress – look at the difference between stress and distress, the factors that cause distress, the negative effects of distress and how to turn distress into eustress.
03. Secondary Stress – understand what secondary stress is, how it affects you, the ways you experience it and what you can do to reduce its impact.
04. Stress and Mental Health – deep dive into the link between stress and mental health, understand how stress affects relationships, values and meaningful purpose in life and look at ways to reduce psychological stress.
05. Burnout – explore the difference between stress and burnout, look at the signs, symptoms and causes of burnout, how to recognise burnout symptoms and deal with burnout when it occurs.
06. Depression – why understanding the difference between stress and depression is important, the connection between stress and depression, what is known about depression, what treatments there are for depression and the lifestyle changes you can make to minimise depression.
07. Anxiety – understand the similarities and differences between anxiety and depression, look at who gets depressed, the link between smoking and mental health conditions, and what the treatments for anxiety are.
08. Doom Scrolling – look at what doom scrolling is and the role that it plays in our lives, how it affects the brain and the psychological and physical effects it has as well as the things we can do to minimise its impact.
09. Stress Management – ways to understand your stress levels, the importance of managing stress and what happens if you don’t manage your stress as well as providing tools and techniques for managing stress.
10. Stress Myths – the role of social conditioning in allowing stress into our lives, 9 common stress myths that rule our lives, how to move past stress myths to create a new way forward.
11. Support Recovery – look at what happens when distress is left to run out of control, understand the impact to the nervous system of a breakdown and what causes this to happen as well as look at ways to support the nervous system in recovering after experiencing a break down.
12. Environment, Community and Self – understand the ways in which your environment impacts your personal wellbeing, how to create a healing environment at home and in the workplace and the way that nature impacts your wellbeing.
Strategies
01. Engage and elicit expectations for the program.
02. Understand the importance of strategic wellness planning and complete exercises that assist in embedding this knowledge.
03. Set aside time to study the information, tools and resources in the workshop.
04. Set aside time to meet with their team to discuss the elements of the workshop.
05. Identify, and make a list of, the key personnel needed to participate in health and wellness discussions.
06. Participants to complete the exercises as directed in each course manual.
07. Allocate time to consider the current effectiveness of any health and wellness program in place.
08. Without conducting any in-depth research, identify where strategy can play a role in adding depth and breadth to the existing health and wellness programs.
09. Identify elements where strategy can boost areas that are working well from existing health and wellness programs.
10. Identify the convincing rationale for creating a bespoke health and wellness program.
11. Create a clear narrative regarding the need to incorporate strategic elements in creating the framework for a health and wellness program.
12. Set aside time to identify, and write down, any additional commitment required to create a strategic plan for the health and wellness journey.
Tasks
01. Set aside time to read through course manuals and make notes.
02. Allocate time to read the workshop’s preliminary analysis.
03. Identify the key personnel needed to create an effective health and wellness program.
04. Ensure relationships are built with key personnel through regular meetings, discussion and gathering ideas.
05. Schedule a meeting within the next 30 days for participants to meet and discuss workshop.
06. Participate in small groups during the workshop to share observations and reflections.
07. Determine and schedule the time needed to dedicate each workshop.
08. Demonstrate preparedness, commitment and personal presence at each workshop.
09. Prepare questions, seek feedback and create a plan for personal growth.
10. Each exercise in the workshop must be fully completed by the participants, and they must share the process and outcomes with the group.
11. Participants should identify and put into practice the adjustments presented throughout the workshop in order to finish their project.
12. Participants are asked to go over resources for ideas and choose at least one new tool from the list to use.
Introduction
The third workshop in the Simplified Wellness Program – Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression – focuses on the explosion of the occurrence of mental health globally and the impact that it is having in both the personal and professional arenas.
The truth is this: stress, burnout, anxiety and depression have been around for decades. The issues surrounding them are now more openly discussed and there has also been a significant increase in the number of people reporting their experience of these issues.
During this workshop you will explore the depth of stress and its impact in life. You’ll look at the difference between stress and burnout and also look at the way that stress can be related to anxiety and depression. You will also do a deep dive into the way you can understand what stress is, where your own is coming from and how you implement simple and effective steps to reduce your stress on a daily basis.
History
History of Stress
One of the pioneers of stress study, Hans Selye, took the word “stress” from the physics profession. In physics, stress refers to the force that causes a physical body to swell. For example, bending a piece of metal until it snaps occurs because of the force, or stress, exerted on it.
After completing his medical training at the Université of Montreal in the 1920s, Hans Selye coined the term “stress”. No matter what ailments his hospitalized patients had, he saw that they all shared this one trait: all of them appeared ill. In his opinion, they were all experiencing physical stress.
He suggested that stress was a general burden on the body brought on by deviations from normal bodily processes. Stress hormones were released as a result of this stress. A closer examination of general adaptation syndrome, our body’s short- and long-term responses to stress, led him to coin the name “General Adaptation Syndrome.”
General Adaptation Syndrome had three stages, according to Hans Selye’s theory.
Stage 1: Alarm response
This is a stressor’s instant response. Humans demonstrate a “fight or flight” response during the earliest stages of stress. This stage depletes the energy of other systems, such as the immune system, making us more susceptible to disease.
Stage 2: Resistance
The body starts to adjust to stress if alarm reactions persist. But because the energy is focused on stress reactions, this adaptation is bad for your health.
Stage 3: Exhaustion
This is the last phase following prolonged exposure to a stressor. As the immune system deteriorates, the body’s capacity to withstand stress is gradually weakened and eventually destroyed. According to Selye, long-term stressed patients may develop serious infections or heart attacks due to a weakened immune system.
The Ensuing Debate
Selye established the discipline of stress study and made compelling cases for how stress affected health. Yet not everyone shared his physiological perspective of stress as an all-encompassing condition. What about emotional strain (for example, the death of a loved one, irritation, caring for a sick child, or issues at work)? Could it be stressful in these circumstances too?
Several doctors, psychologists and scholars shared this opinion. Various research studies were undertaken to investigate the effects of stress in different situations.
In one study, carried out by Dr John Mason, two groups of monkeys were denied food for a brief length of time.
The primates in Group 1 were left alone, while those in Group 2 observed others being fed. Both groups of monkeys were observed to experienced physical hunger-related stress, but the group that witnessed others eating had higher stress hormone levels. Hence, Dr Mason demonstrated that both physical and psychological stress might trigger the body’s stress response.
As the research on stress developed, individuals claimed that since stress was a general phenomenon, everyone ought to respond uniformly to similar stressors. But for others, something about this assertion seemed off. Many also believed that everyone’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol had to be increased by some sort of universal factor.
In one intriguing study, experts in parachute jumping had their levels of stress hormones measured.
Now, there’s no doubt that jumping out of a plane is stressful. Surprisingly, the results of this experiment showed that their levels of stress hormones were normal.
Afterwards, stress hormone levels were assessed in both novice jumpers and their teachers. A notable difference was discovered! Students’ levels were typical the day before the jump, but instructors’ levels were quite high. Students’ levels were very high the day of the jump, while instructor levels were average.
The researchers came to the conclusion that because the instructors were anticipating the jump and knew what to expect, their stress hormone levels were greater 24 hours before the jump. The students had no clue what to expect and therefore their stress levels remained the same.
However, the novelty and unpredictability of the circumstance on jump day caused the pupils’ stress hormone levels to soar, while the instructors went through the same process as usual and therefore didn’t experience any change in hormone levels.
Throughout the following 30 years, various researchers carried out tests that revealed there are similar features to situations that cause stress hormone levels to rise in everyone, even though the kind of stressors causing the release of these hormones are different for everyone.
When evaluated, the results of these tests showed that the stress response is different for everyone, and hormone levels are affected by four common factors:
• Novelty
• Unpredictability
• Threat to the ego
• Sense of control
History of Burnout
The term “burnout syndrome” was first used in two scholarly papers written in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger and Sigmund Ginsburg. Freudenberger, a psychologist and psychotherapist who was born in Germany and later moved to the United States, popularized the phrase in later works (Freudenberger, 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Freudenberger & Richelson, 1980). As a result, he is widely regarded as the concept’s founder.
It is important to remember that Freudenberger did not coin the phrase. However, he deserves praise for methodically outlining and studying a mental state that he personally experienced and that some of his colleagues had previously described as being ‘burned out’.
In other words, even before it was recognized as a psychologically and clinically important disorder, the phrase was being used to describe a specific experience and mental state.
In his original 1974 essay, Freudenberger defined getting burned out as “being fatigued by exerting excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources”. He claimed that the physical signs of burnout included tiredness, fatigue, recurrent headaches, gastrointestinal problems, insomnia and shortness of breath. Frustration, rage, suspicion, a sense of omnipotence or overconfidence, excessive use of tranquillizers and barbiturates, cynicism and depressive symptoms were also listed as behavioral indicators.
In his essay, Freudenberger outlined personality traits that caused people to experience burnout, in addition to describing the symptoms of burnout. In more general terms, his essay indicated that he believed that burnout happens in situations that demand a lot of emotional labor, empathy, personal commitment and intrinsic motivation. It can also occur where the required labor is physically and mentally taxing – these are common working conditions in the social work, education and health care industries.
Freudenberger’s essay also offered some preventive strategies. He suggested addressing issues at an organizational rather than just an individual level, since he thought that burnout was particularly tied to specific working conditions and organizational contexts.
In particular, Freudenberger suggested reducing working hours, consistent job rotation, regular monitoring and employee training.
This pioneering work on burnout foreshadows a lot of the subsequent 50 years’ worth of research. Many psychological and medical studies were conducted after Freudenberger’s first study, beginning with work done by Christina Maslach and her associates in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Maslach, 1976; Maslach & Jackson, 1981; Pines & Maslach, 1978).
Maslach is still one of the most well-known researchers in this area and was a pioneer in the study of burnout. Maslach, a social psychologist, concentrated on measuring burnout in contrast to Freudenberger’s qualitative, nearly autoethnographic, portrayal. She created the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which remains the most used questionnaire for measuring burnout today, based on the three components of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy.
Burnout research underwent a paradigm shift as a result of the work of Maslach and her colleagues – particularly the development of the MBI, which made it simple to gauge the mental condition of various groups and professions.
In 2001, Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter then went further to make a distinction between a pioneering and an empirical phase of burnout research. The goal of the initial phase, in the middle of the 1970s, was to define and name this new “syndrome”. The research at this time was primarily based on observations and interviews in the human services and healthcare industries.
Following the development of the MBI in the early 1980s, the focus of burnout research shifted, and the syndrome appeared in an increasing number of professions including elite soccer players, military personnel, police officers and teachers.
The relationship between burnout and well-established industrial-organizational psychology terms like job stress, job happiness and organizational commitment was also carefully defined because of Maslach’s studies.
The MBI seemed to provide a shared grasp of the idea of burnout, showed that it was a cohesive phenomenon, and allowed for its measurement without the need to consider or re-evaluate the fundamental presumptions linked to the condition and its societal ramifications.
Burnout has attracted a growing amount of interest from researchers, practitioners and the workforce during the past decade. In particular, clinical psychologists began to recognize burnout as a diagnosis and made an effort to distinguish between burnout cases and non-cases, as well as those who received therapy and those who did not.
On 28 May 2019, the World Health Organization re-defined burnout in the 11th Revision of The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and directly linked burnout to workplace stress. Despite this change, only a relatively small number of nations, including the Netherlands and Sweden, have made burnout a recognized medical diagnosis today. In the majority of (industrialized) nations, it is still a contentious diagnostic that is frequently debated but not formally acknowledged in the healthcare system.
Current Position
Stress and burnout have received significant attention in recent years with their prevalence and impact on mental health in contemporary life being seen to dramatically increase.
Globally, people are experiencing ever-increasing pressure in their daily lives – notably, in their workplaces – and they live in a world that faces significant socioeconomic issues.
As a result, managers, employees and workers across almost all industries and sectors worldwide experience work-related stress, fatigue and exhaustion, with burnout syndrome being the term used to describe the most pronounced symptoms.
Future Outlook
Since the global COVID-19 pandemic began, some worrying statistics have emerged:
• Employees are now more than three times as likely to report mental health issues.
• Despite being under stress, employees refuse to take a vacation. In 2020, American workers wasted 33% of their paid vacation days despite working an average of 49 minutes more in a typical workweek.
• Every area of a worker’s personal and professional life is affected by burnout, which manifests as a lack of motivation, an increase in errors, bad sleeping patterns, a break from friends and family, irritation and other symptoms.
• A startling 76% of workers claim that stress at work negatively impacts their mental health, causing despair or anxiety.
• 98% of respondents to global surveys respond that they are currently experiencing one or more symptoms of burnout.
To combat these statistics and hopefully reverse them over time, every organization, in every industry will need to invest time, money and resources into the following activities:
Offering resources for mental health
One of the most significant keys to preventing burnout is eradicating the stigma surrounding mental health. Organizations need to have a conversation with their people to determine the best means of providing these resources.
However, consideration can be given to delivering mental health education and services via text, email, or phone, on-site and/or online mindfulness and meditation sessions, self-guided resilience resources, and participation in monthly mental health challenges.
Broadening access to mental health services
Professional mental health care is another option in addition to office resources. This can be offered through providing increased employee access to teletherapy or expanding benefits to cover mental health.
Checking in with staff
Showing an interest in employees is a straightforward but highly powerful way to prevent burnout and foster relationships.
To do this, you can create regular surveys to better gauge what is happening in your employees’ lives, and then create initiatives and policies that are guided by the information you gather in the surveys.
Encouraging staff to take mental rest breaks
Bursting the burnout ‘bubble’ can be accomplished by celebrating relaxation and allowing workers time to unwind and socialize.
Suggestions here include the introduction of midday mental rest breaks – also termed as lunchtime virtual happy hours – that encourage employees to take a break from their job and mingle, even if they are working remotely. You can also investigate implementing areas in the workplace where staff members can take quick naps during the day.
Reducing the number of meetings
Meetings have a bad reputation for clogging up workers’ calendars, stressing them out and adding to their workload.
There are different ways to tackle this. For example, you could introduce a day of the week where no employee is allowed to attend or hold a meeting. Or, you could cut the length of all mandatory meetings by 30%, or allow employees to create ‘no-meeting’ times during each day of the week, so that they can create uninterrupted space to get work done.
Allow flexible scheduling
Many employees now work in a permanent hybrid or flexible schedule in order to give them greater freedom. Within the requirements and capabilities of your organization, you can allow staff members to work from home on a permanent, flexible or hybrid basis.
Alter the expectation that you are always available
Employees are freer to take breaks as needed and to leave work at the end of the day when they aren’t required to remain always linked. You can achieve this by focusing on performance being valued more highly than the number of hours worked in a ‘results-only’ workplace.
Changing expectations here also provides working parents and carers more freedom to change their schedules.
Provide more time off
If it’s within your organization’s means, then it can pay to give your workers an additional period of paid leave for them to use for rest, renewal and reset.
This carries an obvious additional cost to the organization but can usually be easily weighed against the cost of losing burned out employees to mental health issues for longer periods of time.
Provide company-wide wellness days
If your organization is struggling with the weight of stress and burnout issues, then it can be beneficial to give employees time and encouragement for self-care. For some organizations, this might look like closing the office for a day or even a week at a time.
Others will introduce a period of time where a day of the week is dedicated to rest and refuel, and others look at creating a ‘wellness week’ of the year which is dedicated to employees being able to focus specifically on health and wellness with the organization providing products and services that are delivered during that week to assist them in turning their health and wellness issues around.
Pay your workers to take time off
With employees reluctant to take time off work, some businesses provide incentives to encourage their workers to take their annual leave accrual.
This can look like a cash bonus for each week taken off, it may be a larger cash bonus to spend while on vacation but comes with the condition that the employee must completely unplug from work and take the time off. It might be that there are activities or services that the employee can access during their break that are paid for by the organization.
Every organization is unique and therefore will need a unique solution. Some organizations will need to do all of these things, others will pick and choose a combination. There may be additional things that an organization needs. The only constant is that every organization will need to take action of some sort to assist their employees to take control of their health and wellbeing.
Executive Summary
The third workshop in the Simplified Wellness Program – Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression – focuses on understanding the most common forms of mental health experienced by workers in today’s society.
Mental health in the workplace is one of the hottest current topics and has been tipped to play a significant role in the most highly measure strategic metrics to be measured moving forwards.
Stress, burnout and exhaustion have been around for a long time, but where they were a taboo discussion topic previously, they’ve become more commonly and openly discussed in recent times. Instead of being something that people were encouraged to dismiss, organizations are now moving to educate their employees on recognizing symptoms early and to providing tools and resources that assist their workforce to cope more easily with the demands of the modern way of living.
This workshop has 12 focus areas. Here’s what they cover:
Chapter 1: Stress
Stress is a worldwide issue that impacts productivity in organizations as well as the health and wellbeing of employees. Stress at work occurs when a person’s capacity and aptitude to handle demands of various kinds and combinations exceeds those obligations. After musculoskeletal diseases, work-related stress is the second-most prevalent compensated illness/injury in the world.
Several things might lead to stress at work. For instance, if a person’s work obligations (such as hours or duties) are higher than they can comfortably handle, they may feel under pressure. Conflict with co workers or superiors, ongoing change, and threats to job security, such as the possibility of being laid off, are additional sources of work-related stress.
There will be some level of stress in most employment situations, and this level will change over time as situations arise and resolve.
Stress can improve our performance, resiliency, and general functioning when it is present in moderation and in a healthy amount. But excessive or persistent work stress can have a negative impact on a person’s psychological and physical health, increasing their risk of anxiety and mood-related issues. When stress levels are high, it can also affect our ability to reason rationally and make wise judgements. When this happens, stress becomes distress.
Whilst everyone is an individual and will therefore have their own experience of stress, there are common factors that are often experienced by different individuals. These factors can be things like:
• Job specific stressors
• Role specific stressors
• Career development issues
• Relationship issues
• Low levels of perceived control
• External stressors (such as length of commute, lack of sleep, financial issues, personal issues, and pressure to complete work outside of office hours)
Similarly, the way each individual responds to stress will differ, however there are common tools and resources that an organization can provide to assist their employees to deal with the demands that stress places on life.
In this focus area you will understand what stress is, look at the common causes of stress, the way you respond to stress and stress as a health problem.
Chapter 2: Stress versus Distress
Although most people perceive stress as bad and detrimental, it can occasionally be adaptive and beneficial.
Stress is a typical physiological and psychological reaction people have to their environment. It occurs at any time there is a demand on an individual’s system that requires adaptation or change.
A sort of stress that is beneficial, inspiring, and good is referred to as eustress, a term that is relatively new. Eustress, in contrast to distress, encourages people to put in extra effort, perform better and accomplish their goals despite obstacles.
Distress, on the other hand, occurs when the individual cannot cope with the demand for change that is being imposed.
The term distress refers to the unfavorable form of stress that most people associate with being “stressed out”. Those who are in distress frequently feel overburdened and apprehensive, as well as suffer from physical and mental symptoms including headaches, tension, insomnia, inattentiveness or impatience. Stress that is frequent, strong or persistent is harmful to the body and brain, is associated with a variety of physical and mental conditions and impairs one’s capacity to operate.
Both eustress and distress include the activation of the ‘fight or flight’ response in the body and brain.
The energy provided in eustress is proportionate to what is required in the circumstance, but in distress, the energy is either abundant or useless.
The distinction between eustress and distress depends on the stressor(s) that set off the reaction and how the person views them. When a person believes the stressor or stressors are beyond their control, ability to fix, or desire to change, distress results. Because they lack an effective answer and feel overwhelmed and powerless, people who are in distress often resort to worrying and other counterproductive behaviors.
In this focus area you will look at the difference between stress and distress, the factors that cause distress, the negative effects of distress and how to turn distress into eustress.
Chapter 3: Secondary Stress
The emotional strain that occurs when someone hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another is known as secondary traumatic stress.
Also commonly called either Vicarious Trauma Syndrome or Compassion Fatigue, secondary traumatic stress (STS) describes the physiological and psychological reactions that occur after repeated exposure to stressful situations or materials.
According to some, secondary traumatic stress is a normal reaction to learning about or hearing about traumatic situations that other people have gone through. Empathy and compassion can occur, which is then followed by a desire to, or being able to, assist those who are or have experienced suffering.
STS symptoms can develop very rapidly after an individual absorbs the particulars about certain events and, until recently, was most commonly experienced amongst individuals who work in the police, caregiving industries (nursing, aged care, psychiatric care and the like), not-for-profit sectors that work with disadvantaged and homeless people, and with those who work with children in vicarious situations.
In recent times, individuals from all walks of life are experiencing secondary traumatic stress due to the availability of information about traumatic events on a 24/7 lifecycle within social media platforms.
PTSD and STS share some symptoms, but STS is a different stress syndrome (Levin et al., 2021). Symptoms can include fear or irritability, hypertension, thoughts of helplessness, trouble falling asleep, and disturbing flashbacks to the incident.
In this focus area you will learn what secondary stress is, how it affects you, the ways you experience it and what you can do to reduce its impact.
Chapter 4: Stress & Mental Health
Stress is a common reaction to pressures or demands from the environment, particularly if they are viewed as harmful or hazardous. Hormones, which are chemicals produced by the brain, flood the body during times of stress. These hormones cause people to sweat more heavily, breathe more rapidly, tighten their muscles and become more alert. A person’s ‘fight or flight’ response, which is part of the normal, human in-built alarm system, is triggered in response to the secretion of these hormones as a means of protection.
Stress is a normal element of daily life to some extent. In moderation, stress can aid productivity, make it easier to strive to meet deadlines, give you more focus to be ready for an important presentation, and create the energy you need to arrive on-time for significant events. Long-term stress, though, can be detrimental. The likelihood of developing both physical and mental health issues rises when stress becomes severe and persistent.
Long-term stress increases the likelihood of physical and psychological complaints such as muscle tightness, exhaustion, trouble sleeping, mental health issues (including anxiety and depression), increase drug use issues, digestive issues and general discomfort. Also, it raises the chance of health issues like high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, stroke, gastrointestinal issues, immune system deterioration, infertility, and headaches.
In this focus area you will deep dive into the link between stress and mental health, understand how stress affects relationships, values and meaningful purpose in life and look at ways to reduce psychological stress.
Chapter 5: Burnout
Initially, it can be challenging to distinguish between stress and burnout because their boundaries are often hazy.
Burnout is the result of unmanaged and accumulated stress over time. Consider burnout to be the older, meaner sibling of stress. It needs stress to exist, but stress can exist without making you exhausted.
For most people, stress and exhaustion are daily occurrences. With stress, an end is inevitable, but getting there could be challenging. On the other side, burnout is a cycle of unfavorable feelings and withdrawal that happens when you put too much of yourself – emotionally, intellectually, or physically – into anything without taking any steps to recover.
In this focus area you’ll explore the difference between stress and burnout, look at the signs, symptoms and causes of burnout, how to recognise burnout symptoms and deal with burnout when it occurs.
Chapter 6: Depression
Multiple research studies have shown that there is a causal link between long-term stress and the occurrence of depression.
What most people don’t know is that the causal relationship is also what is known as ‘bi-directional’. This means that not only does long-term stress contribute to depression, but that depression can also cause stress. They can also both make each other worse.
This can create a nasty spiral if nothing is done to reduce the symptoms, and therefore the impact of both of these conditions.
In this focus area you’ll focus on why understanding the difference between stress and depression is important, the connection between stress and depression, what is known about depression, what treatments there are for depression and the lifestyle changes you can make to minimise depression.
Chapter 7: Anxiety
There’s a very fine line that sits between stress and anxiety.
While both are emotional reactions, stress is usually brought on by an outside trigger. A job deadline or an argument with a loved one are examples of short-term triggers. Long-term triggers include being unable to work, discrimination or a persistent illness.
Stress causes both mental and physical symptoms in people, including irritation, rage, exhaustion, muscle pain, digestive issues and trouble sleeping.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is characterized by excessive worry that persists even in the absence of a stressor.
The symptoms of stress and anxiety are quite similar, including difficulties concentrating, weariness, tense muscles and irritability.
In this focus area you’ll look at the similarities and differences between anxiety and depression, look at who gets depressed, the link between smoking and mental health conditions, and what the treatments for anxiety are.
Chapter 8: Doom Scrolling
With the advent of technology that keeps us connected 24/7 and the introduction of social media platforms that provide an overload of information at our fingertips, doom scrolling is on the rise.
With little discernment over the content that appears in our online feed, we often find ourselves viewing information that wouldn’t normally be in our purview, a lot of which is negative and can be highly inflammatory in nature. As a result, we can find ourselves doom scrolling.
Doom scrolling is the inclination to continue to surf or scroll through negative news, even when such news is saddening, demoralizing or depressing.
The 24-hour news cycle may cause some people to be in a continuous state of high alert, giving them the impression that the world is black and dangerous.
For some people, a vicious cycle might set in where, instead of shutting the ‘bad news’ out, they become further drawn in, obsessing over the news and checking for updates round the clock to assuage their mental discomfort.
But, taking this approach doesn’t work for them and the more they check the news, the more it starts to affect their daily lives in other ways.
In this focus area you’ll look at what doom scrolling is and the role that it plays in our lives, how it affects the brain and the psychological and physical effects it has as well as the things we can do to minimise its impact.
Chapter 9: Stress Management
Reducing your stress can make significant impact on the way you live your everyday life including improving your mood, boosting your immune and digestive functions, promoting longevity in your life and protecting your mental health.
No matter what kind of job we may have, what our duties may be, or how financially secure we may be right now, we all deal with stress on a daily basis. Stress of some kind affects everyone.
The way we respond to stress determines whether we live our lives with a sense of calm and at ease. When we successfully learn how to manage stress, we can take the necessary actions to reclaim control of life and become more happier in general.
In this focus area you’ll learn about ways to understand your stress levels, the importance of managing stress and what happens if you don’t manage your stress as well as providing tools and techniques for managing stress.
Chapter 10: Stress Myths
Totally eliminating stress is not the aim of stress management. It is impossible to completely eradicate stress and, given there are some situations where stress is good (eustress), we don’t want to remove the benefits that this type of stress brings to our lives.
There are many ways, tools and techniques you can use to help you reduce your stress. Everyone is unique and will therefore have a unique combination of things that go together to cause their stress. This means that each individual will need a unique solution to help them reduce the stress they experience.
In this focus area you’ll look at the role that social conditioning plays in our acceptance of severe stress in our lives, debunk the nine most common stress myths that rule our lives and take a look at the ways we can move past stress myths to create a new way forward for ourselves.
Chapter 11: Support Recovery
The body’s response to stress is typically self-contained. Hormone levels return to normal as soon as a perceived threat has passed. Your heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline levels when your cortisol and adrenaline levels decline, and other systems begin their routine operations.
But the ‘fight or flight’ response remains activated if stressors are constant and you consistently feel attacked. And with the way we live today, over 70% of people spend over 80% of every day in ‘fight or flight’ mode.
It’s no wonder the statistics are showing that there are significant increases in the occurrence of diseases such as cardiovascular, stroke, type 2 diabetes and auto-immune syndromes.
Learning good coping mechanisms for the stresses in your life is crucial for this reason. In this focus area you’ll look at what happens when distress is left to run out of control, understand the impact to the nervous system of a breakdown and what causes this to happen as well as look at ways to support the nervous system in recovering after experiencing a break down.
Chapter 12: Environment, Community and Self
A variety of things play a role in poor mental health.
Genetics, past experiences, diet, and our way of life all have an impact. Nevertheless, many of us overlook one of the most important variables when attempting to identify the root causes of our mental health issues: the environment in which we go about our daily lives.
As any experienced person in the mental health industry will tell you, it is crucial to consider the larger context of life while treating any mental health disorders, and this includes the environments in which we live and work.
In this focus area you’ll look at the ways in which your environment impacts your personal wellbeing, how to create a healing environment at home and in the workplace and the way that nature impacts your wellbeing
Curriculum
Simplified Wellness – Workshop 3 – Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression
- Stress
- Stress versus Distress
- Secondary Stress
- Stress and Mental Health
- Burnout
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Doom Scrolling
- Stress Management
- Stress Myths
- Support Recovery
- Environment, Community and Self
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling in the Simplified Wellness corporate training program.
You will be learning using our special distance learning facilitation approach, which will allow you to put everything you learn in school into practice. The techniques and resources used in your program have been created and developed to guarantee that you get the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible.
We hope you enjoy the curriculum and find it both thought provoking and enjoyable. But if you’ve never studied remotely before, you could be feeling apprehensive about the task at hand. In order to get you started, we will provide you with some fundamental knowledge and instructions on how to use the modules effectively, how to handle the materials, and what to do as you go through them. This manual is intended to put you in the correct path and assist you in developing your skills as a successful distance learner. Before you begin studying seriously, spend a few hours reading this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students and taking notes.
Study Environment
To study, it’s often best to choose a space that is both private and peaceful. Preferably, this should be a room where you have easy access to isolation from outside distractions. Make sure the space is well-lit and has a relaxed, inviting atmosphere. Doing this will give you the opportunity to create the right frame of mind when you do spend time to studying.
A lovely fire, the option to play calming background music, mild but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if it’s possible, and a good-sized desk with a comfy chair are a few examples of ways to make your study space more inviting.
Make sure your family is aware of your study schedule and is familiar with your study guidelines. Your learning environment is crucial. If at all feasible, having a separate study area that you can dedicate to yourself is great. If this is not possible, you will need to devote much more time to creating and maintaining your study plan because it will have an impact on both you and other people. The more attuned to learning you space is, the more easily you will be able to study.
Study Tools and Rules
Make an effort to ensure that your study materials are adequate and in good operating condition. You will require access to a computer, scanner, and printer as well as internet connectivity. You will require a good filing system in addition to a comfortable chair that supports your lower back.
Spending valuable study time trying to remedy unreliable or improperly designed study tools can be highly irritating. Make sure your study aids are current. You should also take a few study guidelines into account. You will be subject to some of these guidelines, which are meant to help you be more organised about when and how you study.
After reading this guide to distance learning, spend some time creating your study rules. You will also need to come to an agreement with your family, friends, or anyone living with you over some study guidelines. To be able to help you as you study, they too will need to practice discipline. It’s crucial to include your family and friends as active participants in your study group. Their encouragement and support may prove to be a vital factor in your ability to successfully complete the program.
Successful Distance Learning
Since individuals can learn in their own way, at their own pace, and for their own purposes, distance learners are not required to attend regular classes or seminars.
But with a distant learning program, unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s job to make sure they manage their own study contribution.
Strong self-discipline, self-motivation, and a strong will to achieve are required for this. Students who prefer working alone, are adept at managing others, and are accustomed to controlling themselves are more likely to succeed as distance learners.
It’s crucial to understand your primary motivations for studying as well as the primary outcomes you hope to obtain as a result. When you need to encourage yourself, you will need to keep these goals in mind.
Keep both your short-term and long-term objectives in mind at all times.
You will need to find ways to motivate and appreciate yourself while you are studying because no one is here to spoil, take care of, or spoon-feed you information. Make sure to keep track of your academic progress so that you can be confident in your accomplishments and periodically review your goals and objectives.
Self-Assessment
All of the Appleton Greene training programs are post-graduate degrees. Consequently, you ought to be a seasoned learner with a degree in a business-related field.
As a result, you ought to be aware of your academic talents and shortcomings. What time of day, for instance, are you most productive? Are you an owl or a lark? Which research techniques do you find most effective? Are you a diligent student? How do you maintain self-control? How can you make sure you have fun while studying?
If you want to apply yourself effectively, it’s crucial to understand who you are as a student. To do this, you’ll need to do some self-evaluation early on.
Make a SWOT analysis of your academic career. Describe your internal and external opportunities and threats, as well as your strengths and shortcomings as a student.
Later on, when you are making a study plan, this will be useful. Then, you can include elements in your study schedule to make sure you are playing to your strengths and making up for your inadequacies. Additionally, you can make sure that you take full use of your possibilities while avoiding any dangers to your success.
Accepting Responsibility as a Student
Training programs almost always entail a sizable investment, both in terms of money and the amount of time you must devote to studying, and the student bears the entire burden of responsibility for their effective completion.
This is never more obvious than when a student is taking a course remotely.
A crucial step in ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program is accepting responsibility as a student. When anything goes wrong, it is simple to point the finger at other people or situations. However, the reality is that if a failure is your fault, you have the power to correct it; the decision rests totally with you.
You are helpless to change the situation if it is always someone else’s fault. Due to the fact that each student is an individual and that what works for one student may not necessarily work for another, every student studies in a completely different manner.
You must take personal responsibility for figuring out how to create, carry out, and maintain a personalised study plan if you want to succeed. You are the only one to blame if you don’t succeed.
Planning
The sense of not being in control is by far the most important factor contributing to stress. Without planning, we have a tendency to be reactive and can stumble from one obstacle to another, hoping that all will work out in the end. Almost always, they don’t!
We must be certain of the steps we want to take and when we want to take them in order to be in charge. Additionally, we must take into account as many potential outcomes as we can so that we are ready for them when they occur.
Compared to emergent change, prescriptive change is much simpler to govern and control.
This also applies to distance learning. If you believe that you are in charge and that everything is going according to plan, it is much simpler and more fun.
Even if something does go wrong, you are ready for it and can respond to it without being overly stressed. It is crucial that you do take the time to carefully plan your academic schedule.
Management
It is equally crucial to make sure you oversee its implementation once you have created a clear study plan.
The majority of us often enjoy planning, but implementation is usually when things go wrong. We don’t know why goals aren’t being met.
At times, we are unsure even if our goals have been reached. We cannot simply draw the conclusion that the study strategy was unsuccessful. If it isn’t working, you’ll need to know what to do to fix it.
Similarly, even if your study strategy is working, you still need to know why so that you can keep getting results.
Therefore, you need to have self-assessment criteria so that you can consistently increase performance throughout the program. Your performance should continue to advance throughout the program if you handle things properly.
Study Objectives and Tasks
Creating your program objectives is where you should start first. These should feature your priorities and reasons for enrolling in the training program.
To avoid confusion, keep them brief and to the point. Don’t just jot down the first ideas that occur to mind because they probably overlap too much.
List potential department names like “customer service,” “e-business,” “finance,” “globalisation,” “human resources,” “technology,” “legal,” “management,” “marketing,” and “production.” List as many goals under each heading as possible to generate ideas, and then rearrange these goals according to importance.
Finally, identify the most important item under each department heading to serve as your program’s goals.
Try to limit yourself to five, as doing so will help you concentrate. If the main goals are all accomplished, it is likely that the other items you stated will be as well. Simply go through the procedure once more if this is not the case.
Study Forecast
Depending on your availability and ongoing obligations, the Appleton Greene Simplified Wellness corporate training program should be finished in 12 to 18 months.
Whilst the program is designed to be completed in a 12 month period, every student is an individual with varying commitments and production levels, which accounts for the wide variation in time estimations.
The fact that this is a distance learning program that integrates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program then magnifies these distinctions. Because every project study is based on actual data, crucial choices and trade-offs must be made. To guarantee that everything goes according to plan, you’ll need to be patient with your expectations. We would always advise you to use caution when making your own task and time estimates, but you must still create them and have a good understanding of what are reasonable expectations in your particular situation.
Regarding your time planning, think about how much time you can realistically devote to studying with the program each week. Then, using the guidelines provided here, estimate how long it should take you to complete the program. Finally, divide the program into logical modules and allot an appropriate amount of time to each one; these will be your milestones. You can make a time plan using a computer spreadsheet or a personal organiser like Mimio.
Refer to your list of tasks that must be completed in order to meet your program’s objectives when planning your tasks; Calculate each task’s implementation date in relation to your time plan, keeping in mind that you are not estimating when your objectives will be met but rather when you will need to concentrate on implementing the corresponding tasks.
You also need to make sure that each task is carried out in conjunction with the relevant training modules that are associated with it. the next step is to divide each activity into a list of particular to-dos, say 10 for each task, and add these to your study plan; Once more, you might create your study plan using MS Outlook to include your time and task management.
You could also use a project management tool like MS Project. Now that you know when you can anticipate being able to take action to complete the tasks necessary to fulfil your program objectives, you should have a clear and realistic prediction.
Performance Management
Creating a study forecast is one thing, but tracking your progress is quite another.
In the end, it matters less if you meet your initial research forecast than how frequently you revise it to keep it reasonable and in line with your performance.
You will have a better understanding of your own performance and productivity levels as a distance learner as you progress through the program. You should reevaluate your study forecast after finishing your first study module so that it accurately reflects the amount of achievement you really accomplished.
You must first time yourself while practicing by utilising an alarm clock in order to achieve this. Set the alarm for hourly intervals, and then record your progress throughout the course of each hour. After that, you can record your actual performance on your study plan and compare it to your forecast.
Then, whether they were good or bad, think about the factors that led to your performance level and thoughtfully change your future forecasts as a result. With time, you ought to begin routinely hitting your forecasts.
Time yourself while you are studying and record the actual time taken in your study plan. Think about your time-efficiency successes and the reasons for each success when reviewing future time planning. Think about your time-efficiency failures and the reasons for each failure when reviewing future time planning. Re-evaluate your study strategy.
You must consistently manage your time otherwise you will never finish your academics. This will either happen because you are not dedicating enough time to your studies or because you are using your study time less effectively. Keep in mind that if you let your studies go out of control, they can end up adding to your stress.
Consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning. Consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning. Time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan. If you don’t manage your tasks consistently, you won’t be able to tell if your program objectives are being met or not.
Keeping in Touch
You will have access to qualified professors and tutors who are competent and experienced and who are in charge of giving tutorial help for your specific training program. Therefore, don’t be afraid to let them know how you’re doing. We save electronic copies of all emails sent in support of tutorials so that instructors and tutors can examine earlier exchanges before deciding how to react to a specific request.
Additionally, it means that all correspondence between you and your instructors and tutors is documented, preventing any needless repetition, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. Send them an email if you are experiencing any issues with the program.
Since they are more than likely to have dealt with a situation similar to yours before, they can frequently offer valuable advice and point you in the correct way. Please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide for more information on when and how to use tutorial support. This will enable you to make the most of the tutorial support that is offered to you and will eventually help you succeed in and enjoy your training program.
Work Colleagues and Family
It is important to share your program study progress with your family, friends, and coworkers.
The training courses offered by Appleton Greene are highly useful. It’s part of the program to seek out information from others, collaborate with others to plan, develop, and implement processes, and get feedback from them on the processes’ feasibility and productivity. As a result, you’ll have lots of chances to put your theories to the test and get feedback from others.
Don’t keep your feelings within; people are often understanding of distance learners. Get outside and spread the word! Your family, coworkers, and friends are probably going to gain from your efforts with the program, therefore they are probably more interested in getting engaged than you might imagine. Don’t be afraid to assign tasks to others who could gain from them. This is a fantastic method to get buy-in and understanding from those that you may later depend on for process implementation. Talk about your experiences with your loved ones.
Making It Relevant
Making information relevant to your own unique situation is the key to learning effectively. You should constantly be attempting to draw connections between the program’s content and your personal situation. Remember that this is the most crucial and satisfying step in turning your studies into genuine self-improvement, whether you accomplish it alone or in conversation with your family, clients, or colleagues.
Be specific about how you hope to benefit from the program. This entails establishing precise study goals related to the course’s material in terms of comprehension, concepts, completing research or review exercises, and connecting the material to your own situation. As you progress through the program, it is understandable for your goals to change. In this situation, you should update your study plan with the new goals, so you always know what you are aiming for, when, and why.
Distance Learning Checklist
• Prepare your workspace, materials, and norms for studying.
• Detailed self-evaluation of your capacity for learning should be done.
• Make a structure for your study schedule.
• Take into account your study goals and assignments.
• Make a forecast for the study.
• Analyze your academic performance.
• Review the prediction from your study.
• When organising your study schedule, be consistent.
• For tutorial assistance, contact an Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP).
• Be sure to stay in touch with those in your vicinity.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Simplified Wellness corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Simplified Wellness program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Simplified Wellness corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Simplified Wellness corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Simplified Wellness Specialist (ASWS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Simplified Wellness – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
On 28th May 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) re-defined burnout in the 11th Revision of The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
In this revision, it is described as a ‘ …syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed…’
You can read the full classification here:
You can read more about Vicarious Trauma or Secondary Psychological Stress through the links below:
Tools to Reduce Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Trauma –
https://www.tendacademy.ca/tools-to-reduce-vicarious-trauma-secondary-trauma-and-compassion-fatigue/
Warning Signs, Are You Experiencing Vicarious Trauma –
Read about how parental stress increases the effect of traffic-related air pollution on childhood asthma incidence here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0812910106
Read about the relationship between stress and Alzheimer’s Disease:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5991350/
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Stress
Introduction
Stress is a normal and healthy physiologic reaction to demanding, challenging or novel circumstances. It affects both the mind and the body. Your body releases stress chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol when you are under stress. In response to these chemicals, your body experiences physical changes, which then enable you to cope with the stressful circumstance.
Although everyone experiences stress in some form regularly, everyone’s experience will be unique.
You can better manage stressful times if you are aware of what stresses you out and how you react to various life problems.
Your body has evolved to respond to danger in a positive way by triggering the stress response, sometimes known as the “fight or flight” response. While you are under stress, your body releases chemicals that keep you attentive and prepared to confront problems.
Stress is a process rather than a disease. When there is an imbalance between the demands placed on us and our capacity to meet those demands, stress is the result. A person’s attitude towards a certain situation has a significant impact on the amount and intensity of stress they may experience. A situation that could be incredibly upsetting for one individual might only be a minor inconvenience for another.
Therefore, your stress reaction and your experience with stress is a very personal thing.
For example, you might have a massive task to complete and you become overwhelmed by the pressure to get everything done. You might have a long list of things on your ‘to-do’ list and it can feel like you’re running out of time. You might have an overflowing inbox, full of emails with demands coming from every corner.
The more crucial the outcome, the more common it can feel to be stressed about it. Both external circumstances (such as too much work or non-stop demands from family and friends) and internal causes (such as overthinking and worrying about things) can combine to make you feel anxious about getting everything done.
It’s important to know that not all stress is negative.
Some individuals benefit greatly from stress and perhaps require it to function. When the word “stress” is used in a clinical context, it refers to a circumstance that requires an individual to change. It is the response to this situation that determines whether stress is good stress (known as eustress) or whether it grows into a more dangerous kind of stress (known as distress).
When stress persists for a long period or you feel helpless and unable to handle your circumstances, it becomes a problem. When this happens, it’s necessary to control your stress so that you may continue to perform effectively both at work and at home.
How to know if you’re too stressed
Finding the correct balance between eustress and distress (that makes you feel overwhelmed and unproductive) is the secret to stress management.
The easiest way to know where your stress levels are at is to get to know the signs and symptoms your body gives you as a warning that your stress is starting to impact you.
One of the ways you can do this is to keep an eye out for stress-related health symptoms.
Your body releases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which make your heart beat quicker and you breathe more rapidly. Your muscles may stiffen up, your skin may become sensitive, and your stomach may feel queasy.
These are all indications that your body is gearing up for a “fight or flight” scenario. If the stressful scenario has ended, these feelings should subside quickly. If they fail to go away, it can mean you’re under too much stress.
Everyone has a distinct threshold beyond which stress is no longer beneficial, and everyone will have a unique response to stress. However, there are some common things you can watch out for:
• changes in appetite
• physical reactions, such as headaches, muscle tension or upset stomach
• difficulty concentrating
• changes in mood, irritability, or quick to anger
• withdrawal from friends and family
• reliance on alcohol or other substances to cope
• thoughts of self-harm or suicide
• feeling overwhelmed or unable to cope
• feeling “on edge” or unable to stop worrying
• changes in sleep patterns
• exhaustion.
Stress as a health problem
When a person thinks that the expectations placed on them surpass their capacity to manage, stress manifests as a health issue. There are a number of things that might make someone feel stressed out, such as:
• surroundings (work, home, school)
• lifestyle
• personal and emotional issues
• bodily ailments.
Stress can worsen almost any health ailment you can think of, in addition to making us feel bad emotionally.
Many health issues have been linked to stress, according to studies. Conditions like obesity, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, depression, gastrointestinal issues, and asthma seem to get worse or have a higher risk of developing due to stress.
There is some positive news, so don’t worry too much about being stressed. Simple stress-reduction techniques could help you feel less stressed and reduce the hazards to your health.
These are currently the top 10 stress-related health issues:
Heart disease
Experts have long hypothesised that those with type A, stressed-out personalities are more likely to experience heart issues and high blood pressure. Stress can raise heart rate and blood flow, as well as release lipids and cholesterol into the blood. However, it’s probable that stress is linked to other issues, such as a higher propensity for smoking or obesity, which subsequently raise heart risks.
Physicians are also aware that intense emotional stress can lead to heart attacks and other significant cardiac issues. Chronic heart disease patients should do everything within their power to prevent acute stress and learn effective coping mechanisms for life’s inevitable pressures.
Asthma
Several studies have indicated that stress might exacerbate asthma. According to some research, a parent’s ongoing stress may even make their child more likely to acquire asthma. In one study, the authors examined the relationship between parental stress and the prevalence of asthma in early children who were also exposed to air pollution or whose mothers smoked while pregnant. The chance of acquiring asthma was significantly higher in children whose parents were under stress.
Obesity
Individuals who are under a lot of stress tend to carry more belly fat than they do in their legs or hips. Carrying fat around your hardest working organs has been linked to greater health hazards. Raised levels of cortisol in the blood directly affects the amount of belly fat that is stored.
Diabetes
There are two main ways that stress can make diabetes worse. Firstly, it makes poor eating habits and binge drinking more likely, and secondly, it appears that stress directly raises the blood sugar levels of those with type 2 diabetes.
Headaches
One of the most frequent causes of headaches, including migraines as well as tension headaches, is stress.
Anxiety and depression
It comes as no surprise that high levels of anxiety and depression are associated with chronic stress. According to a review of recent studies, those who experience job-related stress, such as rigorous labour with few rewards, have an 80% higher risk of getting depression within a few years than those who experience less stress.
Gastrointestinal issues
Several GI problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome and chronic heartburn (commonly known as gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD), are also frequently influenced by stress.
Alzheimer’s disease
According to one animal study, stress may make Alzheimer’s disease worse by hastening the formation of the illness’s brain lesions. Reducing stress, according to some studies, might be able to stop the disease’s growth.
Accelerated ageing
There is evidence that stress can rapidly increase ageing. In one study, the DNA of mothers who were under a lot of stress because they were taking care of a chronically unwell child was compared to that of mothers who weren’t. Researchers discovered that the telomere length of the mothers with chronically ill children displayed signs of accelerated ageing. Stress seems to shorten life expectancy by 9 to 17 years.
Untimely death
A study that focused on elderly spouse caregivers – people who are already dealing with a lot of stress – took a look at the health repercussions of stress. It was discovered that carers had a death rate that was 63% greater than that of non-caregivers of the same age.
Common causes of stress
Today, life moves very quickly. We are connected via technology constantly, and while there used to be a distinct line separating business from personal life, technology means that these two areas of our life are now blurred and overlapping. In addition, the introduction and high adoption of social media means that our lives are now very visible and if we’re not careful, we can get caught out comparing someone else’s virtual life to our everyday activities.
As a result, we are left with a demanding, overstimulated, and exhausting life. We can easily become overwhelmed by the stress and pressure of success and end up living a life on ‘autopilot’, where we feel as though we don’t have enough time, we have to at least keep up with everyone else, and we need an extra day in the week in order to get ahead.
One of the phrases we utter the most frequently these days is “I’m so stressed”. But do you understand the real cause of your stress?
Although some of our stress may originate from the workplace, changes in the way we live have also significantly increased stress from other sources. Historically, we are taught that stress is brought on by being overburdened at work, but here are a few of the additional stressors that can impact you regularly:
The workplace
This can be a major source of stress in life due to heavy workloads under intense time constraints, open-plan offices, a lack of human resources expected to accomplish more in less time, personality conflicts, and other factors.
Food
Today, our food is processed, packaged, and loaded with additives and preservatives. In this way, the more food you eat, the more stress your body experiences.
Cleaning supplies
Our cleaning supplies have undergone tremendous modification and now include a variety of contaminants we were unaware of. Toxins from these products enter your body through your lungs as well as through your skin. The more frequently you utilise these products, the more stress your body is under.
Cosmetics and personal care items
The chemicals and toxins in our cosmetics and personal care items, including shampoo, hand soap, body moisturiser, and similar items, are absorbed via our skin. Our bodies are under additional stress as a result of our increased use of them.
Electronic devices
Anything with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi emits an electronic frequency that interferes with the natural rhythm of your body. The more of these devices you have around you, the more your body is under stress.
Traffic
Nearly everywhere in the world has experienced a significant increase in the number of vehicles on the roadways. This creates a greater load of fumes, emissions and toxic load in the air generally.
Commuting and travelling
As a result of the globalisation of business, it is not unusual for workers to have longer commutes and travel more frequently for work-related purposes. You are exposed to fumes and pollutants carried in the air by more vehicles the more you commute and travel.
Population explosion
As a result of the planet’s vastly increasing human population, there is a larger risk of contracting diseases like the common cold and influenza. Also, merely by observing and hearing what is occurring to others, you run the risk of experiencing secondary stress (whether in person or from a distance through technology platforms such as news and social media). This implies that carrying out routine daily tasks (including travelling, working, and shopping) may increase your stress levels.
Insufficient sleep
If you have any of the above influences in your life then your body will be spending a lot of time in ‘fight or flight’ mode. Your body does not want you to have deep REM sleep when you are in this phase, which means that your system is continually on high alert. Instead, it wants you to remain vigilant so you can defend yourself or get away if necessary.
You cannot effectively rest and regenerate your cells if you don’t get REM sleep. Your body is under stress when you are unable to do this.
So, it is clear from this little sample of items that you are frequently confronted with stressful life occurrences. Knowing the source of your stress is essential for implementing a few straightforward measures that will enable you to live your life differently and conquer stress once and for all. As usual, as you learn a new method of doing things, add compassion and kindness for yourself.
The way you respond to stress
People typically respond to stressful situations in one of two ways: either by over-functioning and shifting into high gear to solve every issue, or by under-functioning and freezing up to the point that they are unable to handle the situation.
Both of these behaviours are undesirable since an under-functioner frequently finds it difficult to deal with even small difficulties while an over-functioner is prone to burnout.
Also, it may be quite tense in a relationship when an under-functioner and an over-functioner are both responding negatively to the same stressful circumstance. One person being irritated at doing all the work while the other feels excluded from the process could result from one person handling all the details while the other person is frozen.
Your attitude, personality, and your general way of living will all have an impact on how you handle stress. Everyone is different, so there are a number of variables that come into play, including:
• how you approach a problem
• how anxious you feel generally
• how much the problem affects you
• whether you have dealt with something similar before
• whether you have control over what is happening
• how long the event affects you
• how important the outcome is to you
• the various coping mechanisms people have for dealing with challenging circumstances
• your life experiences and life history
• your self-esteem; and
• whether you have people nearby who can assist you.
Tips for controlling your stress response
The following five tactics can be used to your advantage if you notice that your reaction to stress is one of these patterns.
Understand your triggers
Finding your triggers is the first step in controlling your stress. Both internal and external triggers are possible. Major life changes, elements in your environment, unforeseen occurrences, problems at work, social problems, and traumatic incidents are a few examples of external triggers. A lack of control over your circumstances, your anxieties, emotions of uncertainty and hesitation, and controlling your own expectations can all be internal triggers.
Breathe
Deep, even abdominal breathing is the most underrated tool you have to assist you in changing the way you deal with stress. It is the only scientifically proven way to immediately move yourself into a relaxed state.
You can attempt a variety of various breathing exercises. The simplest exercise is belly breathing, which involves sitting or lying flat while breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth, allowing your belly to expand and contract while keeping your chest motionless.
Check your self-compassion
Self-compassion can be especially important when you’re under stress. While you may not always be able to manage your stressors, you can learn to accept what is going on, identify your emotional reaction to it, and discover a strategy to deal that provides you what you need—without turning to blame or self-recrimination. As life becomes stressful, adding self-criticism or self-blame only serves to exacerbate the situation.
Lower your standards
Sometimes all it takes to lessen stress is to change your expectations. Consider re-evaluating what you are doing to identify what is definitely necessary and what may be modified or omitted if you find that you are becoming overly anxious about every small detail. Projects can be changed, deadlines can be moved, and less urgent tasks can frequently be dropped or assigned.
Relate to others
As humans we are hard wired to crave connection. Being among people that uplift you might help you to reset your stressors and ground yourself when you’re under stress. Companionship can assist ‘under functioners’ develop resilience and continue to function in the face of stress. Being with people might assist in grounding ‘over-functioners’ and provide a small amount of serenity when their natural inclination is to go all out.
Finding the right balance between doing too much or too little in reaction to stress is crucial because either will only make matters worse.
Case Study: Chronic Stress, Cell Aging and Telomere Length
In the modern era, stress, and the study of its effects and impacts has taken on extraordinary significance.
There could be a number of reasons for this. There are so many more stressors today than ever before; things such as overpopulation, financial pressures on local and macro levels, acceleration of human activities, difficulties, productivities and behaviours. All of these are accompanied by rising levels of noise, pollution, and “everyday stressors”, such as employment.
This then sees an increase in stress-related illnesses and complaints, many of which require medical attention and frequently result in exorbitant medical bills and disability.
One area that has gained significant traction in research is that of the way that our chromosomes may show the consequences that chronic stress – and a heavy dose of ostensibly frightening, stressful situations – can have on the entire body, as they literally make us ‘look old.’
The length of chromosomal telomeres and activity of the cellular telomerase are two markers and possible factors that appear to provide evidence of individual susceptibility and ‘molecular resilience’, consisting of cellular resistance and regeneration capacity.
Telomeres, a structural complex found at the ends of human chromosomes, prevent errors in the replication and repair processes from degrading the chromosomal strands. Because of this, these telomeres, which are made up of repeating DNA sequences, are physiologically susceptible to shortening due to the discontinuous replication during each cell division. By extending telomeres, the telomerase enzyme greatly aids in maintaining the protective effect of telomeres. Many cells have a low level of telomerase enzyme activity, and it is thought that the slow loss of telomeric DNA causes accelerated cell ageing and, eventually, cell death. While cellular life cycles, including those of cancer cells, may be prolonged, increased enzyme activity can also raise the risk of several neoplastic illnesses.
The binding of sufficient amounts of functional shelterin, a 6-unit protein complex with specialised and essential roles in telomere maintenance and function, is essential for the telomeres’ ability to safeguard the chromosomes. Telomere deprotection is brought on by insufficient telomere length, which results in insufficient concentration of shelterin at chromosome ends or otherwise impairs shelterin function. Loss of telomere protection can inhibit carcinogenesis while also causing age-related diseases because defective telomeres activate checkpoint responses similar to those triggered by DNA damage, which stop cell growth or cause cell death. Also, through contributing to genomic instability, defective telomeres have an impact on the growth and development of cancer.
There is strong evidence indicating that behavioural signals like exercise and other mind-body medical practises help protect telomere length. The study (led by Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn) looked at how beneficial habits in healthy people, such as mindful meditation, exercise, and healthy diet, have a direct effect on telomere length, among other things. For a brief period of time, the telomere length also seems to vary. For instance, investigations over a year of monitoring showed that drastic or traumatic life events as well as challenging life situations can lead to a direct shortening of telomeres.
Surprisingly, however, this effect was minimal in those who had strong health-promoting habits and significantly diminished in people who continued to have moderate health behaviours.
Along with achieving much happier mental states, Blackburn’s study showed that it is possible to reduce cognitive-mental (or emotional) stress, also known as ‘stress arousal’, by using a variety of mind-body medical treatments.
As a result, it has been shown that mind-body practises can modulate the levels of the hormones cortisol and catecholamine, with the reduction of both of having positive effects on telomeres. The precise pathways utilised, as well as cause-effect relationships and effect estimations, are largely unclear in this area.
Relaxation methods and relaxation response (RR) techniques are at the core of many mind-body treatments and therapies. Herbert Benson (founder of the Mind Body Medical Institute) defined the RR as a collection of linked physiological mechanisms and modifications that are triggered when a patient performs a recurrent mental or physical activity that assists in passively ignoring distracting thoughts.
These behaviours are linked to instantaneous physiological alterations such as decreasing heart rate, arterial blood pressure, and decreased oxygen consumption or carbon dioxide elimination (i.e., reduced metabolism) and breathing rate.
Exercise 3.1: Stress Test
2. For each item, write down how often the item occurs in each day.
3. Using a scale of low, medium and high, for each item, write down the level of impact you believe that stressor has in your life each day.
4. Choose one item from your list where you would like to start reducing the stress impact in your life.
5. Write down three things you can do to change the way that this stressor impacts your life.
6. Write down how and when you will implement the first step.
7. How will you hold yourself accountable for implementing this first step?
Course Manual 2: Stress versus Distress
Introduction
Stress can be defined as the body’s physiological reaction to anything that places onerous demand on us and throws us out of equilibrium. A stressor might be a change, danger, or pressure coming from either the outside or the inside of the body.
Human survival as a species requires stress. Humans have relied on the automatic stress response within the body to stay alive and fend off dangers for thousands and thousands of years. This stress response is known as the ‘fight or flight’ response.
In order to provide our muscles energy and our mind focus, the fight or flight reaction quickens the heartbeat, blood pressure, and breathing rates, suppresses digestion, and raises blood sugar levels. This series of adjustments enables us to fight or flee from danger in circumstances where our life is genuinely in danger.
This response has been critical to the human species surviving over time; however, the problem with this response is that it can’t` tell the difference between genuinely life-threatening situations and circumstances where we feel the stress of modern day living.
Stress versus Distress
Most types of stress we encounter in today’s environment come from within. These are psychological stressors.
We start to feel anxious when we sense a threat, like an impending exam or too many expectations from our jobs.
How each individual views the experience of a negative situation will affect how much stress they create within themselves.
As human beings, we each have the ability to create a subjective interpretation of a situation’s qualities, such as its intensity, source, duration, controllability and acceptability. Importantly, whether we believe it is within our range of coping mechanisms or not determines whether it will result in eustress or distress.
While individuals can experience the same event, each individual will create a different interpretation of that same event.
For instance, take the example of someone who needs to provide a presentation at work. While this individual sees the opportunity to present as a fantastic chance to showcase their work, they may become anxious at the thought of having to present to a group of their co-workers.
So, the individual prepares their presentation and believes that it is succinct, informative and that they are well-prepared. This person views the current circumstance as favourable and transient. Whilst they are experiencing some anxiety about presenting to their co-workers, the fact that they think they can handle it is most significant.
Compare that with an individual who is completely distressed at the thought of public speaking. This fear causes them to freeze and feel like they’re unable to put together a quality presentation. They believe that their project is poorly done, and they fear that they might make mistakes in their presentation, which would leave their peers with a negative impression. This person views this task as unmanageable, unwanted and persistent, and feels they are unable to adequately handle it.
When the demands of the stressor surpass our perception of our capacity to handle them, the stress becomes prolonged and moves an individual from being in a state of eustress to a state of distress.
The distinction between eustress and distress is concerned with how the body responds to a challenging situation.
Eustress
The major distinction between eustress and distress is that while distress is a negative sort of stress that results in bad emotions, eustress is a positive type of stress that causes positive sentiments.
Eustress is a beneficial, enjoyable type of stress. Stress is normal and healthy. When the stressor is perceived as possibilities or challenges that may be effectively solved by using coping mechanisms, this positive form of stress elicits pleasant sentiments. Positive outcomes including a nice psychological state and a healthy physical state are linked to this good stress.
Eustress, or ‘good stress’, refers to enjoyable events or situations. The following list of stressors usually results in pleasant experiences, and represent eustress in action:
• Getting married
• Purchasing a home
• Having a child
• Beginning a new job
• Travelling
• Giving presentations
• Receiving an award
• Being promoted at work
• Reuniting with old friends
• Beginning a business
• Discovering a new passion
• Going on an adventure
• Meeting new people
Eustress can have positive, beneficial effects.
Individuals who experience eustress are mindfully challenged and often pay closer attention to the task at hand. This is commonly described as the individual being ‘in flow’. That is, they become immersed in the experience that improves their health and wellbeing when they reach the state of flow.
The experience of eustress can start a process of adaptation, enhancing a person’s capacity for creative abilities. A person can accomplish tough tasks and perform better with the assistance of eustress. It also aids in reducing the harm that comes from distress when it manifests.
Eustress is typically linked to good feelings, optimism, self-reliance, and hope. Eustress also serves as a key predictor of life happiness and health, according to multiple research studies conducted over time.
Distress
Stress that is damaging, unpleasant and negative is called distress. When the stressor is perceived as a danger or threat that the person cannot escape, distress is triggered. Distress has been linked to poor emotional wellbeing and diminished physical health.
Despite there being a distinction between the two, today, the words ‘stress’ and ‘distress’ are often used interchangeably. They’re used regularly to discuss regular life concerns and to describe stressful situations.
Any stress that exceeds your capacity to handle it leads to distress. When you endure a high volume of acute stressors, chronic stress from circumstances that can’t be changed for a long time, or regular activities that cause recurrently negative emotional tension, you are said to be in distress. Distress can also be brought on by internal circumstances, such as phobias, perfectionism, compulsive thought patterns and the like. Distress can also be caused by exposure to highly stressful situations like toxic workplaces, situations of abuse, bullying and long-term illnesses, and can all make us feel uneasy.
Unpleasant occurrences or the stress associated with upcoming events, can also be a source of distress, or negative stress. Following are a few examples of situations that can lead to distress:
• Exposure to long-term bullying
• Divorcing one’s partner
• Splitting up
• Interpersonal relationship issues
• Ongoing tension with teammates
• The passing of a loved one or parent
• Failure to meet a deadline
• Parental conflict
• Family tension, such as arguments between siblings
• Financial difficulties
• Declaring bankruptcy
• Losing a job
• Dealing with natural catastrophes
• Serious health issues
• Being charged with a crime
• Being abused or assaulted
• Awaiting the results of medical tests
• Being concerned about job reorganisation or employment issues
In addition to lowering a person’s performance at work or school, excessive distress can have a variety of negative impacts on the human body and brain.
Persistent stress can be particularly harmful. Studies have shown that the brain’s size may shrink as a result of an individual being exposed to long-term distress, and structural changes that impact memory, thinking, and stress responses may result.
Being exposed to chronic distress can reduce an individual’s ability to adapt to life changes, which can lead to or exacerbate issues with one’s mental and physical health. Moreover, it can weaken the immune system, making a person more prone to disease and psychological disorders. Irritable bowel syndrome, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, inflammatory illnesses, and even unexpected death have all been connected to high levels of distress in an individual’s life.
Factors that cause distress
There are a number of factors that can play a role in creating distress within an individual’s life.
Work-family conflicts occur when there are conflicts between the two distinct but related worlds of work and family. One is a conflict between work and family, also known as work-family interference or work interference with family, which happens when obligations from the workplace make it harder to participate in family life.
Conversely, when family life gets in the way of work, it causes conflict between the two, which is sometimes referred to as family-work interference or family interference with job.
Globally, work-family conflict has been reported to be more prevalent in women.
The majority of household chores are still handled by women. Women also mostly take on the primary role of caring for children and giving unofficial care to elderly relatives, both of which have been seen to worsen work-family conflict experiences.
Previous studies have revealed that one unfavourable impact of work-family conflict is that women may be seen to contribute less to the workplace, which could impede professional advancement.
When the time spent travelling between home and work and engaging in unpaid work is taken into consideration, figures from Europe show that women work an average of 64 hours per week compared to 53 hours for men. As a result of these additional responsibilities, women appear to have more difficulty balancing job and family obligations, particularly when they are raising children.
Mothers and workers with higher education report the highest incidence of work-family conflict.
Due to lengthier workdays and a harder time separating work from personal time, highly educated parents frequently suffer more work-family conflict than less educated parents. There is an increased risk of psychological distress in jobs where employees have significant decision-making authority and responsibility.
A low degree of job satisfaction is linked to a higher risk of psychological distress, burnout, anxiety and depression.
Despite the fact that job gender balance in the workplace is common, women are frequently paid less and are less likely to hold managerial positions.
Work-related stress on the body and mind has been seen to impact mental health. Jobs that involve high levels of care to individuals involves a lot of mental effort, but even though it may raise the risk of emotional tiredness and psychological suffering, it can also be fulfilling. Men’s mental health has been proven to be more affected by physical work stress than it is for women.
A person’s perception of the availability of emotional or practical support from others when needed is referred to as perceived social support. Psychological anguish is more likely to occur when there is a lack of social support from one’s partner, close family members, parents and friends. There are signs that it works differently for men and women, such as the fact that emotional support shields women against depression more than it shields men. In both work and familial settings, women receive greater assistance than do males and have larger networks of allies. Women, on the other hand, appear to receive less support from their partners than do men.
Women typically benefit more from social participation than males do, and this is especially true of emotional support, which is frequently linked to leisure activities like hobbies or cultural pursuits. It appears that leisure activities, especially those that include social interaction, are linked to greater mental health, and this is especially true for men.
Social loneliness is the absence of a social network, whereas emotional loneliness is the absence of someone to turn to in times of need. In the general population, loneliness affects more women than men and is associated with mental illnesses and psychological distress.
This association is partially independent of social support perceptions. Hence, compared to social loneliness, emotional loneliness is more strongly linked to suffering and mental problems. Among college students, women’s mental health is affected by loneliness more than for men, although disparities between sexes have not been discovered among individuals who live in communities.
The presence of a spouse appears to be a key component of loneliness. Marriage has been linked to greater mental health in both sexes as compared to divorce and widowhood, although divorce and widowhood have stronger long-term consequences on men than on women. Living alone has generally been linked to a higher risk of developing mental health issues, notably among males in some studies, and men specifically have higher mortality rates from mental disorders than do women. Yet, research has also demonstrated that living alone is not linked to decreased emotional wellbeing or psychological discomfort, particularly among senior individuals.
Smoking and excessive alcohol consumption are two unhealthy lifestyle choices that have been linked to a higher chance of developing depressive symptoms. Those with mental illnesses or psychological discomfort are more likely to smoke cigarettes than those in higher socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, it appears that in recent decades, the link between smoking and psychological suffering has grown stronger.
Financial hardships have been linked to a decreased likelihood of mental health. Psychological discomfort is brought on by both poverty and the stigma attached to accepting public aid. Men and women appear to be at different risk of developing common mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety disorders, depending on their income category; women are at higher risk than men are in all categories except the lowest one, while both men and women appear to experience the same negative effects of financial hardship on their mental health.
Women are more likely than men to experience psychological distress when providing informal care, such as helping elderly parents.
How to turn distress into eustress
Distress from emotions can become overwhelming and significantly interfere with day-to-day activities. The typical course of treatment entails recognising the triggers and putting stress-reduction methods into practise so you can turn your distress into eustress.
Talking to family, friends and/or a therapist or counsellor can help people discover the causes of their emotional pain and come up with new coping mechanisms, because the causes of emotional distress are not always immediately visible to the person experiencing them.
There are also readily available tools and resources to help individuals to better regulate their stress response and minimise the time they spend in distress.
• Box breathing and guided imagery can be really powerful tools to distract the mind and provide a space where individuals can move away from a distressed state.
• Some individuals employ mindfulness meditation as a long-term stress management technique. It usually entails turning inward to sharpen awareness and self-awareness.
• Adopting certain lifestyle adjustments, like giving up smoking and increasing your physical activity, can also be beneficial. Several studies have shown that regular exercise helps reduce anxiety and depression.
• Physical activity of any intensity can be beneficial. According to a 2020 study published in Lancet Psychiatry, teens who participated in mild exercise had a decreased risk of developing depressive symptoms by the time they turned 18 years old.
When horrific events like mass shootings, natural catastrophes or pandemics occur, it is normal to experience stress, anxiety, grief and worry. Stress-related symptoms can include experiencing emotional or nervousness, as well as difficulty sleeping or eating.
These are some constructive methods for managing stress for yourself, others, and your community:
• Ensure your own wellbeing. Give yourself a break if you’re feeling stressed out, eat well, move your body, sleep well, and get plenty of rest.
• Take breaks from news articles, especially those on social media, when you’re watching, reading, or listening to them. While being informed is important, hearing about the horrific occurrence over and over again can be stressful. Consider restricting your daily news consumption to just a few times and taking a brief break from your phone, TV, and internet.
• Take good care of yourself.
• Stretch, breathe deeply, or practice meditation.
• Strive to have nutritious, balanced meals.
• Regularly move around.
• Make getting quality sleep a priority.
• Avoid using drugs, tobacco, and alcohol excessively.
• Schedule some downtime.
• Try engaging in some other enjoyable activities.
• Chat with others. Discuss your worries and feelings with those you can trust. If you have issues, talk to a parent, friend, counsellor, doctor, or pastor about how you are handling things.
• Contact your faith- or community-based organizations.
• Abstain from alcohol and narcotics. They could appear to be helpful, but they can actually make things worse and make you feel more stressed than before.
• Know when you need more assistance. Speak with a psychologist, social worker, or trained counsellor if the issues persist or if you are contemplating suicide.
Case Study: The effects of distress and the risk of developing four chronic diseases.
In 2018, 16,485 adults from UK households participated in a research study to examine the relationship between distress and the risk of developing arthritis, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes.
Participants were questioned at the start of the study to determine whether they had been given a chronic disease diagnosis at baseline using the following question: “Have you ever been told that you have any of the conditions listed on this card by a doctor or other health professional?”
The participants were requested to report any newly diagnosed diseases from the same list at specific intervals during the research study duration.
The diagnoses of coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction, angina, and stroke were placed under the category of cardiovascular disease (CVD), while bronchitis and emphysema were placed under the category of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) for the sake of analysis. For diabetes, COPD, arthritis, and CVD, incident disease variables were produced by coding participants who reported receiving a new diagnosis of the condition during the research. Participants who did not report receiving a new diagnosis of the particular ailment were also recorded. In the analyses, the four incident illness variables served as the primary outcomes.
Predictors
The 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) of the National Health Service (NHS) was used to gauge psychological distress at baseline (GHQ). The GHQ is commonly used in population studies to gauge how much people are affected by symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other poor mental health conditions.
Participants were asked to rate their occurrence of 12 common symptoms – for example, loss of sleep or loss of confidence. Then, these responses were recorded. Participants were then rated using a standard reference scale based on their responses to determine if they qualified as cases of psychological distress.
In addition, socioeconomic position (SEP) was assessed using occupation as the baseline. According to the Registrar General’s Social Class, each participant’s most recent job or present position was classified. Professional occupation, managerial and technical occupation, skilled non-manual, skilled manual, semi skilled occupation, and unskilled occupation were the six categories of occupational social class. These occupational groups were then broken into two broad categories – “non-manual” and “manual” – in order to analyze how distress and SEP interacted.
The three variables that were simultaneously evaluated for each participant – smoking status, food and exercise – were possible mediators in the analyses.
Participants were also questioned about their smoking history: “Have you ever smoked a cigarette, a cigar or a pipe?” and “Are you still smoking cigarettes today?”.
The participants’ level of exercise was assessed by asking them how many days in the previous four weeks they had spent walking for at least 30 minutes.
To measure the quality of each participant’s diet they were also asked the question, “How many portions of fruit and vegetables overall do you typically eat on a day when you eat fruit or vegetables?”.
Potential confounding variables in analyses included age, sex, body mass index (BMI), chronic disease at baseline, SEP and social support, as indicated by marital status and neighborhood cohesion.
Eight items from the “Neighborhood Cohesion Scale”, which evaluates the availability and caliber of local social assistance, were used to measure neighborhood cohesion at the baseline. On a 5-point Likert scale with 1 denoting “strongly disagree” and 5 denoting “strongly agree,” participants were asked to rate their level of agreement with statements such as “I chat to my neighbors on a frequent basis”. The sum of the item scores produced the neighborhood cohesion score.
Results
Greater BMI, poorer health behaviors (in terms of food, exercise and smoking), lower socioeconomic position, and reduced neighborhood cohesion were all substantially related with higher levels of psychological distress.
At baseline, people with arthritis and COPD were also considerably more likely to be younger, female, married or cohabiting, and to have high levels of psychological distress.
410 (2.9%) patients experienced arthritis throughout the three-year follow-up period, while 173 (1.1%) experienced cardiovascular illness, 55 (0.3%) experienced COPD, and 141 (0.9%) experienced diabetes.
Throughout the whole spectrum of distress severity, there were substantial relationships between psychological distress and risk of arthritis and cardiovascular disease after controlling for age and sex.
Significant correlations between psychological distress at moderate and high levels and the risk of getting COPD were found.
There were also significant linear trends between level of anguish and risk of arthritis, CVD, and COPD, indicating dose-response correlations between psychological distress and risk of developing these disorders.
Diabetes risk and psychological discomfort did not significantly correlate.
Exercise 3.2: Box breathing to reduce distress
1. Using a scale of low, medium or high, write down where you feel your distress level is in this moment.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Imagine the four sides of a square box.
4. As you inhale for a count of 3 seconds, imagine a line is being drawn down one side of the box.
5. Hold your breath for a count of 3 seconds and see a line being drawn along the bottom of the box from where the previous line stopped.
6. Release your breath for a count of 3 seconds and see a line being drawn up the other side of the box.
7. Pause for 3 seconds and see a line being drawn along the top of the box.
8. As you breathe in through your nose for a count of 3 seconds, tense all the muscles on your toes and feet.
9. Breathe out through your nose for a count of 3 seconds whilst relaxing all the muscles in your toes and feet.
10. Breathe in for 3 seconds while tensing all the muscles in your lower legs, knees and upper legs.
11. Breathe out for a count of 3 seconds whilst relaxing all the muscles in your lower legs, knees and upper legs.
12. Breathe in for 3 seconds while tensing all the muscles in your torso.
13. Breathe out for 3 seconds while relaxing all the muscles in your torso.
14. Breathe in for 3 seconds while tensing all the muscles in your arms, hands and fingers.
15. Breathe out for 3 seconds while relaxing all the muscles in your arms, hands and fingers.
16. Breathe in for 3 seconds while tensing all the muscles in your head, neck, jaw, eyes, ears and cheeks.
17. Breathe out for 3 seconds while relaxing all the muscles in your head, neck, jaw, eyes, ears and cheeks.
18. Place your hands on your belly.
19. Breathe in through your nose for a count of 3 seconds, pulling the air all the way down into your abdomen and moving your hands outwards.
20. Breathe out through your mouth for a count of 3 seconds, releasing the air from your abdomen and moving your hands inwards.
21. Take a moment to reconnect with yourself.
22. Using the same scale of low, medium or high, write down where you feel your distress level has moved to.
Course Manual 3: Secondary Stress
Introduction
The emotional strain that arises when someone hears about a horrific event is known as secondary traumatic stress (STS). It is the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about or sees the firsthand trauma experiences of another.
It is a syndrome that describes the physiological and psychological reactions that occur after secondhand exposure to difficult situations or materials.
STS is a normal reaction to learning about, or hearing about, traumatic situations that other people have gone through. It can also result from assisting, or wanting to assist, those who are, or have been, in need.
Vicarious traumatization and compassion exhaustion are other names that are commonly used interchangeably for secondary stress.
STS symptoms almost always appear rapidly and are usually triggered by a few specific incidents. While post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and STS share some symptoms, STS is a different stress syndrome.
Other than merely being aware of a traumatic incident, there are several other factors that can contribute to secondary traumatization, including empathy, emotional contagion and physiologic causes.
Moreover, research on Holocaust survivors and their offspring has demonstrated that traumatization can be transmitted without ever discussing the horrific experiences.
For a long time, secondary trauma was believed to affect those in professions who dealt directly with people experiencing or working through trauma. This meant that secondary trauma was prevalent in industries such as mental health professionals, first responders, trauma and palliative care nurses, intensive care and emergency room medical professionals, social workers, child and disability protection officers, police officers and firefighters.
Today, with the unlimited and mostly unrestricted access to social media platforms, secondary trauma is experienced by almost any user as they are bombarded with news of traumatic events from around the globe.
How does secondary stress affect you?
Vicarious trauma is the term used to describe the indirect trauma that can happen when we are exposed to traumatic or upsetting images or stories from a third party.
We can be indirectly affected by the information or images of another living creature’s suffering in many different ways, including but not limited to:
• the viewing of graphic news reports
• gory, frightful or violent television shows and other media
• hearing a detailed traumatic story from another person
• seeing crime scene evidence
• working in a courtroom
• attending debriefings or conferences where upsetting images are described or shown.
When experiencing this secondary trauma, individuals experience a profound shift in their worldview. Their core beliefs about the world are altered and possibly damaged by repeatedly being exposed to traumatic material.
For example, a domestic violence shelter employee may lose faith in the possibility of any relationship being healthy. Anyone who interacts with a child may lose the trust of a child abuse investigator.
Some of the common effects of secondary stress can be:
• Feelings of professional isolation
• Heavier case loads
• Regular interaction with traumatized individuals might worsen the impacts of secondary trauma
• Employees may take more sick days
• Morale may worsen
• Individuals may become less productive
• Organizations may experience high turnover rate as individuals quit their jobs.
How do you experience secondary stress?
STS can occur in child abuse investigators, prosecutors, judges, therapists, health care professionals, animal shelter workers and many others work in high-stress, trauma-exposed fields.
However, it can also affect individuals who do not work in high-trauma fields but are profoundly impacted by stories that they are exposed to.
Symptoms can include feeling fearful or irritable, hypertension, thoughts of being helpless, difficulty sleeping and intrusive images of the event.
A reduction in one’s capacity or interest to tolerate the suffering of others is one of the defining characteristics of compassion fatigue, which was first defined as a STS reaction.
Common sources of secondary traumatic stress can be:
• Facing the death of a child or adult family member of someone you know of work with
• Continuing to work with people where serious maltreatment, domestic violence or sexual abuse is occurring
• Investigating a vicious abuse/neglect report
• Frequent/chronic exposure to emotional and detailed accounts of traumatic events by children
• Photographic or video images of horrific injuries or scenes of a recent serious injury or death
• Assistance with supporting grieving family members after a child abuse death
• Frequently viewing and/or hearing accounts of war crimes in other countries, including the atrocities committed against women and children
• Frequently viewing violent movies and/or television shows
• ‘Doom scrolling’ and constantly consuming negative news stories.
What you can do to reduce the impact of secondary stress
The good news is that you can get rid of this type of stress by introducing some proactive techniques to assist you in lessening the impact of secondary situations in your day-to-day life.
Industries that have been affected by secondary stress issues for some time have created tools and resources to assist their people with creating coping strategies.
For example, the education industry has created tips to assist teachers to ensure taking care of themselves remains a top priority. In recent years, educator self-care has gained popularity and is now universally acknowledged as being crucial to academic achievement and the prevention of burnout in teachers.
Some of the ways that you can create self-care for yourself include:
• Plan some time just for you.
• Spend some time doing whatever it is that keeps you in check so that you may be the best version of yourself.
• Participate in mindfulness training or meditation.
• Enjoy exercise in a way that makes sense for you.
• Try journaling, creating art, or listening to your favorite music multiple times every week, or perhaps every day.
• Enjoy a quiet morning cup of herbal tea and take 10 minutes to collect your thoughts and energies for the day.
• Sit outside in a green space and listen to the birds chirping.
Additionally, other ways to support yourself and reduce the impact of secondary stress include getting outdoors, staying away from your phone, the internet and TV, and reducing the amount of time in general you spend on social media and sending emails.
Create the transition process from work to home that works for you. This may be something as simple as having particular relaxing music that you listen to on your journey home, sitting in your car in your garage and taking several deep breaths before going inside, sitting in a quiet space at the front of your home before entering into the fray of everyone in the home, going for a walk at the local park before going home – essentially, any other activity that allows you to ‘shed’ your day, let go of all that has happened and relax once you’re in your own space.
This is really important so that you can wind down effectively and transition yourself from day into night. A quality transition routine will also underpin great sleep routines.
Maintaining relationships with your family and friends is crucial when things are tough, especially if you live alone. Plan at least once each week to have a phone call, online video chat, or lengthy text exchange with a close friend or family member. To have a pleasant experience, connect while you are at your most energetic.
When it comes to our daily thinking, it is often really helpful to have the skillset of reframing our thoughts so that we can directly influence the way we feel about what we’re seeing, hearing and experiencing. In today’s society, we have been trained to react to information as it comes to us, and without realizing it we have built a tendency within ourselves to be more inclined to cling onto unfavorable (rather than favorable) notions.
It’s why, when during a busy day where nine out of ten things go smoothly, we focus on the one thing that did not go as planned.
Reframing is a technique that allows you to take thinking about something in a negative way and turn it around to perceive it as an opportunity or a good idea. On occasion, it can assist us in reaching a favorable conclusion – or at the very least, a neutral one.
An illustration could be: “Online learning is extremely challenging.” Although it is accurate, this thinking can be reframed as one of several other things, such as “I get to work in cozy sweats today” or “I can get better at technology when I learn how to construct online learning experiences for my presentations”.
Like everything in life, reframing is something that comes with practice. It becomes second nature for you when you consciously spend time practicing how it fits into your day.
Be gracious and compassionate to yourself. Have a good cry, if you need to, or scream into a pillow after a challenging day. This is a terrific method to release tension and get ready for the next day. Forgive yourself for anything that didn’t go as planned and acknowledge the opportunities that have arisen because things happened in a different way. If you can think of one positive thing that happened during the day, it’s an added bonus.
Ask for help when you need it. We all need help sometimes so, speak up if you need assistance when circumstances become too much to handle. Inform someone you trust that you require a break or support. We all have people we can lean on when we need to. We just have to remember that it’s OK to ask.
If things get really rocky and you find that your capacity to function at work, and uphold healthy relationships with friends and family, is being significantly affected by physical and emotional symptoms, get help from a qualified therapist or medical expert.
Case Study: Secondary stress and coping: a case study of social workers employed in the South African Police Service
One of the most violent nations in the world is thought to be South Africa. The foundations for a divided and separated society, where violence was recognized as an acceptable means of resolving disputes in order to maintain the dominance of one racial group over all other groups, were set by colonialism and apartheid.
Criminal violence has increased as South African society has become more divided along social and economic lines. Yet, violence in the nation has shifted from being political to being criminal in nature.
The South African Police are charged with the seemingly impossible task of attempting to preserve peace and order in the face of this brutality and the suffering it causes.
The study of primary trauma victims has long been the focus of empirical research in the expanding area of traumatology. Yet, in recent years, there has been a lot of focus on the secondary effects of traumatization on individuals who provide counselling to primary trauma sufferers.
An often-overlooked secondary group of professionals who support the police authorities by acting as occupational and forensic social workers is housed within the South African Police Service.
In a nation like South Africa, where social problems are pervasive and affect every aspect of South African culture, the profession of social work is naturally stressful and demanding. Also, secondary traumatization is a specific professional stressor that has a major negative influence on these social workers as they investigate child abuse or offer counselling to a police officer.
Two issues arise:
• How are these social workers affected by the volume of distressing information to which they are routinely exposed?
• What coping mechanisms do they use?
In order to comprehend and lessen the harmful impacts of secondary traumatic stress, it was deemed essential to investigate the effects of secondary traumatization encountered by these social workers in the South African Police Service. Furthermore, by giving them the right assistance, social work supervisors can improve the level of care their social workers provide to patients.
Therefore, it was also deemed vital to investigate the pressures these social workers encounter and to pinpoint the essential support systems necessary for such therapeutic initiatives.
So, the main goal of this study was to investigate the type and degree of secondary traumatic stress that social workers employed by the South African Police Service faced. This study used an exploratory, descriptive, and correlational research approach, while the research methodology used combined quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This research was classified as a case study since it comprised a comprehensive analysis of a bounded system made up of social workers employed by SAPS.
The study was divided into two phases: the first part involved administering questionnaire booklets with open-ended questions and seven typical research tools in group settings. In addition, social workers who were unable to attend the group meetings were sent questionnaires and a self-addressed envelope.
The research methods assessed the type of secondary trauma exposure, degrees of secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, satisfaction with one’s ability to help others, burnout, coping mechanisms, and aspects of the workplace.
Two hundred survey booklets were given out, and one hundred and twenty-eight complete surveys were returned. Using the statistical software SAS and SPSS, descriptive and inferential statistics were utilized to analyze the quantitative data.
30 participants who took part in the first stage of the study and who indicated they would be open to being interviewed were purposefully chosen for the second phase: an interview stage.
In order to learn more about the participants’ perceptions and experiences of secondary trauma while working for SAPS, a structured research tool was employed to direct the interview. The interviews were conducted in-person, over the phone, or via Skype.
Atlasti, a qualitative computer tool that aided the researcher in thematic analysis, was used to analyze the qualitative data that resulted from the interviews. The researcher used reflexivity when analyzing the qualitative data as a result of adopting qualitative methodologies.
128 social professionals in total, all of whom were employed in South Africa, took part in the study, including 102 occupational social workers and 26 forensic social workers.
When viewed as different subfields of occupational and forensic social work, as well as within each discipline, the degree of exposure to secondary trauma varied significantly. This variance showed up in the frequency and length of the cases.
Particularly devastating situations were those in which the sexual abuse was severe, or the child had passed away as a result of intense abuse, according to the forensic social workers who conducted the interviews.
Comparatively, occupational social workers said that some of the worst instances they had handled involved police officers who became incapacitated, as well as situations in which they had to deal with police suicides, family killings, or femicide-suicides.
The majority of subjects had moderate to high degrees of burnout as well as average to high levels of secondary traumatic stress disorder and vicarious trauma. Burnout and secondary traumatic stress levels also had a significant positive association.
Average degrees of compassion fulfilment were felt by most individuals in their work. Participants identified a variety of coping mechanisms and resources that took into account many personal characteristics, including physical, emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual.
Participants exhibited high levels of resilience, and the results showed a negative relationship between resilience and vicarious trauma. Between the various ranks of the participants, there were many noteworthy variances.
Individuals with a higher rank reported having experienced more trauma and scored considerably higher for secondary trauma. Those who were colored reported considerably lower degrees of vicarious traumatization than those who were black.
A number of statistically significant discrepancies between the forensic and occupational social workers were also noticeable. As comparison to occupational social workers, forensic social workers displayed significantly higher degrees of vicarious trauma, and they also displayed more self-intimacy distortions. Also, compared to occupational social workers, forensic social workers had fewer coping strategies and poorer levels of resilience.
Moreover, participants’ satisfaction with the SAPS work environment was below average. The results of the work environment scale revealed that there were issues with the interpersonal aspects of the workplace, and that levels of colleague support were below average.
Significant discrepancies existed between black and white participants’ levels of job satisfaction. These discoveries advance knowledge of trauma in racially divided communities.
The complicated correlations between the many research variables were discovered by multivariate analysis, adding to the idea of trauma in polarized cultures. With the exception of the vicarious trauma variable, which was split into two independent variables to account for views about oneself and beliefs about others, two structural equation models were created to illustrate the correlations between the variables examined in the study. The models
burnout as well as the relationship between traumatic stress exposure and vicarious trauma (self).
Exercise 3.3: Secondary traumatic stress scale
Course Manual 4: Stress and Mental Health
Introduction
While stress in and of itself is not considered to be a mental health condition, there are a number of ways in which it is related to, and can seriously affect, the state of our mental health.
Our emotional, psychological and social wellbeing are all parts of our mental health. Our mental health influences our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It also influences how we respond to stress, interact with others, and make decisions. Every period of life, from childhood through adolescence to maturity, is vital for mental health.
If you have mental health issues, they may have an impact on your thinking, mood and behavior over the course of your life. There are numerous elements that affect mental health issues, such as:
• Biological components, including DNA or the chemistry of the brain
• Experiences with trauma or abuse in life
• A history of mental illness in the family
Poor mental health and mental illness are not the same things, despite the fact that the phrases are sometimes used interchangeably. An individual may not have a mental disorder, but they can have poor mental health. Similarly, a person with a mental illness may go through phases of good physical, mental and social health.
It is important to keep in mind that a person’s mental health can alter over time and can be highly dependent on a variety of circumstances.
A person’s mental health may be affected if the demands placed on them are greater than their capacity for coping and the resources available to assist them are limited. For instance, someone may have poor mental health if they are working long hours, providing care for a relative, or going through financial difficulties.
The link between stress and mental health
Mental health issues can be brought on by stress, and this may exacerbate already existing issues. For instance, if you are under a lot of stress, this could cause you to suffer depression or anxiety. Conversely, suffering from depression or anxiety can also cause you to experience higher levels of stress – this can create a cycle. Maybe a stressful or traumatic time period could cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stress can be a result of mental health issues. Dealing with the daily symptoms of your mental health issue may prove to be challenging for you. Organizing your medicine, medical appointments, or other treatments may potentially cause you stress.
To relieve tension, you can turn to recreational drugs or alcohol. This can worsen your stress levels and have an impact on your mental health.
Talking about mental illnesses like anxiety or depression is only one aspect of mental health.
According to research, having excellent mental health is related to:
• Enhanced creativity in learning
• Greater life expectancy
• Improved social connections and physical health; and
• Higher levels of productivity.
Mental health is a condition of mental wellness that enables people to manage life’s stressors, develop their potential, study and work effectively, and give back to their communities. It is a crucial element of health and wellbeing that supports both our individual and group capacity to decide, form connections and influence the world we live in.
Mental health is a condition of mental wellness that enables people to manage life’s stressors, develop their potential, study and work effectively, and give back to their communities. Accessing mental wellness is a core human right. It is essential for socioeconomic, communal and personal development.
The absence of mental diseases is only one aspect of mental wellness. It has variable degrees of difficulty and suffering, is experienced differently by each individual, and may have very different social and therapeutic implications. It exists on a complex continuum.
Mental health issues include psychosocial impairments, mental illnesses and other mental states linked to high levels of suffering, functional limitations, or risk of self-harm. Although this is not always or necessarily the case, people with mental health disorders are more likely to have lower levels of mental wellbeing.
Factors that affect mental health
Many individual, social, and structural factors may interact throughout our lives to support or undermine our mental health and cause a change in where we fall on the mental health continuum.
People may be more susceptible to mental health issues due to personal psychological and biological characteristics like emotional intelligence, substance use, and heredity conditions.
Individuals are more likely to develop mental health issues when they are exposed to unfavorable social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental conditions, such as poverty, violence, inequality, and environmental squalor.
Challenges can appear at any stage of life, but those that happen during developmentally vulnerable times, notably early childhood, have been shown to be most harmful to mental health in adult years. For instance, physical punishment and strict parenting are known to harm children’s health, and bullying is a major risk factor for mental health issues.
Among other things, our unique social and emotional capacities and characteristics as well as satisfying interpersonal relationships, high-quality education, respectable employment, secure neighborhoods, and cohesive communities combine to create protective factors that seem to persist throughout our lives and help us be more resilient.
At various scales, society contains both threats and safeguards for mental health.
Risk for individuals, families, and communities is increased by local threats. Global risks, which include economic downturns, disease outbreaks, humanitarian crises, forced displacement, and the escalating climate issue, raise the risk for entire populations.
There are only a few risks and protective factors that can be reliably predicted. All other factors can impact us at any time and the level of stress we are experiencing and our ability to be resilient in the face of the impact will determine how our mental health fares in that circumstance.
Despite being exposed to a risk factor, the majority of people do not go on to acquire a mental health illness, while many people who have no known risk factors do so nonetheless. Yet, the interrelated factors that affect mental health can either support or detract from it.
One of the greatest impacts to our mental health is our ability to get quality sleep on a regular basis.
The term “insomnia” refers to a persistent problem with getting to sleep, maintaining sleep, consolidation of sleep, or the general quality of sleep.
Insomnia is known to occur despite people allocating enough time and creating a suitable sleep environment for themselves each night. Excessive daytime sleepiness, lethargy, irritability, and other impairments are common among people with insomnia.
The incidence of insomnia varies between studies.
Increased stress levels have also been demonstrated to affect the way that people experience sleep. Individuals who are under constant stress may find that they spend less time in deep sleep and have disturbances during REM sleep.
Stress can also play a part in whether insomnia is experienced temporarily or whether it becomes a chronic condition.
Temporary Insomnia
Short-term or acute insomnia is the term used to describe a condition where a person has insomnia symptoms for less than three months. Short-term insomnia symptoms might be brought on by unexpected events such as:
• Problems with interpersonal relationships
• Issues relating to the job
• Financial setbacks
• Bereavement and grief
• The identification or manifestation of a disease or other medical condition.
Acute stress may also be brought on by considerable modifications made to your sleeping quarters. There are all sorts of small changes that can create issues with sleep. For example, you might have new neighbors who play music until late at night, or there may be a car that leaves early every morning and wakes you up. There may be a streetlight that lets too much light into your room, or there might be nocturnal animals that make a noise outside your window. Even things like different noises and light conditions in a room when you’re travelling can cause short-term sleep issues.
Once the stressful scenario has passed and the acute stress caused has subsided, the symptoms of short-term insomnia may start to fade. Nonetheless, some people can develop a secondary, recurrent cycle of daytime sleep anxiety and nighttime sleep loss as a result that leads to chronic insomnia.
Chronic Insomnia
If a person experiences symptoms of chronic insomnia at least three times per week for at least three months, then they are said to experience chronic insomnia.
Chronic sleeplessness can be significantly exacerbated by ongoing pressures. These stressors may include:
• Challenges at work
• Marital or family problems
• Death of a loved one
• Serious sickness or injury
• Significant life changes, and
• Low socioeconomic status.
Not everyone experiences chronic sleeplessness because of ongoing stress, but people with anxiety disorders are more likely to experience the symptoms of insomnia. In addition, alterations in sleep patterns brought on by occurrences in one’s life may also contribute to insomnia.
People frequently experience anxiety about sleeping and other elements of their lives once chronic insomnia takes hold. This heightens daily stress, which in turn makes insomnia symptoms worse.
Other daytime effects of insomnia that can cause or exacerbate stress include:
• Fatigue and malaise
• Difficulty focusing
• Paying attention, or accessing memories
• Poor performance in social, family, professional or academic contexts
• Irritability and mood disturbances
• Hyperactivity, aggression, impulsivity, and other behavioral issues
• Greater likelihood of mistakes and accidents
• Less energy and desire.
Understand how stress affects relationships, values and meaningful purpose in life
Both physical and mental health are crucial aspects of overall health. For instance, depression raises the danger of many different physical health issues, especially chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and stroke. In a similar vein, having chronic illnesses raises your likelihood of developing mental disease.
When someone is under significant amounts of stress, it’s easy for them to feel like they’re failing at being able to control everything in their lives. For some, this means that they’re failing at being successful.
When comparing this to the perfect lives of others that are on display in the social world, it can leave some people feeling like they’re failing in life in general and this can lead to the onset of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. When high levels of stress lead to mental health conditions, it can heighten a person’s need to protect themselves, and often this can show up as a person isolating themselves from others – often so they can hide their feelings of shame and humiliation at not being able to keep up.
As a result, when someone is under long-term, chronic stress, it often places an additional burden on them to try and have positive relationships with other people. This can appear in their inability to maintain good working relationships in the workplace, or it may be that the relationships outside work take the toll. In the most severe cases, relationships in all aspects of life are affected and the individual can become completely isolated and unable to communicate effectively in any corner of their life.
People are generally social creatures by nature and when first working with people, psychologists often examine the recent changes a person is experiencing in their interpersonal relationships to gauge the impact of the stress that person is exposed to.
For example, a person who is overcome by grief will find it difficult to communicate with others until their sadness has subsided to a level where they are better able to manage it. Similarly, a person who is experiencing significant stress cannot relate to others effectively unless their level of stress is controllable.
The sheer pressure that is caused by stress forces a person to spend a lot of time contemplating their current predicament, leaving little mental space for other relevant issues. It is hard to find space to deal with the demands and needs of others if you are in a critical place from a mental health perspective yourself. The higher your stress levels rise, the more space the pressure that is caused from that stress takes up, therefore there is no space left to accommodate the needs and wants of others.
Stress also negatively impacts personal values due to low self-esteem. The greater the stress, the more an individual will experience the exhaustion of trying to deal with the pressure that the stress creates.
Stress impacts the whole system – mind, body and spirit – and when the whole system is under pressure there is no avenue to turn to for additional support.
The more you add into the system, the greater the load that is carried and as we all know, at some point the load we carry gets too heavy and we have no choice but to drop it.
The only way to avoid dropping the load is to shed some of the weight and often it is things like our values and beliefs that are shed first because they seem to be the easiest way to be able to move forward.
When it all becomes ‘too hard’, we have less energy to care about the things that are important to us and so we just let go. As a result, it becomes difficult for a person to uphold their own ideals in this circumstance, which is why stressed-out people lose their personal ethics and values.
Stress also makes it more difficult for someone to maintain their meaningful goals in life. When things get really hard, and the weight of the stressors makes us too exhausted to maintain a large focus, we turn our attention instead to the things that are right in front of us.
This can lead to the emphasizes being placed on the difficulties we’re experiencing – things like difficult losses that lead to challenging circumstances. It is in this way that stress makes a person significantly more pessimistic than they would normally be, and as a result, they are unable or unable to concentrate on the crucial factors that give life a meaningful purpose.
How to reduce psychological stress
Although resilience is frequently defined as the capacity to recover from adversity, research indicates there may be more to it than that. In recent times, resilience has been offered as a solution to being able to better cope with the higher stress loads being experienced in a day-to-day context.
However, it is also true to state that if you reduce the effects of the stress you are experiencing day-to-day, then you don’t need to be anywhere near as resilient on a daily basis.
So, how much resilience do we actually need?
Effective stress management often entails one or a mixture of the following:
• Recovery: returning to pre-stressor levels of functioning and restoring regular living
• Resistance: when our reaction to a stressor or unpleasant event is minimal or non-existent
• Reconfiguration: a return to the old routine. An important event has the potential to favorably or negatively alter who we are and how we live.
Contrary to recovery and resistance, reconfiguration implies transformation; rather than going back to how we were before the stressor, we move past simply preserving or sustaining our previous existence.
We can lessen stress and its associated mental health issues and advance by accepting the ‘new normal’.
Multiple research studies have shown that people respond to stress differently and that it is our sense of coherence (SOC) that can play a significant role in reducing our suffering and exposure to unpleasant emotions.
Our sense of coherence enables us to better manage stress in daily life, maintain good health and stay well.
In general, sense of coherence has three main components: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness.
The degree to which people can understand and make sense of events in their lives is referred to as the feeling of comprehensibility. Understanding what is going on makes a person better equipped to handle challenging circumstances.
The degree to which people believe they have enough available resources (internal and external) to meet their requirements is measured by their sense of manageability. Having control over one’s life promotes a better quality of life.
In addition, the degree to which people perceive that their lives have emotional significance and that their issues are challenges rather than obstacles, is what constitutes the source of meaningfulness. People are more motivated to make an attempt to face life when events have purpose.
SOC is a general orientation that communicates a sense of trust because stressors are predictable, that resources are accessible to deal with problems, and that challenges are worthwhile because they have meaning for the individual.
Martin Seligman, credited as the father of positive psychology, also contends that our capacity to persevere through problems in life and general wellness depend critically on our level of hope and optimism about the future. They are a part of a “family of strengths” that indicate a hopeful outlook on the future.
Case Study: Stress and Mental Health
After being advised by her cardiologist to concentrate on stress management as her primary form of treatment for her ‘heart attack’ symptoms, a young woman sought out psychological therapy.
To the outside world, everything seemed to be in the 36-year-old’s grasp. She was in line for promotion to vice president as the marketing director of a local high-tech company. She was socially active, travelled extensively, and drove a brand-new sports vehicle.
Although everything appeared to be normal on the surface, her mind took her to some dark places and she would catch herself worrying that ‘the wheels will come off my new car’ or about how she was going to ‘hide the fact that underneath the carefully curated surface, she was really a mess.’
She had experienced attacks of shortness of breath, heart palpitations, chest pain, dizziness, and tingling in her fingers and toes over the previous several months. She would grow apprehensive to the point of panic, filled with a sense of impending doom. She awoke every day with the terrifying suspicion that an attack could occur without cause or notice.
She hurried to the emergency room of a local hospital twice, thinking she was having a heart attack. Following a disagreement with her boyfriend on the direction of their relationship, she experienced her first ‘heart attack’.
The emergency room physician said that she was ‘simply hyperventilating’ after reviewing her EKG and demonstrated how to deal with this situation in the future. She returned home feeling silly, irate, and bewildered. To her, it had felt very real that she had nearly suffered a heart attack.
After arguing with her employer about a new marketing plan at work, she suffered her next, more serious attack. This time, she insisted on being admitted to the hospital for a night in order to undergo a battery of diagnostic tests and to speak with her internist. No heart attack was the outcome in both cases. Her internist gave her a tranquillizer prescription to help her relax.
She consulted a cardiologist because she was now convinced that her own doctor was mistaken. The cardiologist performed another battery of tests, but this time there were no physical findings. The cardiologist came to the conclusion that stress was primarily to blame for the symptoms of a heart attack and panic attacks. She was referred by the physician to a stress-focused psychologist.
Her psychologist conducted stress tests and discussed how stress could result in her physical complaints during her initial appointment. The sources and characteristics of her health issues were explained to her at her subsequent visit using the test results. The results of the tests showed that she was extremely sensitive to stress, that she was under a great deal of stress at work, at home, and in her personal life, and that she was exhibiting a variety of stress-related symptoms in her endocrine, sympathetic neurological, musculoskeletal and emotional systems. She didn’t exercise, regularly misused alcohol and caffeine, didn’t get enough sleep, didn’t eat healthily, and had a precarious financial situation.
The stress test revealed her susceptibility to stress, the source of her stress, and the ways in which stress manifested itself in her “heart attack” and other symptoms. Her bewilderment was greatly reduced by her newly discovered information, which also helped her to divide her worries into easier-to-handle issues.
She became aware of the enormous pressure she was under to settle down and get married from both her mother and her fiancé, despite the fact that she didn’t feel ready. Her workload was becoming too much as a new marketing campaign started at the same time.
It became clear to her how any significant emotional event, such as a fight with her partner or her boss, would push her over the edge. She began to understand that her body reacted by causing her to hyperventilate, have palpitations, chest discomfort, vertigo, anxiety, and a terrible sense of impending doom. Simply put, stress was ruining her life.
Derived from Lyle H. Miller, Ph.D., and Alma Dell Smith, Ph.D.’s The Stress Solution.
Exercise 3.4: Mental health assessment
1. Was there an answer(s) that surprised you?
2. Did one of the questions give you clarity around an area that you hadn’t realized was affecting you?
3. What is one simple thing you can do differently to help you experience that area of life differently?
Course Manual 5: Burnout
Introduction
Burnout is a condition of extreme and protracted stress-related emotional, bodily and mental depletion. It happens when you experience emotional exhaustion, overwhelm, and an inability to handle ongoing expectations. As the stress in your life mounts, you start to lose the enthusiasm and drive that initially motivated you to accept a particular role.
Burnout not only causes you to become less productive and less energetic, but it also makes you feel more hopeless, cynical and resentful. You can eventually feel as though you have nothing more to contribute to life.
Burnout has a detrimental impact on all aspects of life, including your home, job, and social lives. It can also alter your body over time, affecting your immune system and making you more susceptible to ailments like the flu and the common cold.
Exhaustion, cynicism (less affiliation with the job), and perceptions of diminished professional abilities are the three key characteristics of burnout. Simply put, you are showing indications of burnout if you feel worn out, start to despise your job, and/or start to feel less competent at work.
The majority of people’s waking hours are spent at work. Hence, it can seriously affect your life if you despise your job, dread going to work, and get no satisfaction from what you’re doing.
Burnout must be addressed immediately due to its wide range of effects.
The difference between stress and burnout
It can be challenging to distinguish between stress and burnout because their boundaries are often hazy.
Burnout is the result of unmanaged and accumulated stress over time. Consider burnout to be the older, meaner sibling of stress. It needs stress to exist, but stress can exist without making you exhausted.
Burnout may come from constant stress, but excessive stress isn’t the same thing as burnout.
Generally speaking, stress involves too much; that is, too many demands on your bodily and mental wellbeing.
For individuals suffering from being stressed, it is possible to believe that if they can just get things under control, they will feel better.
On the other hand, burnout is about not doing enough. Being burned out entails experiencing a sense of emptiness and mental exhaustion, as well as a lack of drive and compassion. Unlike those who are stressed, individuals who are burnt out frequently don’t believe that their circumstances will improve.
Burnout is the feeling of being completely depleted, whereas excessive stress is the sensation of being drowned with obligations. And while being under a lot of stress generally makes you aware of it, burnout sometimes sneaks up on you.
A great way to see the difference between stress and burnout is depicted in the following table:
Burnout versus Stress
For most people, stress and exhaustion are daily occurrences. With stress, an end is inevitable, but getting there could be challenging. On the other side, burnout is a cycle of unfavorable feelings and withdrawal that happens when you put too much of yourself – emotionally, intellectually or physically – into anything without taking any steps to recover.
People frequently seek out a psychologist’s help for psychological reasons when they are under a lot of stress. With burnout, it is essential to seek professional assistance because its primary symptoms stimulate increasing levels of withdrawal and isolation, possibly to the point of depression.
Signs, symptoms and causes of burnout
Everyone experiences burnout differently, though it can have an impact on your physical, mental, and emotional health.
People are creatures of habit, and when normal routines alter for us, it’s frequently a clue that something is wrong.
Looking at things like changes in your sleep patterns, whether your diet has changed significantly, are you consuming more or less food than normal, and have you changed the way you exercise cam give you some clues as to whether you’re displaying burnout symptoms.
Here are some of the common signs experienced by people who are diagnosed with burnout:
One of the signs of burnout is feeling empty, worn out, and unable to handle daily life. If you ignore your burnout it could make it even more challenging to function than what you are currently experiencing.
While everyone is different, and therefore will experience their burnout in a unique way, there are several common physical and mental signs of burnout that it is important to know:
Knowing the warning signals will help you decide whether the stress you are under is having a bad effect on you.
• Issues with the digestive system
• Problems concentrating
• High blood pressure
• High blood sugar levels
• Weak immune system (getting sick more frequently)
• Recurrent headaches
• Fatigue
• Lack of interest or pleasure
• Feelings of worthlessness
• Suicidal thoughts
A high-stress work environment doesn’t always result in burnout. You might not encounter the negative consequences that can lead to burnout if your stress is effectively handled. Yet, some people (and those in particular occupations) are more likely than others to have burnout symptoms.
According to the 2019 National Physician Burnout, Depression, and Suicide Survey, 44% of doctors report feeling burned out.
Of course, burnout affects more than just doctors. Every level of employee in every industry faces potential risk. According to a 2018 Gallup report, employee burnout can be caused by five main job characteristics:
1. Unjustified time constraints. Workers who report having sufficient time to complete their work are 70% less likely to suffer from high burnout, but those who are unable to get more time (such as paramedics and firefighters) are more susceptible to burnout.
2. Management’s lack of cooperation and support. Support from the manager acts as a psychological defense against stress. Workers are 70% less likely to regularly experience signs of burnout if they feel warmly supported by their manager.
3. An unclear role. Only 60% of employees are aware of the expectations of their role. Employees may become worn out just trying to figure out what they should be doing when expectations are like moving targets.
4. An excessive workload. Even the most upbeat employees will experience hopelessness when the burden appears insurmountable. Overwhelming feelings might easily result in burnout symptoms.
5. Discrimination. High levels of burnout are 2.3 times more likely to occur among workers who believe they are being unfairly treated at work. Favoritism, unequal pay, and maltreatment by a coworker are all examples of unjust treatment.
Although pressures from other aspects of your life might also raise these levels, the stress that leads to burnout can primarily come from your employment.
Your job is a common cause of burnout. Yet, everyone who feels overworked and underpaid is susceptible to burnout, from the diligent office worker who hasn’t had a vacation in years to the exhausted stay-at-home mother juggling childcare, housework, and an elderly parent.
Burnout, however, is not just a result of demanding work or having too many obligations. Burnout is influenced by a variety of other variables, such as your personality and way of life. In fact, your daily activities and perspective on the world might contribute just as significantly to overwhelming stress as your obligations at work or home.
Causes of burnout at work
• Having little or no control over your work, in your opinion
• A lack of appreciation or compensation for efforts
• Uncertain or unreasonable job expectations
• Working in a monotonous or unchallenging environment
• Engaging in high-pressure or chaotic work.
Lifestyle-related causes:
• Overworked with insufficient downtime for socializing or relaxing
• The absence of close friendships
• Taking on too many obligations without receiving enough support from others
• Short sleeping hours.
Burnout can also be exacerbated by certain personality features:
• A tendency towards perfection; nothing is ever good enough
• A pessimistic outlook on the world and oneself
• A need to be in charge and a resistance to cede authority to others
• An ambitious Type A personality.
How to deal with burnout when it occurs
If left untreated, burnout signs and symptoms can result in:
• Alienation from activities linked to employment. Those who are burnt out find their occupations to be more and more annoying and demanding. You risk becoming pessimistic about your workplace and your co-workers. Also, you could start to emotionally remove yourself from your work and feel numb about it.
• Feeling emotionally spent. Untreated burnout symptoms might eventually leave you feeling emotionally spent and unable to function.
• A decline in performance. Burnout impacts routine duties at work or at home if taking care of family members is your primary responsibility. Those who are experiencing burnout symptoms are generally uncreative, have trouble focusing, and feel negatively about their tasks. Combined, these factors lead to diminished performance.
It is, therefore, essential that you deal with the symptoms of burnout before they take hold in your life and morph into full blow burnout.
Trying to push through the tiredness and carry on as you have been can only result in more emotional and physical harm, whether you are aware of the warning signs of imminent burnout or you’ve already reached your breaking point.
It’s time to take a break and change course by learning how to support yourself in overcoming burnout and regaining a sense of wellbeing and optimism.
Burnout management calls for the “Three R” strategy:
• Recognize. Watch out for burnout’s warning signals.
• Reverse. By getting help and controlling your stress, you can undo the harm.
• Resilience. By looking after your physical and emotional health, you can increase your ability to cope with stress.
You may manage symptoms and regain your energy, focus, and sense of wellbeing by using the following advice for preventing or managing burnout.
Tip #1: Reach out to others
Burnout makes it impossible to care, let alone take steps, to improve oneself when problems seem insurmountable and the future appears dark. But contrary to popular belief, you have a lot more control over stress. You can take proactive measures to manage extreme stress and restore balance to your life. Reaching out to people is one of the most efficient ways to reconnect to what is going on around you.
Social interaction is nature’s remedy for stress, and speaking face-to-face with a patient listener is one of the quickest methods to relax and de-stress. Your conversation partner only needs to be a good listener – someone who will pay close attention without getting sidetracked or passing judgment. Find someone who listens rather than someone who only has time for ‘curing’ what’s wrong with you.
Reach out to your partner, family, and friends, as well as anyone else who is dear to you. You won’t become a burden to others if you connect with them. That will only solidify your friendship because most friends and family members will be touched that you trust them enough to confide in them. Make the time you spend with loved ones positive and joyful by trying not to focus about the things that are exhausting you.
Get along with your co-workers better. Becoming friends with co-workers can protect you from experiencing job burnout. For instance, when you take a break, consider interacting with your co-workers rather than staring at your smartphone, or arrange social outings after work.
Attempt to keep negative people at a minimum. Spending time with folks who just complain and are negative will make you feel down. Try to spend as little time as possible with someone who is negative if you have to work with them.
Join an organization or cause that has personal meaning for you. You can find a place to chat to like-minded individuals about how to cope with daily stress – and to meet new friends – by joining a religious, social, or support organization. If there is a professional group for your industry, you can go to meetings and meet people who are dealing with the same responsibilities at work.
Make new pals. It’s never too late to make new acquaintances and broaden your social network if you don’t feel like you have someone to turn to.
Giving to others brings great pleasure to a lot of people, can help you feel much less stressed, and can help you make more friends.
Helping others doesn’t have to require a lot of time or effort, even though it’s crucial not to take on too much when you’re dealing with overwhelming stress. Even the smallest gestures, such as a nice word or a smile, can lift your spirits and reduce stress for both you and the other person.
Tip 2: Change the way you perceive your job
The best approach to prevent job burnout is to quit your job and look for one you love instead, whether your job is one that keeps you on your toes all day or is tedious and unfulfilling. Of course, for many of us, changing jobs or careers is not a realistic option; instead, we are thankful to have a profession that allows us to support our families. Yet no matter what the circumstance, there are still things you may do to raise your mood.
Strive to find some meaning in what you do. Even in routine professions, it’s possible to think about how your work benefits others or provides a much-needed good or service. Put your attention on the parts of your job that you enjoy, even if it’s only conversing with co-workers during lunch. You can reestablish a sense of direction and control by altering the way you view your work.
Achieve equilibrium in your life. If your job is making you unhappy, look for fulfilment and significance in other areas of your life, such as your friends, family, hobbies, or volunteer work. Pay attention to the aspects of your life that make you happy.
Make acquaintances at work. Strong relationships at work can lessen boredom and fend off the effects of burnout. A difficult or unfulfilling job can be stressful, and having pals to laugh about with during the day can help. It can also help you perform better at work or just get through a bad day.
Take a break. Try to take a complete break from work if burnout appears unavoidable. Take a trip, use your sick days, request a leave of absence, or do everything else to get away from the situation. Take advantage of the time away to rest up and look into other rehabilitation strategies.
Tip #3: Reconsider your priorities
Spend some time reflecting on your aspirations and dreams. Are you skipping out on something that matters to you truly? This may be an opportunity to slow down, give yourself some space to ponder, and rediscover what truly makes you happy.
Establish limits. Don’t push yourself too far. Understand how to decline requests that take up your time. If this is challenging for you, keep in mind that saying “no” frees you up to say “yes” to the things you want to be doing.
Get away from electronics every day. Decide on a time each day when you will entirely unplug. Put your laptop away, turn off your phone, and refrain from checking social media or email. Even 15 – 30 minutes will give you benefit.
Develop your artistic side. Burnout can be successfully treated with creativity. Take up a fun project, try something new, or pick up your old interest again. Choose hobbies that are unrelated to your job or whatever is making you stressed.
Schedule some downtime. The antithesis of the stress response, the relaxation response is triggered by relaxation techniques including yoga, meditation, and deep breathing or even simple things like sitting in nature for short periods of time.
Obtain lots of rest. Being exhausted makes it easier to become burned out since it impairs your judgement. Getting a good night’s sleep will help you stay calm in tense circumstances.
Tip # 4: Prioritize physical activity
Exercise is a potent stress reliever, even if it might be the last thing you feel like doing when you’re exhausted. You can also do it right now to improve your mood.
Try to work out for at least 30 minutes each day, or split that time up into 10-minute segments. A ten-minute stroll can lift your spirits for two hours.
Rhythmic exercise, where you move both your arms and legs, is a tremendously powerful technique to boost your mood, enhance energy, sharpen attention, and calm both the mind and body. Try dancing, weightlifting, swimming, martial arts, walking, running, or weight training.
Instead of keeping your attention on your thoughts, switch your attention to your body and how it feels as you move, such as the feel of the breeze on your skin or the sound of your feet striking the ground, to reduce tension as much as possible.
Tip # 5: Have a balanced diet to help with your mood and energy levels
Your mood and energy levels can be greatly affected by what you put into your body.
In particular, concentrate on eating less sugar and processed carbohydrates. Although you might yearn for comfort foods like pasta or French fries or sugary snacks, these high-carbohydrate items will rapidly make you feel low on energy and mood.
Limit your high intake of foods like caffeine, bad fats, and items containing hormones or artificial preservatives that can have a negative impact on your mood.
Increase your intake of Omega-3 fatty acids to improve your mood. The finest sources include seaweed, flaxseed, walnuts, and fatty fish including salmon, herring, mackerel, anchovies, and sardines.
Avoid nicotine. Smoking when you’re anxious could seem to be comforting, but nicotine is a strong stimulant that makes anxiety levels rise rather than fall.
Use alcohol sparingly. Alcohol temporarily eases anxiety, but when consumed in excess, it can exacerbate it.
Case Study: Impact of burnout on nursing and quality of care
Growing up, Ms. C and Ms. M had been best friends, and they had both always wanted to be nurses. After graduating from college, they were separated by various family and work obligations, and they started their nursing professions at various hospitals in various states. Both of them graduated at similar times and were working in medical-surgical units. They were committed to providing their patients with the best possible care.
The hospital where Ms. C worked experienced budget cuts over the course of her first year, and resources started to dwindle. Ms. C’s daily patient load increased from four to seven as a result of less staff being rostered on her unit.
She found it difficult to keep up with the growing workload and was unable to spend as much time with her patients as she would have liked. To help with the personnel shortage, the hospital implemented obligatory overtime, and Ms. C quickly started working a few hours past her typical 12-hour shifts and frequently six or seven days in a row. She was constantly exhausted and usually struggled to concentrate, especially when her shift was coming to a conclusion.
Her personal life was impacted; she made fewer phone calls to her family and appeared to never have time for her pals.
Ms. C possesses several of the personal risk factors for burnout, including being young, single, well educated, and in the early stages of her work. The real problem is her hostile work environment, which makes her unhappy and dissatisfied with her position.
Around 65% of the nurses in this workplace work 12 hours or more every day, including Ms. C.
She is consequently going through the first stage of burnout, which is marked by physical and emotional tiredness. If she doesn’t deal with her stress and job discontent, burnout will progress to its latter phases.
Ms. M’s friend Ms. C did find time for a phone call, and Ms. C was astounded by how content Ms. M was with her work. Ms. M listened as Ms. C ranted about how unhappy she was with her work. Ms. M. expressed sympathy for her predicament and spoke eloquently about her own recent admission to the medical urgent care unit. Because of the greater professional challenges and less patient load in the intensive care unit at her hospital, she persuaded Ms. C to shift there. Ms. M assured her, “You’ll really feel like you’re making a difference.” Ms. C, feeling inspired, put in a request for a transfer to the medical ICU and was successful in gaining a job there.
During her orientation and training in the intensive care unit, Ms. C regained her passion and enthusiasm. She once more looked forwards to going to work because she appreciated the technical challenges posed by the more intricate patient care.
Yet once she had become used to the unit, her patient load grew, and she once more found herself working overtime and long hours. She never felt fully rested, went home every day with a headache and backache, and had tremendous mood swings.
Once more, she withdrew from her loved ones and friends and started regularly overeating. She also started drinking a glass or two of wine every night to help her relax. A prescription mistake made by Ms. C was the ‘last straw’ for her.
The patient suffered no significant harm, but the patient’s doctor raged at Ms. C and several other nurses on the ward. Ms. C consequently doubted her decision to become a nurse and felt like a professional failure. She put up even more of a wall between herself and her friends, family, and co-workers.
Changes needed to be made to the system that was being run in the hospital so that all the personnel could work in a lower stress environment, however, because it can be difficult and take a long time to change organizational structure, individuals must also take steps to make changes in themselves to help reduce the impact of stress and burnout.
Attention to personal and professional lifestyle habits are integral steps in preventing and managing stress effectively. Self-care, time management, and strong interpersonal relationships are key elements for maintaining physical and psychosocial wellbeing.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, with proper diet, exercise, and sleep, is vital to avoiding the physical effects of stress, as is seeking activities that help to disengage individuals from their professional routine and provide enjoyment. Self-reflection as a way to remind oneself why he or she entered the healthcare profession and remaining “connected” to people are also important in managing stress and preventing burnout. Adequate time away from work is essential for maintaining a positive work/life satisfaction and has been the most common suggestion about how to avoid stress and burnout.
Working smarter refers to taking frequent “mini-breaks” to escape work stresses, varying daily work routines, and setting realistic goals. Nurses can also increase their sense of control by advocating for changes in the work environment and for adherence to institution policies, state and federal laws and regulations, and nursing association statements and principles.
Over the next few months, Ms. C starts to pay better attention to her health by eating a balanced diet and finding time for regular exercise, including a twice-weekly yoga class. She starts an informal support group with her peers on her unit, and the number of participants increases as the sessions become more popular. She also visits with the Human Resources staff to ask about workshops in stress management techniques. In addition, Ms. C leads a small group of her peers in approaching their nursing supervisor to discuss their concerns about the quality of patient care and staffing. With time, Ms. C has a renewed sense of purpose at work and has become involved in a multidisciplinary committee that is addressing quality of care. She also has become more active in her personal life, spending more time with friends and family and volunteering as a coach for a youth soccer team. She has scheduled her first vacation in two years, planning a 10-day cruise with her best friend, Ms. M.
Exercise 3.5: Self-assessment for burnout
1. Were you surprised by how large your total score was?
2. Was there a certain area that you scored higher/lower in that surprised you?
3. Given your total score, do you feel that you need to take some steps to reduce your stress so that you can stop burnout from occurring in your life?
4. What is the first step you think you need to take?
Course Manual 6: Depression
Introduction
Depression is a serious medical condition that frequently affects people’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Thankfully, it is also curable.
Sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities you used to get enjoyment from are major symptoms of depression. It can impair your ability to perform at work and at home, and cause a number of mental and physical issues.
Depression can range in severity from mild to severe and symptoms might include:
• experiencing sadness or depression
• loss of enjoyment or interest in once-enjoyed activities
• appetite changes, weight loss or increase unrelated to diets
• inability to sleep or excessive sleeping
• energy loss or increased fatigue
• an increase in pointless movement (such as hand-wringing, pacing or an inability to sit still) or slower speech or movement (these actions must be severe enough to be observable by others)
• a sense of worthlessness or guilt
• having trouble focusing, thinking, or making decisions
• suicidal or death-related ideas.
For depression to be diagnosed as a condition, symptoms must persist for at least two weeks and must indicate a change from your pre-existing level of functioning.
For people suffering from some of these symptoms, it’s important that medical assistance is sought in the first instance as some other medical issues like thyroid issues, brain tumors and vitamin deficiencies can mirror the symptoms of depression.
In any given year, depression is thought to afflict one in 15 adults (6.7%). In addition, 16.6% of the population will experience depression at some point in their lives. Although it can strike at any moment, depression typically first manifests itself in late adolescence to mid-life.
Depression is more common in women than in males. According to some research, one-third of women will go through a significant depressive episode at some point in their lives. When first-degree relatives (parents, children, or siblings) also have depression, there is a significant degree of heritability (about 40%).
Depression Is not sorrow, grief, or loss.
Although it can be common for people who have lost something to frequently label themselves as ‘depressed’ as a result, the loss of a loved one, the termination of a job, or the dissolution of a relationship, whilst trying events for a person to go through, are not the same as experiencing depression. These things are an experience of melancholy or grief in response to such circumstances.
Yet being depressed is not the same as being sad. The grieving process is normal, particular to each person, and shares some characteristics with depression. Depression and bereavement both have the potential to cause extreme sadness and withdrawal from daily activities.
However, they differ in several key ways:
• While someone is grieving, unpleasant emotions frequently come in waves and are blended with pleasant recollections of the deceased. For the majority of two weeks, mood and/or interest (pleasure) are diminished in serious depression.
• Self-esteem is typically preserved during mourning. Feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred are frequent in serious depression.
• When contemplating or fantasizing about ‘joining’ the deceased loved one, ideas of death may come to mind. Due to feelings of worthlessness, deservingness of life, or inability to handle the pain of melancholy, thoughts of suicide are common in serious depression.
• Depression and loss may coexist. Some people experience depression as a result of a loved one passing away, losing their job, becoming the victim of physical violence, or experiencing a big tragedy. When depression co-exists with grief, the grief is more severe and lasts longer than grief alone.
It’s extremely important to distinguish between grieving and depression because doing so can help people get the support, care and treatment they require.
The following things may contribute to depression:
• Biochemistry: Variations in a few brain chemicals may be a factor in the manifestation of depressive symptoms.
• Genetics: Depression may run in families due to genetics. For instance, if one identical twin develops depression, there is a 70% probability that the other would also get the condition at some point in life.
• Personality: It seems that those who have low self-esteem, are easily stressed out, or are usually gloomy are more prone to suffer from depression.
• Environmental factors: Certain people may be more susceptible to depression if they are constantly exposed to violence, neglect, abuse, or poverty.
Depression is one of the most manageable mental illnesses. Over time, between 80% and 90% of depressed individuals respond well to therapy. Virtually all patients have some symptom alleviation.
Initial assessment usually involves a health care provider carrying out a thorough diagnostic evaluation that includes a physical exam and an interview before making a diagnosis or starting treatment. In some instances, a blood test may be performed to ensure that a medical condition like a thyroid issue or a vitamin deficit is not the cause of the depression (reversing the medical cause would alleviate the depression-like symptoms).
In order to provide a diagnosis and determine a course of action, the examination will pinpoint particular symptoms, examine medical and family histories, as well as cultural and environmental factors.
Where an individual’s brain chemistry is contributing to their depression, prescription medication may be required for a period of time. Antidepressants may therefore be prescribed to help alter one’s brain chemistry. These drugs are not tranquillizers, sedatives, or “uppers”. They do not become habits. Antidepressant drugs typically don’t have any stimulating effects on persons who aren’t depressed.
Antidepressants may produce some improvement within the first week or two of use, but it may take a few months for the full benefits of the medication to be experienced.
Psychiatrists usually recommend that patients continue to take medication for six or more months after the symptoms have improved. Longer-term maintenance treatment may be suggested to decrease the risk of future episodes for certain people at high risk.
In cases of mild depression, psychotherapy, or ‘talk therapy,’ is sometimes used without medication as the preferred treatment. For more severe cases of depression, psychotherapy is often used along with antidepressant medications.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been found to be effective in treating depression. CBT is a form of therapy focused on problem solving in the present. CBT helps a person to recognize distorted/negative thinking with the goal of changing thoughts and behaviors to respond to challenges in a more positive manner.
Psychotherapy may involve only the individual, but it can include others. For example, family or couples therapy can help address issues within these close relationships. Group therapy brings people with similar illnesses together in a supportive environment and can assist the participant to learn how others cope in similar situations.
Depending on the severity of the depression, treatment can take a few weeks or much longer. In many cases, significant improvement can be made in 10 to 15 sessions.
Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) is a medical treatment that has been most commonly reserved for patients with severe major depression who have not responded to other treatments. It involves a brief electrical stimulation of the brain while the patient is under anesthesia. A patient typically receives ECT two to three times a week for a total of six to 12 treatments. It is usually managed by a team of trained medical professionals including a psychiatrist, an anesthesiologist and a nurse or physician assistant. ECT has been used since the 1940s, and many years of research have led to major improvements and the recognition of its effectiveness as a mainstream rather than a “last resort” treatment.
Why understanding the difference between stress and depression is important
These days we’ve been taught to believe that stress is associated with negative emotions. But some stress is beneficial to your health, such as the excitement you have while beginning a new career or relationship.
Good stress (or eustress) can serve to increase excitement and motivate you to work harder and accomplish more. It can also make you more ready to handle difficulties or react to risky circumstances. When you experience eustress, positive tension dissipates quickly, your mood is lifted to meet the occasion, and then the stress vanishes.
Where it is retained in your system over the long-term, stress can become overwhelming and have an impact on your physical and mental wellbeing. Our physiological stress response is taxed beyond what it is intended to do if we are continuously under stress, and this begins to harm us.
Chronic or long-term stress can have negative effects on you on their own, but it can also worsen depression, a mood disorder that makes you feel down and uninterested in activities you typically find enjoyable. Your sleep patterns, focus, and appetite can all be impacted by depression.
Stress can contribute to depression occurring, just as being depressed can add additional stress into your system. The relationship between the effects of stress and depression, and vice versa, is one of the most critical challenges of our times.
Sometimes we can get caught in the cycle of trying to solve all our problems and where stress is linked with depression that can be adding to our issues. Avoiding trying to handle stress and despair on your own is another method to lessen their impact. Strong, empowering connections can significantly alter circumstances.
Depression itself is a state of separation. So, finding a mechanism to connect becomes one of the most crucial ways to move away from depressive states. Finding a means to connect with a few people, places, activities and things that are important to you is a great step to reducing the hold that depression can have on your life.
Where stress and depression are interacting with one another, it can be helpful to sort through and identify the stresses in your life that are causing the most damage.
We all eventually experience ‘I’m stressed,’ but it can be incredibly useful to identify the particular issues that are bothering you. Often, people find that talking things out with a listener is more helpful than precise suggestions like, ‘Do this or do that.’
Talking to a professional is an option if talking to friends or relatives isn’t successful enough. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a type of treatment that helps people modify their perspectives and methods.
Depression and anxiety
Although being two distinct disorders, depression and anxiety frequently coexist. They receive similar medical care as well.
Every now and then experiencing sadness or the blues is normal. Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time because it’s a common reaction to stressful circumstances. Yet, persistent or severe depressive and anxious sensations may be a symptom of a mental health issue.
A sign of clinical (major) depression may be anxiety. A common occurrence is depression that is brought on by an anxiety disorder, such as a panic disorder, separation anxiety disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder. A lot of people have both clinical depression and an anxiety problem.
The more severe cases of both illnesses typically heal better with psychological therapy, drugs like antidepressants, or a combination of the two.
Lifestyle changes you can make to minimize depression
Mild cases of a stress-depression cycle can occasionally be broken with a few minor adjustments, starting with adopting a more upbeat outlook. Regardless of the severity of the conditions, there are lifestyle changes you can make that can contribute to minimizing the symptoms of depression.
• Exercise is one more proactive coping technique. It only takes 30 minutes of exercise five days a week to see a difference. Stress-reduction techniques include slowing down and relaxing activities like walking in nature, yoga and tai chi.
• Refrain from overeating or drinking. They won’t assist and may only briefly improve your mood. They can hurt you physically, but they can also make you feel bad about yourself and guilty. Alcohol abuse can disrupt your sleep and leave you groggy the next day.
• Be careful with caffeine. Too much might make you feel like you are wound tight and exacerbate stress. Reduce your consumption of soda, coffee, and other caffeinated beverages.
• Give up smoking. It’s a common misconception that smoking cigarettes can reduce stress. While nicotine does initially help you relax, this feeling is fleeting and can lead to cravings or withdrawal symptoms, which can lead to even more stress. It can also seriously affect your health which adds stress to your system.
• Schedule some time that’s just for you. Engage in activities you enjoy or that make you feel happy. Take it easy on yourself and concentrate on your strong points.
• Avoid stressful situations. Do your best to avoid a scenario or person if you are aware that it triggers your emotions.
• Have a good night’s rest. Making ensuring your body and mind get enough sleep can significantly help to reduce stress. The National Sleep Foundation advises individuals to get 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night.
It’s really important that people who are depressed do what they can to get past the notion that ‘nothing I do is really going to matter’ if they want to reduce the negative effects of stress in their lives.
In most circumstances, it’s just not true. Overcoming that kind of hopeless belief is a major thing, even though it might not change everything.
Case Study: Stress-induced depression – a new depression sub-type
Numerous global studies have been guided by the idea that stress may contribute to depression.
Numerous authors have attempted to define new subtypes of depression based on their functional relationship with stress exposure because the association between stress and depression is not new.
Highlighting a potentially widespread depression subtype, informally referred to as ‘stress-induced depression’ (STRID), which was discovered in Sweden by Sberg and colleagues, is of particular importance. Between 1997 and 2003, there was a sharp rise in the number of employees on long-term sick leave (Statistics Sweden, 2004; http://www.scb.se).
Almost 80% of patients who underwent studies of consecutive cases with psychiatric diagnoses drawn from the databases of two significant Swedish insurance companies satisfied the DSM-IV criteria for MD (Sberg et al., unpublished data).
The depression episodes were light to moderate (according to the Montgomery and Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS)), and they were markedly accompanied by poor working memory.
Further check ins with these patients at specified intervals revealed that STRID frequently had a protracted course and that patients frequently remained exhausted even after their depression symptoms had subsided.
The residual clinical picture typically included extreme physical and mental exhaustion, erratic and un-restorative sleep patterns, impatience, perceptual hypersensitivity, emotional vulnerability, and substantial cognitive impairments (mainly memory and concentration problems).
A closer look at the case histories showed that the majority of them were unquestionably brought on by psychosocial stress, either at work or frequently in conjunction with stressors in the family.
Data from a cohort of approximately 5,000 Swedish workers on long-term sick leave who had a mental diagnosis supported this. Results support the life event stress literature’s assertion that persistent, particular stressful situations at work can cause depression.
Disturbances of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (HPA axis) may represent unique pathophysiological characteristics of this depression subtype from an endocrine perspective.
An established and well-recognized characteristic of depression, particularly the severe, melancholic variety, is hyperactivity of the HPA axis. In contrast, STRID patients were found to have HPA-axis hypo-reactivity.
The STRID subtype of depression is anticipated to be associated with several neurological, immunological, and metabolic characteristics in addition to the HPA-axis disruption, necessitating a collaborative effort between preclinical and clinical research.
Overall, the research suggests clinical research will be essential for establishing the veracity of this novel subtype of depression, for enhancing treatment response predictors, for increasing the foundation for genetic studies, and for promoting new drug discovery procedures.
Exercise 3.6: DASS-21 Survey
1. Were you surprised with your total score?
2. Are you more or less stressed than you thought?
3. Are you experiencing depression or anxiety that you weren’t aware was there?
4. What is one thing you can/need to do to focus on reducing stress/depression/anxiety?
5. How urgently do you feel you need to do this one thing?
Course Manual 7: Anxiety
Introduction
Anxiety is characterized by persistent, possibly irrational sensations of anxiety. If you have anxiety, it could be difficult for you to control your feelings. Anxiety is a significant illness that makes it challenging for an individual to function in daily life.
Everybody experiences anxiety occasionally. Anxious feelings that persist, occur for no apparent cause, or make day-to-day living difficult could be symptoms of an anxiety disorder.
Stress or worry are only one aspect of anxiety. When we experience pressure, a common reaction is stress and anxiety. As the stressful moment is passed, these sensations typically disappear.
With time, anxiety symptoms can intensify. It can be challenging to determine whether to seek support because we all occasionally suffer anxiety.
Anxiety symptoms and signs can include:
• feeling really worried or anxious most of the time
• finding it challenging to relax
• unable to manage your worrying or worrisome thoughts
• feeling easily exhausted
• trouble focusing or a blank mental image
• muscle tension that never goes away
• disruptions to sleep.
Types of anxiety
There are a number of forms of anxiety, each with their own set of symptoms.
Some people may experience a number of different forms at the same time. In addition, some people might be dealing with depression and another mental illness whilst suffering from one, or more forms of anxiety as well.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
When someone experiences anxiety most days, they have generalized anxiety disorder. It can be challenging to work, study, or visit friends and family because of the constant concern.
If you have GAD you tend to feel anxious and worried a lot of the time. These concerns are severe, enduring, and interfere with your day-to-day activities.
Most people occasionally experience anxiety and worry, especially in high-stress situations. You can have anxiety before a test, public speaking, a competitive activity or a job interview. You may feel like you’re on high alert and hyper-focused when experiencing this type of anxiety. In some circumstances it can make you work more quickly or at your peak.
However, if you have GAD then you experience anxiety and worry on a regular basis rather than just during stressful events. You don’t obsess over any one thing in particular. You fret about your job, health, family, finances, and other things.
GAD affects roughly 16.8% of people globally throughout the course of their lifetimes and around 4% of people report having GAD at some point in a year.
GAD symptoms include things like:
• Constantly feel uneasy or tense
• Fatigue easily
• Find it difficult to focus
• Frequently feel agitated
• Constantly have tense muscles (such as jaw pain or a sore back)
• Find it difficult to quit worrying
• You feel a great deal of concern about one or more activities or events
• Find it challenging to complete daily tasks due to your worry (such as work, study, meeting friends and family)?
• Experience trouble falling or staying asleep or having a restful night’s sleep?
Panic attacks
Anxiety emotions that are severe, overpowering, and frequently uncontrollable are known as panic attacks. Breathing issues, chest pain, lightheadedness, and perspiration are some examples of physical symptoms.
A panic attack disorder may be present in someone who experiences frequent panic episodes. One panic attack does not necessarily indicate that you have an anxiety disorder. A panic attack occurs once or twice in the lives of about 40% of Australians.
Although panic disorder can occur at any age, it is less common in the elderly and in young children.
Those who suffer from panic disorder may:
• Experience unplanned panic attacks that happen frequently.
• Dread having another panic attack for at least a month after you’ve had one.
• Radically alter your lifestyle to attempt to prevent panic episodes. For instance, you might stop exercising because it raises your pulse rate.
You can also be concerned with the cause of your panic attacks. Some people, for instance, worry that it indicates they have a different ailment. They may have undergone numerous tests for illness despite the results showing nothing is wrong.
What’s the sensation of a panic attack?
You have a sudden, intense sense of fear and panic during a panic attack.
The worst symptoms of a panic attack usually appear during the first 10 minutes, and they can last up to 30 minutes. You can have extreme fatigue afterwards.
These may occur numerous times per day if you have panic disorder. Even while you’re asleep, panic attacks might start and wake you up in the middle of the night.
Panic attack warning signs and symptoms include:
• intense feeling of fear or panic
• the feeling that you are about to pass out, choke, ‘lose control,’ or ‘go insane.’
• higher heart rate
• having trouble breathing (feeling that there is not enough air)
• feel like you’re choking
• excessive perspiration
• faintness, light-headedness, or vertigo.
Derealization, or the perception that neither you nor the environment are real, can also happen to some people. This symptom appears to be connected to the physiological changes that take place during a panic attack in your body.
Disordered social anxiety (social phobia)
When someone has social anxiety disorder, they are extremely afraid of being judged, ashamed, or degraded in front of others (also known as social phobia).
Even routine circumstances like eating in public or conversing with others can trigger this fear.
When you have social anxiety disorder, you have extreme anxiety when performing in front of other people or in social circumstances.
Even in routine settings, you might worry about being looked down upon, criticized, made fun of, or humiliated in front of others. For instance, feeling anxious while dining in a public place like a restaurant.
Social anxiety has both psychological and physical signs that are commonly experienced:
• If you struggle with social anxiety, you might try to stay away from situations where you worry that you could behave in an unpleasant or humiliating way. Your daily activities, personal connections, and job life may all suffer as a result.
• If you can’t prevent a circumstance, you could experience tremendous anxiety and distress. You might try to get out of there as quickly as you can.
• You can obsessively worry that you’ll say or do the wrong thing and that as a result, something dreadful will occur.
• profuse sweating
• trembling
• blushing or stuttering when speaking
• constipation or nausea.
Particular phobias
When someone has a specific phobia, they are extremely afraid of a certain thing or circumstance.
Spiders, heights, getting an injection, and flying are some common specific phobias.
You have a specific phobia if you have an irrational fear of a particular circumstance or object. Acrophobia, claustrophobia, and arachnophobia are frequent phobias. Arachnophobia is the fear of spiders.
Phobia is not a feeling of fear in the presence of something or someone threatening. Our minds use rational fear to keep us safe.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
A person may develop post-traumatic stress disorder after going through a stressful experience like a war, an assault, an accident, or a disaster.
Symptoms can include trouble falling asleep, disturbing dreams or flashbacks of the incident, and avoiding everything associated with it.
When you experience extreme anxiety, helplessness, or horror following a traumatic event, you may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The traumatic occurrence could have been anything that put your life or safety in danger. Examples include:
• a major automobile or other accident (this is one of the leading causes of PTSD globally)
• sexual or physical abuse
• torture or war
• catastrophes like floods or bushfires.
You’re more likely to get PTSD if:
• the incident included physical or sexual assault as well as willful harm
• you endured horrific events repeatedly, such as being sexually assaulted as a child or living in a war zone
• you’ve previously experienced trauma or mental health issues
• after the trauma, you continue to experience stressful life situations and lack sufficient social support.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Anxiety-inducing, persistent, unwanted or intrusive thoughts and concerns are all symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. These symptoms may see the affected person engage in rituals or repetitive actions. For instance, a fear of germs may cause excessive washing.
If you experience an overpowering urge to do or think about anything repeatedly, you may have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
OCD isn’t about maintaining a clean home or enjoying order and organization. It’s a significant condition that might make it challenging to carry out daily tasks. Social disabilities like children being unable to attend school or adults being confined to their homes may result.
It’s beneficial and safe to remember to wash your hands before eating. It’s not useful to always feel the need to wash your hands after touching something.
The difference between anxiety and depression
Almost everyone experiences anxiety, despair, and stress from time to time. All of these are typical responses to overcoming obstacles in life, like losing a loved one or going through a divorce.
Is it depression or anxiety?
You might have an anxiety disorder, a depressive condition, or both if you frequently feel anxious or depressed for no obvious cause. It’s fairly common for someone to have both illnesses simultaneously. In fact, almost half of those who are given a diagnosis of depression also receive one for an anxiety disorder.
Both depression and anxiety are severe yet curable conditions. The symptoms of each ailment may be treated with the same drugs. These conditions have distinct causes, yet they also have comparable symptoms like anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, and difficulty concentrating.
Anxiety
If you suffer from an anxiety condition, you can encounter:
• Fear, panic, or anxiety in circumstances where most people wouldn’t feel threatened or uneasy
• Constant worry or anxiety
• Sudden panic or anxiety episodes without a known trigger.
These disorders can make it difficult for you to maintain relationships, work, or even leave the house if left untreated.
Depression
When you’re depressed, it has an impact on almost every aspect of your life, including your thoughts, feelings, actions, and functioning. One or more of these signs or symptoms may be present in you:
• Discouragement
• Sadness
• Despair
• Hopelessness
• Anger
• Lack of enthusiasm for life in general
• Low energy levels
• Insomnia
• Feeling overburdened by everyday responsibilities and interpersonal interactions.
You are almost certainly going through a significant depressive episode if these sensations last for longer than two weeks and interfere with daily activities like spending time with friends, taking care of your family, or going to work.
Link between smoking and mental health issues
Those with mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, smoke substantially more frequently than the overall population.
People with mental health disorders smoke about 3 out of every 10 cigarettes consumed by adults in the United States. It is unclear why smokers are more prone than non-smokers to suffer from anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.
Additional global research is needed to determine why this is the case, however what is clear is that smoking is not a remedy for depression or anxiety, regardless of the cause.
The greatest approach to feel better is to stop smoking, seek therapy for your anxiety and despair, and generally feel better.
Managing anxiety
Medication and therapy may be required depending on the type and severity of the anxiety being experienced. However, you can also take steps to improve your general health and wellbeing to support any practitioner recommendations.
The tactics listed below might not all be right for you, but experimenting with various ideas might help you discover your own unique set of tactics. This understanding can direct you towards creating a unique set of coping mechanisms so that you always have choices to think about when you’re anxious or overwhelmed.
Also, your therapist can provide fresh approaches to try and provide advice on how to put them into action.
Let yourself experience your feelings.
Depression and anxiety are not your fault because they are medical problems rather than signs of weakness or failure.
Unwanted feelings they produce can undoubtedly cause a lot of distress. Yet, recognizing that your actions – or lack thereof – did not create your anxiety or sadness might encourage self-compassion rather than judgement or self-punishment.
Do things that you can control.
It could be a little easier to deal with overpowering feelings if you regain some control in the present.
Making your bed, having a shower, or filling the dishwasher are just a few quick tasks that can help you feel more accomplished even if you don’t achieve anything substantial. It might also serve as a momentary diversion.
Maintain a schedule
A daily program or routine can give your life structure and give you a sense of control, which can occasionally help reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms.
Making a timetable gives you the chance to allocate time in your day for self-care practices that could help even more.
Make an effort to sleep well at night
While getting too much sleep can also have a negative impact on mood and wellbeing, it can also increase the symptoms of sadness and anxiety.
For optimum health, experts advise that most adults obtain between 7 and 9 hours of sleep each night.
You can use these suggestions to get the rest you require:
• Establish a routine of sleeping in and rising at roughly the same time each day.
• Develop a relaxing ritual that helps you wind down before night.
• Make your bedroom dark, cold, and quiet. Switch off electronics about an hour before bedtime.
Strive to have balanced meals
You can acquire the nourishment you need by nourishing your body with complete meals, such as fruits, vegetables, lean protein, and whole grains. This may also help your symptoms get better.
On the other side, caffeine, refined sweets, and processed foods may conceivably make anxiety and depressive symptoms worse.
You don’t have to completely eliminate these from your diet, but you should attempt to balance them out with nutrient-dense meals whenever you can.
Consider going for a block walk
A minimum of 2.5 hours of exercise per week can reduce anxiety and depression. Because of the positive effect of being outdoors (particularly if it’s in nature) exercising outdoors had more advantages than exercising inside.
By causing the release of “happy chemicals” in your brain, exercise can help you feel better naturally.
Nonetheless, it can be difficult to exercise when dealing with sadness or anxiety. If you’re able to exercise, it can be helpful to begin with simple routine-building activities, such as:
• a walk around your neighborhood after dinner
• a weekend hike
• taking the bus or walking to work instead of taking a car
• gardening.
Schedule downtime for recharging
Mental health issues like depression and anxiety can have an impact on your motivation and energy, which frequently just intensifies feelings of guilt and worry.
Yet keep in mind that anxiety and depression are medical illnesses. You would need time to rest if you had the illness, right? Recovering from mental health problems also takes time.
Honor your needs by making time for the things that calm and relax you rather than obsessing over what you “should” be doing. Perhaps this entails activities like reading a beloved book again, watching a comforting movie or TV show, cuddling with a pet, going for a walk in the woods, baking or cooking, or listening to music or audiobooks.
Moreover, relaxation techniques may lessen the signs of anxiety and sadness and enhance daily living. Breathing exercises, guided imagery, progressive muscular relaxation, massage therapy, yoga, and meditation are a few examples.
Contact your loved ones
When you have a mental health illness, good interactions can greatly enhance your attitude and emotional wellbeing.
Friends and family can help you get things done by:
• Offering rides, running errands, and other more practical forms of support when you need help getting things done
• Listening sympathetically when you need to talk
• Encouraging you and offering emotional support; and
• Joining you in hobbies or activities that provide a positive distraction.
Whether you actually want to talk about your symptoms or not, just knowing that you have someone in your life you can trust can frequently make you feel less alone.
Case Study: Epidemiology of anxiety disorders in the 21st Century
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders. They are also associated with significant health care costs and a high burden of disease.
These disorders include panic disorder with or without agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, and separation anxiety disorder.
Large population-based surveys have shown that up to 33.7% of people will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives.
These illnesses have been shown to be significantly underdiagnosed and undertreated. The prevalence rates of anxiety disorders have not altered in recent years, according to the research.
Prevalence rates in cross-cultural comparisons vary greatly. This heterogeneity is more likely the result of methodological variations than cultural effects.
Although anxiety disorders have a long-term course, their prevalence naturally declines as people get older. Anxiety disorders frequently co-occur with various mental illnesses and other anxiety disorders.
According to prospective research, anxiety disorders are chronic, meaning that patients may experience them for years or even decades. Yet, this does not imply that the patient will always have an anxiety problem for the remainder of their lives. Anxiety disorders typically begin in childhood, youth, or early adulthood, peak in middle life, and then tend to decline as people get older.
The average age at which anxiety disorders first appear is 11.
It could take many patients years before they are sent to a specialist. A survey of psychiatrists with experience treating anxiety disorders found that 45% of individuals had GAD symptoms for at least two years before the disease was appropriately identified as theirs.
Epidemiological studies show that one in three people will experience an anxiety condition at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to experience them than men. Their frequency is greatest in midlife, and they are linked to significant levels of disability, high rates of use of healthcare services, and a significant financial cost on society.
Although there are effective psychological and pharmaceutical therapies for anxiety disorders, many people who are affected do not seek help from health services, and of those who do, a large portion receive incorrect diagnoses or do not receive cutting-edge care.
The prevalence rates have not altered over the past few years, according to the evidence. Prevalence rates that vary between nations and cultures could be the result of methodological issues rather than cultural considerations.
There is a significant amount of overlap between anxiety disorders and other mental illnesses, as well as between anxiety disorders themselves. The development of treatment and preventative strategies, as well as a better understanding of the causes of various disorders, may benefit from further epidemiologic studies.
Exercise 3.7: Anxiety Questionnaire
1. I was completely consumed by my worries during the past 30 days.
2. During the past 30 days, I experienced feelings of hopelessness.
3. During the previous 30 days, social situations annoyed me more than usual.
4. During the past 30 days, I had problems concentrating on my work.
5. Throughout the past 30 days, my ability to complete tasks at work or at home has been hampered by anxiety or fear.
1. Before you answered the above questions, had you noticed that anxiety had been present in the past 30 days?
2. Can you pinpoint where your anxiety is coming from?
3. What role do you believe stress has played, if any, in the anxiety you have experienced.
Course Manual 8: Doomscrolling
Introduction
Doomscrolling, sometimes known as doomsurfing, is the practice of reading a lot of bad news online for an extended period of time.
The activity is similar to the 1970s phenomenon known as the mean world syndrome, which is defined as “the perception that the world is a more dangerous place to live in as a result of repeated exposure to violence-related programming on television”.
According to studies, hearing distressing news prompts people to look up more information about it, starting a vicious loop.
When referring to one’s future, the word ‘doom’ connotes darkness and evil in common usage. The term ‘surfing’ was frequently used in the early days of the internet to describe browsing; similarly, the term ‘scrolling’ describes the more modern way of navigating online text, photos and so on.
Despite the fact that the term ‘doomscrolling’ does not appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, they have formally stated they are ‘watching’ it because of the word’s sharp rise in usage. Merriam-Webster uses the term ‘watching’ to refer to words that are growing in usage but do not yet fulfil their standards for inclusion.
The term ‘doom scrolling’ was selected by Dictionary.com as the most popular trend for August 2020.
It was also selected as the 2020 Committee’s Choice Word of the Year by the Macquarie Dictionary.
The COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the 2021 assault of the U.S. Capitol, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine are just a few of the events that have been documented to have made the practice of doomscrolling more prevalent in the early 2020s.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, doomscrolling among Twitter users grew significantly, and it has also been considered in reference to the climate crisis.
The natural tendency for people to view things negatively while they are ingesting information can be attributed to the rise of doomscrolling.
The notion of negativity bias holds that bad occurrences have a greater impact on one’s mental health than positive ones. Potential risks draw attention because of a person’s normal state of contentment. The negative gives people information about potential harm that can be done and therefore, humans are hardwired to see and be drawn to the negative.
We can look to evolution for understanding of the ways that humans actively seek the negative in a situation simply to ensure survival. For instance, if one’s ancestors knew how an ancient monster could harm them, they were better prepared to prevent that fate.
However, whilst the negative bias is hardwired in us, unlike early humans, most people today are unaware that they are even looking for negative information. Doomscrolling can be facilitated by social media algorithms that take into account the content users engage with and display posts with a similar theme.
When something bad happens, it makes us wonder about it. People frequently scroll endlessly when they have a query because they desire an answer and believe having more information about a situation will make them feel better.
It’s as people think that by scrolling further, they will find a different solution than what they have already seen. They believe that will be beneficial – but instead, they end up feeling worse.
How doom scrolling affects the brain
The need to immerse oneself in doomscrolling may well be the result of an evolutionary mechanism, whereby people are programmed to screen for and anticipate danger.
Being informed can make you feel like you’re more prepared, because you’re constantly following news stories with bad headlines. However, excessive scrolling can also make you feel worse because you have access to so much information that can make your anxieties seem more real.
When it comes to processing information and incorporating new information into reality-based beliefs, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is crucial.
The brain’s prefrontal cortex contains the IFG, also known as the gyrus frontalis inferior, which is the lowest-lying of the frontal gyri in the frontal lobe.
Broca’s area, which is involved in speech and language processing, is located in the inferior frontal gyrus.
According to the IFG, when given new knowledge to update beliefs the brain ‘selectively filters unfavorable news’.
Doomscrolling may cause the brain to feel threatened and turn off its “bad news filter” as a result. Patients were more likely to assimilate negative information when updating beliefs, according to the results of a study where researchers used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to affect the left IFG.
Given that the brain still updated beliefs in reaction to positive information when participants underwent TMS and were given favorable information, this shows that the left IFG may be important for preventing negative news from changing one’s opinions.
Research into this area also reveals that the brain modifies thoughts and filters information in a way that lessens stress and anxiety by processing positive news with greater respect.
Excessive doomscrolling exposes the brain to more unpleasant information and may limit its capacity to embrace positive information and discard negative information. This can lead to negative feelings that make one feel worried, unhappy, and lonely.
The psychological and physical effects of doom scrolling
According to a 2019 National Academy of Science study, doomscrolling can be connected to a decrease in both mental and physical health.
Scrolling aimlessly not only wastes time but also makes us more reliant on dopamine. When we are stimulated, motivated, or just joyful, our brain releases the chemical dopamine. We naturally yearn for dopamine as our levels drop. We feel loved and pleased when we receive notifications and read articles. Naturally, this makes us want to keep scrolling on our phones.
Put down your phone and start interacting with others around you. People are social beings, not people on social media.
On our mobile devices, scrolling is a common activity that is increasingly accepted as a habit. About 60% of adults, according to one study, experience anxiety when their phones are missing. Many of us experience a fleeting sense of connection when we frequently check social media. Because there are no truly solid human bonds in our fleeting encounter, we experience feelings of insignificance, exposure and ultimately loneliness. Social media glances regularly dispel lonely feelings.
According to medical experts, excessive doomscrolling can worsen pre-existing mental health conditions. While everyone’s experience with doomscrolling is unique, it frequently leaves people feeling pressured, anxious, afraid, dejected, and alone. Ruminative thinking and panic attacks may become more frequent in those with cognitive distortion as a result of doomscrolling. Additionally, studies point to a link between bad news intake and increased levels of stress, anxiety, despair, and even symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In a study conducted by psychology professors at the University of Sussex, participants watched television news that had “positive-, neutral-, and negative valanced information.”
According to the study, viewers of unfavorable news shows exhibited higher levels of worry, depression and catastrophic thinking about their own issues. In a study by psychologists and the Huffington Post, it was discovered that viewers of three minutes of negative news in the morning were 27% more likely to report having a poor day six to eight hours later.
Comparatively, 88% of the time, the group that saw news articles with solutions reported having a pleasant day.
The effects of doomscrolling aren’t just relating to psychological effect; there are significant physical effects that are experienced as well. Physical effects include:
• Mouth and throat discomfort: the stress of constantly absorbing negative content can decrease salivation, which can result in dry mouth and make swallowing painful or difficult.
• Hair loss: when the hair follicle transitions from the growth cycle to the resting cycle, hair naturally falls out. The stress of doomscrolling can alter this cycle and cause more follicles to enter the resting state all at once, increasing and making hair loss more obvious.
• Upset stomach: all kinds of gastrointestinal symptoms, such as heartburn, nausea, diarrhoea, and constipation, can be brought on by the stress of constantly consuming negative content
• Muscular aches and pains: the stress of negative content can tighten your muscles, which over time can result in discomfort and soreness in almost any area of the body. The neck, back, and shoulders are the areas most frequently affected by stress-related aches and pains.
• Headache, ear or jaw pain: when under stress, many people unintentionally clench or grind their teeth, which can lead to painful tightness or soreness.
• Dizziness and light-headedness: the stress from being exposed to negative content can make you feel woozy or lightheaded by speeding up your heart rate and causing shallow, quick breathing.
• Lack of sexual desire: prolonged exposure to negative content has the potential to alter the body’s hormonal balance over time. Erectile dysfunction, irregular menstrual cycles, and missing periods are also frequent, along with diminished sex drive.
Doomscrolling, according to experts, can also impair attention span, promote obesity, and mess with sleep cycles. Doctors have also discovered that exposure to fear-based media can impair one’s capacity to comprehend traumatic events.
Constant exposure to negative content can spark a defensive response within an individual. More particularly, it leads someone to position encapsulation as their first line of defense. During encapsulation, a person attempts to enclose or seal off representations of trauma, which leads to denial or disavowal. The behavior, which experts compare to the act of ‘shutting off, can cause exhaustion, flat speech, and a deterioration in cognitive function.
Minimizing the effects of doom scrolling
Knowing that doomscrolling is taking place is the first step in halting it – the doomscrolling cycle will continue while ever you are unaware of it.
Here are 11 suggestions to help you quit doomscrolling:
1. Establish deadlines
It’s imperative that you kick the scrolling habit. Setting time restrictions is necessary in order to do this successfully. If you feel the urge to freely browse the Internet outside of work and social commitments, a reasonable recommendation is 15 minutes. All you need to do to keep track is set a timer. If it turns out to be an issue, stop using the Internet until it is okay to start again.
2. Be Ready to browse the Internet
Prepare your Internet search and take action. By taking potentially upsetting material out of the picture, this is achieved. It is easy to change settings on social networking websites and applications to block particular content. You can use your web browser to completely block a list of websites.
If you’re not sure how to do this, click the “help” tab and type in a search term in your browser’s address bar or use your go-to search engine. This avoidance strategy is strongly advised. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ applies here.
3. Utilize apps with time limits
As excessive Internet use has been a concern for a while, apps that can help reduce screen time are constantly being created. By restricting access to specific functionalities including text messages, emails, web browsers, and social media apps, these apps are made to cut down on screen time.
Make sure to find out upfront or through a subscription service if there are any additional fees and what their terms and conditions of use are.
4. Look for encouraging stories online
There are many encouraging stories online, even though they might not be as captivating or “click-worthy”. Searching for the positives and avoiding the bad will be a better use of your energy. A dose of good news will make your stress levels cheerful.
5. Take up offline hobbies
There are many activities that don’t need using the Internet, such as playing an instrument, biking, hiking, journaling by hand, reading a conventional book, painting or sculpting something, gardening or landscaping, crocheting, doing puzzles or playing board games.
As well as the advantages to mental health, many hobbies also provide advantages for physical health, such as lowered blood pressure, total cortisol levels, decreased body mass index, and increased feelings of physical function.
6. Take a mindful break from social media
Examine your use of social media and its results. It could be time for a break if all of your scrolling and swiping is making you feel anxious, impatient, or inadequate. Make the decision to plan regular breaks from using social media. Your body and mind will have a chance to break up the detrimental routine during these interruptions.
7. Give meditating a go
Maintaining your present-moment focus through meditation is healthy. It blocks out everything else and aids in mental clarity. Further, the mental and physical health benefits of meditation are numerous. For those who have not had former experience meditating, it is important to ease into the process.
Begin slowly – about 3-5 minutes at a time.
From there, try working your way up to 20 minutes or more. This serves well in trying to redirect your thoughts when you begin thinking about doomscrolling behavior. Meditation apps can make learning meditation or improving practice simpler.
8. Focus on the Positive
Consciously making a decision to focus on the positives releases neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin known to elevate mood. It also allows us to be grateful for the things that are good in the world.
When we see the world through a positive lens, we tend to shed the negative – not allowing it to break our stride. We also tend to seek out positive things, which further reduces the incessant need to scroll through negative news.
Changing to a positive mindset can take considerable time, depending on a multitude of factors. Perhaps start by looking for three positive things per day, even if they are seemingly insignificant. Continue building up from there. As your mind shifts from negative to positive, your mood will naturally continue to elevate. When this happens, everything else will become easier and more enjoyable.
9. Talk with loved ones and friends
There is significant power in connecting with another person. Laughing together, crying together, sharing stories, and so on, all foster a sense of connectedness – another basic human survival need. If you are facing a challenging day and feel compelled to doomscroll, talk about it directly. Talking it through will de-escalate the situation and provide enough time for the urge to pass.
10. Practice gratitude
Practicing gratitude can be an antidote for the stress and anxiety of doomscrolling. Take a moment to appreciate what you have, the beauty of the world, and most importantly, the person you are. You don’t have to be anything other than your true self.
11. Remain aware
Stopping doomscrolling requires intention and consistency. The better you keep on top of it, the less likely it is to get back on top of you.
Sometimes, though, when we find ourselves struggling, we resort back to negative patterns of thinking. When negative self-talk begins, so does problematic behavior. It is important to remain aware of how you are feeling at all times.
You can also consider doing the following:
• Only use social media and read the news at specific periods of the day. To be reminded when the time is up, you could set an alarm.
• Reduce the number of notifications you receive from your news and social networking apps.
• Consider limiting the number of online sources you read each time you access the internet. If someone consistently stresses you out, maybe about unfollowing them.
• Make a mental note of it the next time you find you’ve signed on without thinking. Just be conscious of it; don’t judge yourself for it. It might gradually stop becoming a mindless habit.
• If you discover that you are doomscrolling, stop and consider how you are feeling. Your cue to take a break and disconnect from the internet is when you’re feeling depressed, anxious, or agitated.
• If particular blogs cause you to worry about a current event’s worst-case scenario, consider whether there is a more likely and manageable alternative.
• Strive to reorient your attention on the current moment and what is truly occurring. It might be beneficial to practice mindfulness meditation.
• More slowly scroll. Your attention span and your racing thoughts won’t benefit from quickly skimming through your news or social media feed.
• At least two hours prior to going to bed, turn off all of your electronics. Consider avoiding using your phone or tablet in the bedroom.
Conduct offline activities in the real world. Engage in hobbies you enjoy, spend time with family and friends, and exercise.
Case Study: The age of doomscrolling – social media’s attractive addiction
Communication is essential to human survival. The usage of social media today has created a wide range of new opportunities, but it is difficult to predict how many more might appear in the future.
Individuals have become more and more accustomed to using social networking sites as time has gone on. This study looks at how users are attracted to social media as well as how it hooks them by exposing the false worlds, they live in.
There is a serious issue when someone relies more on social media than on themselves. In today’s environment, it can be very difficult to detach people from their numerous electronic devices. The world has started to become more and more dependent on technology.
Technology started to advance quickly in the 20th century. The earliest supercomputers were constructed in the 1940s by engineers and scientists. They then began to consider how to connect them, which resulted in the development of the Internet.
Early iterations of the Internet, such as CompuServe, were created in the 1960s. Early versions of email were also developed during this period. When UseNet was introduced in 1979, networking technology had advanced by allowing users to communicate via newsletter.
As the number of households with computers increased in the 1980s, social media also advanced in complexity. Internet relay conversations, or IRCs, were originally established in 1988 and remained quite popular long into the 1990s.
The first social networking website that people were aware of was Six Degrees in 1997. Users could create profiles and ‘friend’ other users. The first blogging platforms were used by people in 1999, which sparked a social media boom that is still going strong today.
The number of people utilizing social media has skyrocketed along with the growth of blogging.
Websites like MySpace and LinkedIn were particularly well-liked in the early 2000s. Online photo sharing is simple with services like Photobucket and Flickr. With the launch of YouTube in 2005, people then had a new means of sharing and corresponding over very long distances.
In 2006, Facebook and Twitter were available to users everywhere. Today, these social media platforms are among the most widely used online. Tumblr, Spotify, Foursquare, and Pinterest were some of the very first specialized social networking platforms.
There are many social networking sites available today, and many of them allow posts to be shared across many sites by linking to one another. This enables users to converse with a large number of individuals while preserving the intimacy of speaking with one person at a time. Social networking may change in a way that no one can predict in ten or one hundred years, but it appears likely that it will endure in some capacity for as long as there are humans.
Information and communication technology have drastically changed over the past 20 years, with the emergence of social media serving as a game-changing innovation.
The development of mobile technologies has been crucial in defining how social media influence has changed over time. When it comes to the total number of minutes spent online worldwide, mobile devices are in the lead. They made it possible for everyone to connect anywhere, at any time, and using whatever device they preferred.
Around one-fourth of all people on the planet are active Facebook users. Social networks become stronger as their membership increases because they are supported by interpersonal interactions.
If there were no social media, there would be a huge decrease in the visibility of social, ethical, environmental, and political issues. The power dynamic has changed from a small group of people to the rest of the population as more people are aware of the issues.
With this rise in access, we see the rise in the occurrence of psychological and physical health issues associated with 24/7 access to unfiltered content.
One effective tactic to counteract this is to restrict the use of social media. Limiting the amount of time spent on social networking sites can help with the majority of the downsides that people are experiencing. Scheduling limited time to access the content and then step away to something that counteracts any of the side effects of being exposed to potentially harmful content.
The way people communicate with one another on a daily basis has been significantly impacted by the quick growth of information and communication technologies. The ability to communicate is crucial to human survival. Today’s use of social media has brought about a number of recently emerging characteristics, but it is impossible to foresee how many more may do so in the future.
Exercise 3.8: Minimizing Doomscrolling
Course Manual 9: Stress Management
Introduction
Totally eliminating stress is not the aim of stress management. It is impossible to completely eradicate stress, and given there are some situations where stress is good (eustress), we don’t want to remove the benefits that this type of stress brings to our lives.
There are many ways, tools and techniques you can use to help you reduce your stress. Everyone is unique and will therefore have a unique combination of things that go together to cause their stress. This means that each individual will need a unique solution to help them reduce the stress they experience.
The most common place that people start is in finding their stress triggers, also known as your stressors. Knowledge is power so when you can identify your stressors, it makes it so much easier to work out which of them can be prevented, which can be reduced and also to create ways to engage with them differently and coping mechanisms to lessen the impact of those stressors that remain.
Chronic, long-term, invasive stress has been linked to increased risk of developing debilitating diseases so managing your stress levels now will reduce your risk of serious illness later. Plus, it makes you feel good now and allows you to experience the fullness of life that being healthy brings.
There are many factors that can lead to stress, such as personal challenges (like disagreements with family members, being alone, not having enough money, and worrying about the future), issues at work (like conflict with co-workers, an incredibly demanding or precarious position), or serious threats in your neighborhood (like crime, disease or a lack of economic opportunity).
How to understand your stress levels
Although stress in short, occasional doses might not be harmful, ‘prolonged stressful living can cause havoc on our physical, emotional, and psychological wellbeing’ (Boniwell & Tunariu, 2019, p.132).
While some everyday stress is natural, it’s important to recognize when stress levels are too high or occur too frequently.
Because everyone is a unique individual, each person will have their own set of physical and psychological symptoms that they need to get to know so that they can tune in to the signals their body is giving them about their stress levels.
A greater level of conscious awareness about what your body is telling you is often highly beneficial. Here are some of the common symptoms to keep an eye out for:
• Muscle tension or pain: the shoulders, back, chest, stomach, or head are often the first to be affected.
• Digestive problems: including diarrhea, constipation and nausea.
• General wellbeing and sexual health: impotence in men, decreased sex desire, and irregular menstrual cycles in women.
• Blood pressure and the heart: can be affected by the increased stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline) that put us in the fight or flight mode.
When we take the time to take notice, each physical sign can contribute to our self-awareness and help us recognize when stress levels are out of control.
In more recent times, some stress counsellors have started to evaluate stress levels using biofeedback technology. Technology is used to monitor things such as:
Heart rate at rest
Heart rate recorded while at rest is frequently used to determine general fitness but may also signal a change in stress levels.
HRV, or Heart Rate Variability
The difference between heartbeats is known as HRV. Changes in pattern could be a sign that our underlying autonomic nervous system is being impacted by stress levels.
Brainwaves or EEG
EEGs are devices that capture brain activity. Stress can be detected by certain signs.
A breathing evaluation
Over breathing (breathing more than is necessary to suit one’s body’s demands) or quicker, chest-based breathing might be linked to feelings of stress.
Adrenal evaluation
It is possible to measure the amounts of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline using blood and urine samples.
Skin temperature and conductance
Skin can be used to measure sympathetic nervous system changes.
Sleep monitoring
Increased stress frequently affects sleep quality and quantity, and trackers make it simple to keep track of these effects.
Managing our self-care and wellness can be facilitated by getting to know our unique set of warning signs and then recognizing them when the body gives them to us. Once we recognize them, we can treat them as early warning signs of burnout and stress, regardless of the form self-monitoring takes.
The importance of managing stress
Your overall health is at danger if you are under a lot of stress every day. Both your physical and mental wellbeing are negatively impacted by stress. Your capacity to think clearly, work well, and have fun is reduced. When stress really gets out of control, it can appear like there is nothing you can do to relieve the tension and impact on your life.
The reality is, there will never be more hours in the day, the bills won’t stop flowing in, and your work and family obligations will always be demanding. The good news is that you are much more in control than you might realize.
In order to be happier, healthier, and more productive, effective stress management enables you to release the grip that stress has on your life.
There will always be stress in some form, it comes from all directions and cannot be contained in all forms, all the time. The ultimate goal, therefore, becomes to live a balanced life that includes time for work, relationships, relaxation, and fun – as well as the fortitude to withstand stress and face obstacles head-on.
There is no one stock standard solution for stress management that works for everyone. The only way to work out what works for you is to experiment with the different tools and techniques to determine what works best for you in this regard.
What happens if you don’t manage your stress
Even though you may not be aware of it, stress symptoms can have a negative impact on your health. You could assume that your nagging headache, frequent insomnia, or decreased productivity at work are all symptoms of an illness. However, stress could be the real culprit.
In fact, the effects of stress can be felt in your body, mind (through your thoughts and feelings), and through your behavior. Understanding typical stress symptoms might help you manage them. Unmanaged stress can be a factor in a number of health issues, including high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.
Common physical symptoms of stress:
It’s critical to manage your stress since persistent stress can result in physical manifestations of long-term health issues, such as these ones:
Breathing
Rapid breathing helps the body circulate more oxygen when under stress. This may make it more difficult for you to breathe if you already have a respiratory problem like asthma. Hyperventilation and panic attacks can both result from rapid breathing.
Heart rate
Your heart beats more quickly under stress so it can supply more blood to your body’s muscles and organs. This improves how quickly your body reacts to stress in the short term, but it also makes your blood pressure go up. High blood pressure might cause heart difficulties if you are under prolonged or repeated stress.
Stomach (gut)
Your body creates more glucose while you’re under stress to provide you additional energy. If this occurs regularly, you may be more susceptible to type 2 diabetes. Your body releases the chemicals cortisol and adrenaline in response to stress, and when too much of the acid is created, it can cause reflux or upset your stomach.
Sexuality and reproduction
Chronic stress leaves you mentally and physically worn out. This can cause fertility issues and decrease your desire for sex.
Muscles
Because of the adrenaline, your muscles stiffen up to be ready for a “fight or flight” reaction and to defend your body from harm. Your muscles relax after a stressful incident, and your blood pressure returns to normal, but when stress is ongoing, your muscles might not get the chance to unwind. This may result in headaches and body aches as well as back, neck, and shoulder pain.
Immunity
Your body’s immune system is activated by stress to aid in the healing of wounds and injuries. Long-term stress wears down your immune system, leaving you more susceptible to disease and infection and lengthening your recovery time.
Hair and skin
Stress hormones cause your skin to produce extra oil, making it more sensitive and oily. Over time, this can lead to acne or hair loss.
Tools and techniques for managing stress
In terms of stress management, the adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ is undoubtedly accurate. There are lots of different tools and techniques available for you to try. Each individual will require a different combination of tools and techniques to suit their needs so it’s important to keep trying things until you find the combination that works best for you.
Some ideas to get started include:
• Exercise frequently: this is a fantastic approach to reduce stress. A leisurely stroll to the bus stop is insufficient; you need to engage in activity that leaves you feeling puffed afterwards! 3 times per week, engage in at least 20 minutes of exercise.
• Avoid confrontation: stay away from circumstances that cause tension, such as pointless debates and conflicts (although ignoring a problem isn’t always the best approach to do so). Being assertive is acceptable but becoming upset is not.
• Unwind: take some time to unwind every day and make an effort to spend it with people who make you feel good about yourself.
• Eat healthily: a balanced diet is essential.
– Consume a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables and stay away from greasy and sweet foods.
– Eat in moderation.
– Take in adequate liquids.
• Have pleasure in life: It’s crucial to schedule time for enjoyment and to achieve balance in your life.
• Follow a daily schedule: a daily routine might make it easier for us to manage our time and feel more in control. Schedule regular meals, family time, exercise, daily tasks, and other leisure activities.
• Get lots of rest: a healthy sleep schedule is crucial for the body and the mind. Our bodies are repaired, relaxed, and rejuvenated by sleep, which also helps counteract the effects of stress. The following are examples of good sleep hygiene:
– Consistency.
– If possible, keep your sleeping place quiet, dark, calming, and at a pleasant temperature.
– Having a regular sleep schedule is important. If you have trouble going to sleep, try doing something calming and unwinding before bed, such as reading or listening to music.
– Go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning, including on the weekends.
– Avoid using electronics like TVs, computers, and smartphones right before bed.
– Before going to bed, stay away from heavy meals, coffee, and alcohol. Take a workout. Being active throughout the day can make it easier for you to sleep at night.
• Relate to others: keep in touch with loved ones and close friends and express your worries and emotions to those you can trust. Being socially connected can improve our mood and make us feel less anxious.
• Specify a time limit after news: following the news on social media and television for an excessive amount of time can make you more stressed. If watching the news makes you more anxious, try to limit your time spent doing so.
Treatment for stress management
Depending on the length and severity of the stress being experienced, most of the time, we may control our own stress by doing things like taking a break, talking things over with a friend or family member, or asking other family members and friends to assist us with tasks.
We can learn stress management techniques through a number of self-help tools that are widely available (for example governments often have free resources available, internet searches provide a plethora of information at your fingertips and often organizations provide their staff with access to resources through a centrally accessed hub).
However, if learning these techniques doesn’t work for us, or if our stress levels are too high or persistent, specialist medical attention may be required to help us remove the stressors in our life.
Numerous therapeutic modalities have been demonstrated to successfully lessen stress. These include mindfulness-based stress reduction, a variety of relaxation-based techniques, stress inoculation training, cognitive behavioral stress management, and others.
Cognitive Behavioral Stress Management
The term “cognitive behavioral stress management” (CBSM) refers to a set of approaches that include learning how to relax, communicate effectively, solve problems, manage time effectively, and strategies to deal with unhelpful thinking that can increase stress.
Stress inoculation training
People who participate in stress inoculation training (SIT) learn specialized techniques for managing stress. SIT informs the individual about stress and the negative effects of self-talk or poor coping mechanisms. The individual is also taught how to distinguish between what is within their control and what cannot be changed, allowing them to focus their efforts on acting in a more positive manner.
The individual then learns a variety of coping mechanisms (such as methods for relaxation, problem-solving, and communication) that are intended to lessen worry and boost confidence. Then, when simulating stressful scenarios, these coping mechanisms are practiced.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction
It has been discovered that mindfulness-based techniques effectively lower stress by directing a person’s attention to the present moment, free from the diversion of anxieties both real and imagined.
Relaxation-based approaches
Numerous relaxation-based techniques have been shown to reduce stress, particularly when used on a regular basis.
By teaching the body to respond to basic verbal cues (such as, “I feel warm, heavy, and relaxed”) and combining this with peaceful, regularly spaced, deep breathing, relaxation skills training aims to promote deep relaxation and reduce stress. This is carried out in a calm, distraction-free setting where the user can sit or lie down in a cozy, carefree position.
Case Study: NHS Hospital Trust
The situation:
A possible problem with stress at work was discovered by an NHS Trust’s employee wellbeing program. They made the decision to manage stress-related illnesses more proactively and preventively.
Risk assessment:
The Trust amassed information on:
• rates of illness absence
• how much illness was brought on by anxiety and stress
• Employee relations
• disciplinary concerns
• staff turnover.
Creating solutions:
The Director of Workforce Organization Development established a steering group. Staff members, trade union representatives, and a specialist clinical psychologist made up the group.
The Trust hosted unstructured ‘coffee table sessions’ where employees were free to discuss ideas. People were encouraged to participate because the facilitator, a private psychologist from an impartial third-party organization, fostered a non-judgmental atmosphere. The steering group transformed some concepts into workable solutions, sought input, and put them into action.
A ‘hot spot’ technique was used to pinpoint the departments that needed the most intervention. Action steps were created. Measures used included:
• analysis of sick leave records
• analysis of records relating to anxiety
• staff turnover statistics relating to stress
• employee relations data.
The inclusion of additional, qualitative surveys of employees that were more in-depth gave the risk assessment more information. The intervention strategy created by the Trust was then influenced by all of this information.
At each stage, unions were involved. They made a priceless input that strengthened the project’s legitimacy. Staff members felt they could engage in talks regarding the process as well as the process itself and that they had a voice.
The potential for implementing the remedies created for these problem areas in other parts of the Trust was evaluated. The things that were learned were recorded.
Results:
By promoting early reporting of work-related stress and encouraging early intervention, sick days were decreased, resulting in salary cost reductions.
Additionally, there were indicators of cultural shift, such as:
• improved dialogue between managers and employees
• more commitment to the change
• increased awareness of the need of promoting peer support
• internal organizational communication was better informed and improved as a result
• improvements in the organization’s overall use of both negative and positive feedback.
Implementation of the agreed outcomes was made easier to implement because:
• Actions were supported by the senior management team
• There was enough time spent involving all important parties, particularly front-line employees union/staff representatives, senior managers in HR, middle managers, and line managers, and
• The staff’s knowledge was respected.
Exercise 3.9: Stress Assessment Questionnaire
• 1 = Rarely happens
• 2 = Sometimes happens
• 3 = Often happens
• Were you shocked by your score?
• Are there particular areas you need to work on?
• What is the #1 thing you need to do to start managing your stress level?
• How will you hold yourself accountable for doing that one thing?
Course Manual 10: Stress Myths
Introduction
Many people find stress to be a mystery with many varied definitions. These days, most individuals can feel and experience stress, but they’ve been taught that stress is a normal part of life so they don’t think too much further than acknowledging that they’re ‘stressed’.
Stress is an evolutionary response to life’s many demands and pressures. Depending on the person, these stressors might be anything from extremely small to significant.
Over the years, stress has snowballed into a massive, life impacting condition that creates significant issues in so many people’s lives. There are so many elements that go together to create the situation that an individual finds themselves in, and depending on their life experience, their genetics and the general pressure they find themselves under every day, will determine the level of impact that stress plays in their life.
While stress and the impact that it has on our lives is being talked about more openly, what isn’t being discussed is the role that social conditioning plays in the way that we allow stress to invade our everyday tasks.
The role of social conditioning
Social conditioning is a sociological process that teaches people how to behave in a way that is widely accepted by both the larger society and the peer groups that make up that society. Compared to socialization, which is the process of acquiring norms, practices, and ideas, social conditioning plays a more robust role in our lives.
Social patterns and social structures, such as nationalism, education, employment, entertainment, popular culture, religion, spirituality, and family life, are the most common categories for the many different ways that social conditioning manifests itself.
In short, an individual’s social actions and responses are influenced by, and sometimes determined by, the social structure in which they find themselves.
In the nature versus nurture argument, social conditioning stands in for the environment and individual experience. The norms that guide the behavior of participants in the social system are established by society at large and by peer groups within society.
Although individuals shape society, society itself was created by individuals, who in turn shaped and influenced us. Society, therefore, evolves into something that essentially governs and dominates us.
The herd that an individual is a part of is connected to the specific way or influence to which one is exposed. When we liken this to what happens in the wild, we see that the fundamentals of social training are based on an animal’s innate drive to belong to a pack.
‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ is a collection of observations on group dynamics made by Sigmund Freud, who is regarded as the founder of psychoanalysis. According to Freud ’opposition to the herd is as good as separation from it and is therefore anxiously avoided’.
Because of this anxiety, both individual members and group leaders will often follow the decisions made by their group in accordance with its culture. The person is socialized to follow the group’s social norms, even if they go against his or her own moral code, on a micro level.
Isolation may emerge from such protest’s effects which, in Freud’s opinion, is one of the worst punishments that can be meted out to a person. An individual wouldn’t be able to act on his or her ‘instinctual impulses’ as a result of this.
According to Freud, these impulses are what drives a person’s potential acts. In addition, according to Freud, ‘we have an impression of a state in which an individual’s private emotional impulses and intellectual acts are too weak to come to anything by themselves and are entirely dependent for this on being reinforced by being repeated in a similar way in the other members of the group.’
As the group maintains its conditions, there may be little resistance from individual members out of fear of isolation and to protect the practice of innate instincts.
In understanding this, it is easy to see that in a society that proclaimed that without stress you cannot have success and that without being overly busy, overwhelmed and exhausted that there is no evidence that you are working hard enough to deserve success, the herd has come to believe that being stressed is a normal, and in fact desired, way of life.
It is only in recent times that the conversation around stress has started turning towards the collective being receptive to supporting individuals who are struggling under the stress load and that it has become acceptable, and even the norm, for people to seek professional assistance to help them find their way back to ‘good health’.
Nine common stress myths
While there are numerous myths floating around about stress, there are nine myths that are commonly accepted as playing significant role in the belief system of most people.
Myth # 1: Everyone experiences stress the same way
Fact: Everyone experiences stress differently.
What effects does stress have on various people? Sadly, the solution is not straightforward. Stress is very individualized and subjective. A source of stress for one individual could not bother them at all for another. There are various different types of stress. Stress categories include:
• typical stress brought on by daily obligations, such as those related to job, school, and families
• stress brought on by an abrupt change in circumstances, such as a divorce, job loss, or cancer diagnosis
• stress brought on by going through a terrible experience, such as a mass shooting or other type of calamity, among others.
What effects does stress have? These also are highly subjective. Depending on the sort of stress, some people may be able to handle it better than others or recover more rapidly. Although there is little evidence to support this claim, heredity may have a role in stress resilience. In general, people find it easier to cope with regular stress than stress brought on by catastrophic events, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Myth #2: Stress is unavoidable and pervasive
Fact: In many situations, stress can be avoided or handled.
It can be challenging to learn how to manage stress, and there are occasions when people are unable to do so, especially when extrinsic factors are involved. Avoiding stress might occasionally make it worse. However, there are practical approaches to managing stress.
First, some sources of stress can be avoided. For instance, college-aged individuals are notorious for starting assignments at the last minute. With good time management techniques and a prioritized list, this behavior that causes unneeded stress can be prevented.
People use a variety of efficient stress management techniques on a daily basis. Among these tactics are, but are not restricted to:
• understanding the appearance and symptoms of stress
• having a network of support, such as friends, family, or co-workers
• including medical experts in a support network
• daily exercise, such as 30 minutes of brisk walking, can help lower stress
• establishing precise, attainable, and quantifiable goals
• setting aside time each day for leisure and mental wellness.
Myth #3: Stress is never good
Fact: Stress can occasionally be beneficial.
Is stress a positive thing? University of California Berkeley experts claim that stress can occasionally be beneficial. A person’s alertness and behavior and cognition can both be improved by certain amounts of stress. People who are under too little stress may become depressed or bored. The duration of stress is what distinguishes between good and poor stress in an individual. Long-term or chronic stress can become crippling and have a bad impact on memory and other processes, but acute or short-term stress can be beneficial for people.
Myth #4: No symptoms means no stress
Fact: A person may be stressed even if they do not exhibit stress-related symptoms or indicators.
Stress can sometimes be easily detected in some people by behavioral changes or, more specifically, following catastrophic occurrences. In other individuals, it may be extremely difficult to determine if a person is stressed through their behavior.
Such individuals likely appear normal and hide their stress well, but underneath are mentally struggling. Stress is typically reflected mentally and emotionally.
Myth #5: Only major stress symptoms require attention
Fact: Even minor stress symptoms should be addressed.
Stress can quickly go from acute to chronic if symptoms are not managed. Chronic stress has been negatively linked to many physical problems. From a physiological perspective, stress hormones have a real impact on how well a person functions in everyday life.
Research has shown that an excess of stress hormones can alter:
• memory
• cognition
• learning
• the immune system
• the cardiovascular system
• the endocrine system
• the gastrointestinal system.
In other words, stress hormones are capable of producing a whole-body response, even if an individual shows minor symptom of stress. Typical treatments for stress include learning stress management techniques, prescription medication, and behavioral therapy.
Myth #6: Stress causes grey hair
Fact: Grey hair has other causes than stress.
It has long been a myth that grey hair is caused by high-stress levels. However, this is not supported by research. First, hair does not just turn grey. The pigment responsible for hair color is produced less as people age. Thus, age is a large factor in the development of grey hair, as well as a person’s genetic predisposition.
Some other illnesses and factors that may cause grey hair include:
• a vitamin deficiency
• tumor growth
• vitiligo
• alopecia areata (hair loss)
• heart disease
• low bone mass
• cigarette smoking.
Therefore, evidence suggests that stress is not a large factor in developing grey hair, if at all.
Myth #7: Stress causes cancer
Fact: There are many factors that cause cancer. Cancer cannot solely be attributed to stress.
According to the National Cancer Institute, links between stress and cancer are weak at best. Some studies have found a link between certain psychological factors and an increased risk of developing cancer. It should be stated, though, that just because the risk is higher for developing a disease, does not mean a person will definitely develop that disease.
However, it is possible that with certain cancers, stress has indirect effects, like altering the immune system, which is tasked with fighting cancer. So, while studies have not determined whether stress directly causes cancer, the indirect effects on cancer development should still be considered for patients with cancer.
Myth #8: Stress is a motivator
Fact: Small amounts of eustress (good stress) may motivate some people, but the benefits of motivation do not outweigh the overall negative toll on health of chronic, long-term, invasive stress.
In a survey conducted in 2014, Chinese community health workers were asked about their work stress and motivation in relation to job satisfaction. Using two different metrics, this study found that work-related stress had a negative association with job satisfaction.
For some people, short-term stress can be a motivating factor, particularly acute stress. Acute stress helps certain individuals perform tasks like meeting important deadlines and increases an individual’s alertness. Additionally, periods of acute stress may help people perform their best and think creatively about how to solve problems. In these cases, stress is warranted as a motivating force.
However, chronic stress, which has long-term negative implications, is less of a motivating factor and more of a burden. The benefits of acute stress are outweighed by the long-term effects of chronic stress on a person’s physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.
Myth #9: Drinking alcohol is an effective way to cope with stress
Fact: Drinking alcohol can be even more detrimental for a person trying to cope with stress.
According to the University of Utah, sometimes having a drink is a reasonable stress reliever. It depends on the setting. For instance, if someone is stressed and goes out for a drink with friends, the act of being with friends is usually the stress reliever, rather than the drink itself.
If a person is at home and uses alcohol for stress relief or to fall asleep, then problems can arise. One reason why alcohol should not be used to alleviate stress is that alcohol impacts parts of the brain responsible for decision-making and balance.
Additionally, even though a person may fall asleep easier after a drink or two, later in the night they may wake up frequently or awake too early as REM sleep cycles are affected. Finding other methods to relieve stress besides alcohol and drugs is critical.
How to move past the myths and create a new way forward
Recognizing and understanding stress myths and educating yourself on the true information behind stress-based topics is the best way to arm yourself with correct information.
Once you know where the truth of a situation lies, you can create a new pathway forward based on information that is factual.
Always look to find the things that are triggering stress in your life as your number one focus. Once you know what these are, you can create simple, easy and practical steps that can make a difference in the way that you experience the stressful events in your life.
Case Study: Breaking the Blame
Ruby is a San Francisco-based event manager who is 32 years old. She is motivated, committed and enthusiastic about her work, but lately she has felt like she can’t keep up with things. ‘I thought I was good at managing stress, but lately it just feels like too much,’ she said. ‘Even when I’m not, I feel like I’m always at work’.
She consistently volunteers first for new projects, puts in a lot of overtime, and takes on more duties than anybody else in her department. She would utter things such as: I enjoy my work, although it is really tough. I constantly feel as though I have nothing left to give. I have no time for my loved ones or myself.
Even worse, she feels that she’s never moving forwards and is constantly anxious and fatigued despite all of her hard work. She accuses her boss of piling on too much work: ‘I just wish my boss would understand how much strain they’re putting on me. No one can work like this for very long, they expect me to be a superhero’, is something she finds herself regularly saying (and is a line that resonates with many people, especially those who work in an energetic atmosphere like event management).
But Ruby is unaware that her conditioned reaction to stress also contributes to her pain. She is not alone in this; many people at work prefer to attribute their bad physical and mental health to their employer and the stress they endure at work.
However, the issue is that assigning blame does not make anyone feel better. The exact opposite is true. Employees like Ruby will grow more miserable, misunderstood, and helpless over time.
Despite the fact that she loves her career, she might opt to leave. She might decide to quietly quit, like many people before her have done.
Ruby may save her dream job and maintain control of the situation by learning to discern between her own obligations and those of her employer.
Differentiating Between Employer and Individual Responsibility for Workplace Stress
Thanks to social conditioning and the power of social media, it is not uncommon for people to believe that solving their stress problem is the responsibility of their employer.
Ruby can learn to differentiate between what is her call for action and what is her employer’s responsibility by practicing reflection. This entails taking a moment to reflect on the main reasons for her stress and what she can do to deal with them.
Ruby decided to follow these steps to assist her distinguish between her personal obligations and those of her employer:
Determine the causes of her stress at work
Ruby started by compiling a list of the things that are stressing her out at work:
• Heavy workloads
• Arbitrary deadlines
• Vague expectations, and
• A lack of support fell under this category.
By getting clear on what was really causing her stress at work, Ruby took the first step in identifying the stressors that she needed help from her employer for.
Evaluate what she can control
Ruby could then go through her list and decide what she can and cannot control. She might be able to control how she uses her time, but she might not be able to control how many projects are given to her. It might be a good idea to start by telling yourself, “Okay, I can’t change the fact that I have a heavy workload, but I can change how I manage my time and prioritize tasks.”.
By doing this, Ruby established limits by taking action. Her intervention physically halts the domino effect of working stress on her physical and mental wellbeing.
Ruby is also establishing limits by taking action. She prevents the tension at work from having a wooden block domino effect on her.
Take ownership of what she can control
Once Ruby has a clear understanding of what she can control, she can start taking action to address these stressors. For example, if she’s feeling overwhelmed by her workload, she can start prioritizing tasks and setting boundaries for herself. She can say to herself: “I have the power to make changes in my own life. I’m going to start by managing my time and establishing reasonable goals for myself.
Communicate with her employer
If Ruby identifies stressors that are outside of her control, such as unrealistic deadlines or lack of support, she can have a productive conversation with her employer about how these factors are affecting her wellbeing. This could include proposing solutions or making requests for additional resources. Her train of thought could be: “I need to have a conversation with my boss about the things that are causing me stress. It’s not just about me, it’s about creating a better work environment for everyone.”
It’s important to note that change may not happen overnight, but by being intentional about her approach to workplace stress, Ruby can build resilience, find a sense of agency and create greater peace and balance in her work.
In this process, Ruby has not only empowered herself by taking control of the process she follows around the stressors in her life, but she has also debunked the current myth that reducing her stress is the responsibility of her employer.
Exercise 3.10: Stress Myths Quiz
• Were there any answers that surprised you?
• Are there any stress myths that you think are affecting the way you do things in your life?
• What is one thing you can do to change the way you experience life around the myths that have been debunked in this manual?
Course Manual 11: Support Recovery
Introduction
In recent times we’ve seen a lot of talk happening about controlling and reducing stress levels. That’s because there are so many more stressors in modern day life and that has created a situation where so many more people are under significantly higher levels of stress than ever before.
What isn’t being talked about quite so openly is what happens when stress is left to run unchecked – where it creates so much pressure in the system that the body and mind collapse.
While it’s important to understand the things you can do every day to help reduce the stress load on your body, it’s also important to understand what to do if you do push things too far and end up experiencing what’s known as a nervous breakdown.
When under pressure, everyone suffers stress and anxiety, though typically at bearable levels. An individual is said to be experiencing a nervous breakdown if stress and anxiety are constant and increase to a point where they affect a person’s daily life.
An episode of extreme emotional discomfort is also referred to as a nervous breakdown and can also be called a mental health crisis or mental breakdown.
‘Nervous breakdown’ is not a medical term or a mental health diagnostic because it does not define a specific ailment. A person experiencing one is momentarily unable to function in their daily lives. It doesn’t matter how long the ‘moment’ extends for; it could be a day, a week, a month or years.
One of the biggest problems in modern day society is that the term is used too frequently in a colloquial manner where it is used flippantly to define a brief moment where there is pressure. Using the term ‘nervous breakdown’ in this way belies the true nature of a nervous breakdown, and makes it harder for people who are actually suffering from one to have their mental and physical health issues be taken seriously.
In reality, a nervous breakdown should be used to describe someone who is visibly struggling to manage stress, worry or anxiety, or who is being overtaken by mental health concerns.
Today’s clinicians can diagnose, describe and treat severe mental anguish more accurately, which is helping to lessen the stigma associated with mental illness.
What happens when distress is left to run out of control
The hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis is a feedback loop that allows the brain to send signals that cause the release of stress-response hormones. The HPA axis, because of how it works, is also sometimes referred to as the ‘stress circuit’.
In a nutshell, the corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is released by the hypothalamus in reaction to stress. Adrenocorticotropin (ACTH) is then released into the bloodstream by the pituitary gland, which is located right below the brain, as a result of CRH’s action on the pituitary gland. The adrenal glands, which are located on top of the kidneys, are then told by ACTH to release a range of hormones.
These substances include cortisol, epinephrine (formerly known as adrenaline), and norepinephrine (previously known as noradrenaline).
All three of these hormones allow the body to immediately react to any threat that has arisen.
Epinephrine quickens reaction times, raises blood pressure and heart rate, and directs blood flow to the muscles. Cortisol, sometimes referred to as glucocorticoid, causes the body to release sugar (in the form of glucose) so that vital fuel may be used to power the muscles and the brain. Norepinephrine and epinephrine are released during stressful or anxious states and bind to adrenergic receptors all over the body, having effects like dilation of the pupils and bronchioles, an increase in heart rate and constriction of the blood vessels, an increase in renin secretion from the kidneys, and an inhibition of peristalsis.
This process has been designed so that after the threat has passed, cortisol typically has a feedback effect that causes the hypothalamus to stop generating CRH, so shutting down the stress response. However, because the body can’t determine the difference between a truly life-threatening event and a situation that causes stress but isn’t going to kill you – like the phone keeps ringing or the inbox is overflowing with demanding emails – the stress circuit doesn’t get the chance to shut down. Instead, it plays on an auto loop responding to every little stressor that occurs, which means the body never gets the opportunity to move to the para-sympathetic nervous system where it can rest, relax and rejuvenate.
Systemic effects of this stress circuit are felt throughout the body. The HPA axis hormones have an impact on the autonomic nerve system, which regulates important bodily processes like digestion, blood pressure, and heart rate.
The limbic system, which regulates motivation and mood, the amygdala, which produces fear in response to danger, and the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory formation as well as mood and motivation, are other areas of the brain with which the HPA axis interacts. The HPA axis is also linked to brain areas that regulate pain, decrease appetite and regulate body temperature.
Similar to this, the HPA axis also communicates with several other glandular systems, including those that create thyroid, growth and reproductive hormones. When triggered, the stress response turns off the hormonal systems that control metabolism, growth, reproduction and immunity.
In the short term, the response is advantageous because it enables us to direct biochemical resources towards addressing the threat. When this stress circuit is left to run unchecked, the body eventually crumbles under the pressure and the individual finds themselves experiencing a nervous breakdown.
The impact to the nervous system of a breakdown
Why do nervous breakdowns occur?
Although underlying mental health issues frequently play a part, a stressful event can also result in a nervous breakdown.
Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are all mental health conditions that have been known to contribute to the underlying mental health issues. Life circumstances (like financial issues, divorce or trauma) may exacerbate the problem and serve as the catalyst for the breakdown.
Resilience (the capacity to deal with adversity) will be weaker if a person has inadequate coping mechanisms to begin with or lacks social support.
The steady accumulation of stress that frequently results from pressures connected to job, relationships, or financial difficulties, divorce or unemployment may be factors and can potentially lead to a nervous breakdown.
Over time, worry, stress and anxiety can accumulate to the point where a person is unable to manage or carry out their regular daily responsibilities.
Burnout is a condition that resembles a nervous breakdown in that it occurs when a person achieves a level of complete mental, bodily, and emotional weariness.
Numerous mental health disorders can be treated with medication and/or different forms of therapy and your doctor can also send you to psychologists or psychiatrists if necessary.
What signs indicate a nervous breakdown?
There are numerous warning signals that someone may be having a nervous breakdown. Quick professional assistance should be sought after the onset of symptoms.
A person’s mental condition, how they are feeling, or changes in personality are some of the indications. Physical symptoms, however, are also typical. The symptoms might differ from one individual to the next and depend on the underlying cause.
People who believe they are going through a nervous breakdown may exhibit the following symptoms:
• uncontrollable anxiety
• feeling isolated
• uninterested in family and friends
• withdrawing from routine daily activities
• feeling overwhelmed
• significant mood swings
• feeling depressed
• burnt out
• emotional outbursts of uncontrollable anger, fear, helplessness or crying
• feeling depersonalized, not feeling like themselves or feeling detached.
Physical signs may consist of:
• frequent illnesses: exhaustion can make you more prone to infections
• insomnia: when you have a lot on your mind, it can be difficult to fall asleep or sleep can be disrupted
• exhaustion: sore and stiff muscles, especially in the jaw, neck, or back from muscle tension
• bowel problems: stomach cramps and irregular bowel movements
• racing heart: feeling as though your heart is beating faster than usual
• sweats, flushes (hot or cold), and clammy hands.
Nervous breakdown sufferers could avoid social situations, call in sick to work, and isolate themselves at home. They might not be taking care of their personal hygiene, or they might not be eating or sleeping well.
It’s crucial to get assistance and consult a doctor or counsellor if you think you or a loved one may be having a nervous breakdown. Untreated mental illness can result in social problems, physical problems, and longer-lasting mental health issues.
Ways to support the nervous system in recovery
People who have recovered from a nervous breakdown often claim that it compelled them to confront their problems, seek assistance, and improve their coping mechanisms. In some cases, it meant that their untreated mental disease was identified and they began therapy for it.
Some started treatment and changed the structure of their lives and employment to make them less stressful. After receiving care and therapy, people who experienced nervous breakdowns frequently become more resilient and have improved coping skills.
Depending on the circumstance, the diagnosis, and the patient’s preferences, the course of treatment for a nervous breakdown may involve both medication and counselling.
An underlying mental health disorder, such as depression or anxiety, may be treated with medication. Counselling or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a sort of talking therapy that seeks to disrupt the habit of negative thinking, are both possible forms of therapy.
Stress and anxiety can be managed with a few simple lifestyle adjustments. Changing your eating, exercise, and sleeping patterns can assist. A nutritious diet can increase your energy levels, help you sleep better, fight off illnesses, and keep you from feeling down and exhausted. Additionally, cutting out stimulants like caffeine from your diet may help you sleep better and feel less anxious.
As a coping mechanism, drugs and alcohol should be avoided because they can exacerbate mental health issues or result in addiction.
Numerous short-term and chronic forms of mental disease can benefit from exercise. Exercise can be utilized as a self-care activity and as a ‘time-out’ from other pressures. Team sports and activities promote social interaction, which can lessen feelings of loneliness, improve your mood, and boost your self-esteem. Physical exertion may also help you sleep better, which is important for giving you the energy you need to go through your daily tasks.
You can employ relaxation techniques when you sense your stress levels rising, such as meditation or breathing exercises.
Recovery is possible despite the hold that a nervous breakdown can have. Like burnout, a nervous breakdown cannot be cured overnight, but there are numerous strategies to reduce stress and get back to a healthier state of being.
Just like with stress, the experience each individual has with a nervous breakdown will be unique to them, but there are some common experiences. Here are 14 suggestions for places to start the recovery process from a nervous breakdown:
1. Monitor your level of stress
Technology has advanced significantly and there are now apps and gadgets that can help you track your stress. In particular, these can be a terrific way to keep tabs on your anxiety. You can learn more about your unique stress patterns and behaviors with the use of trackers.
2. Determine your stressors
You can avoid or limit encounters with your stress triggers if you are aware of them. Identify the events, people, or circumstances that consistently cause stress and then try to stay as far away from them as you can.
3. Establish a journaling routine
Writing in a journal has been found to be a powerful emotional release. It could take some time to develop the habit, but once you do, you’ll learn on your own how to deal with mental fatigue.
4. Look for expert assistance from a coach or therapist
There is no shame in asking a qualified psychologist or coach for assistance. It’s actually encouraged. Therapy significantly lowers stress levels and can hasten healing in terms of one’s mental and emotional wellbeing.
5. Create a network of allies
Stress can be reduced by being able to talk about your issues in a secure setting. Additionally, it will strengthen your bonds with those close to you. Whether it be in your personal or professional connections, don’t be scared to ask for help from others.
6. Exercise regularly
Moving your body will release the tension it holds while producing feel-good hormones like endorphins. Virtual workouts like online yoga help relieve stress without you even leaving the house.
7. Speak up for yourself
Being honest about your situation with a boss or manager may result in a reduced workload and prevent you from working long hours. Don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself to create change that could better suit your mental and emotional needs.
8. Acquire skills for stress management
Different people respond differently to stress. Stress management techniques such as mindful breathing, intuitive eating, or cardio can only help if you give them a try.
9. Create a work-life balance
An unbalanced relationship with work is one of the numerous factors that can significantly contribute to a nervous breakdown. Cultivating a work-life balance will help you lead a much more functional and stress-free life.
Start with small daily actions to balance time spent at work and time spent on non-work activities. For example, use time blocking to reduce your screen time and take up a new health and wellness trend. Take your vacation days to spend quality time travelling or with your friends and family.
As well as preventing things like burnout, having a good work-life balance will improve your relationships with loved ones, which is a key aspect of your health and wellbeing.
10. Do things that you enjoy
If you want to know how to recover from a nervous breakdown, having fun is a good place to start. Committing to things that make you happy will calibrate stress levels and help you reconnect with yourself on an emotional level.
11. Create a healthy sleep schedule
Not getting enough sleep due to stress poses threats to physical strength, mental focus, and emotional stamina. Try to get at least seven to nine hours a night. This could be done with the right sleep hygiene or even with a sleep tracker.
12. Follow a healthy diet
Eating fresh, wholesome meals can boost your immunity and make you less vulnerable to stress and fatigue. Try to embrace a nutritious diet for more energy.
13. Practice mindfulness and meditation
Many people ask, “How long does it take to recover from burnout?” The answer is that recovery is a process, not a destination. Life skills like mindfulness and meditation focus on the bigger picture. This encourages people to cultivate a more peace-oriented lifestyle.
14. Set boundaries
Many people struggle to say no when being asked to take on extra work. Learning how to set boundaries at work and in relationships can help reduce the chances of burnout.
Recovering from a nervous breakdown
Recovery from a condition like a nervous breakdown doesn’t happen overnight. And because the issue is mainly internal and psychological, tracking progress is not always easy.
Here are six stages you can actively work through at your own pace to find your calm amidst the storm.
Stage 1: Admit the problem
You can’t start your recovery process until you recognize that there’s a need for one.
To start, it’s worth sitting down and considering the causes and extent to which the nervous breakdown is affecting you. From that point on, you can move forward.
Stage 2: Take a break
Taking a break from work is not always possible. But it will help alleviate the strain and give your body and mind the time it desperately needs to relax and gather energy again.
Stage 3: Focus on wellbeing
If you are experiencing a nervous breakdown, it may be time to shift your focus from work-related productivity to your general wellbeing.
Stage 4: Reflect on personal values
When we immerse ourselves in work, we often forget why we started or what we want out of life. Reflecting on personal values can remind us of who we really are and what parts of life deserve our full attention.
Stage 5: Explore new opportunities
There’s more than one way to make money. If your current roles and responsibilities are proving more draining than fulfilling, perhaps it’s time to explore new opportunities and find a career path that better suits your lifestyle and ideals.
Stage 6: Make a change
Although change can sometimes be scary, it’s better than sacrificing your personal health. If you’re experiencing a nervous breakdown, chances are something needs to change in order to get your mental and physical health back on track.
Recovery doesn’t happen on its own. You may need to make some lifestyle or job changes before you can find relief.
Case Study: Craig Bristow
Craig Bristow had barely turned 24 when his life abruptly changed.
He had a nervous breakdown at the start of 2014, and it subsequently molded and shaped his life. His nervous breakdown eventually resulted in the identification of several mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and hyperawareness.
When he was first diagnosed, he initially took a fortnight off of work, promising himself that he would return to work the next week as if nothing had occurred and put the whole ordeal behind him. The reality was that that was never even close to being a possibility for him.
On his first day back at work after having a severe panic attack, he was given a permanent leave of absence. This saw Craig being jobless from 2014 until 2018. Whenever he attended meetings with the Job Centre, he would experience panic attacks.
His situation got worse and worse. Because he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to glimpse the future, he dared not think about it while he was still unable to work.
Craig then found the Papworth Trust (a leading disability charity that supports thousands of people, their families and carers every year) and at the same time, had a fresh ambition he decided he wanted to explore.
Since having a nervous breakdown, Craig had begun journaling his ideas and creating poetry. His poetry was entirely centered around his struggles and experiences. It had only ever been a secret interest; something he did to unwind and try to understand what was happening to him, and why it was happening.
Because what he wrote was so intimate and frank, Craig felt like he never wanted it to be read by anyone. Eventually, Craig let his mother see some of the poems he had written, and she suggested that he consider publishing them so that other people may read them in the hopes that it could benefit them.
When Craig started talking to the people at Papworth Trust, he was unsure of how they would respond to his suggestion that he wanted to be a writer.
At that point, the people at the Papworth Trust did the most empowering thing they could have done – they treated Craig like a human. In doing so, they put him at ease right away. When Craig was talking to someone, he felt like a normal person. He felt as though I was speaking to a friend he had known for a long time and that he had found a secure environment where he could thrive.
Despite this, Craig was still uneasy when we came to the subject of what he wanted to do for a living because he knew that he wanted to say that he wanted to be a writer. But when Craig shared his true passion with the people at Papworth Trust they responded with ‘That’s a great idea; let’s see how we can make this a reality.’.
To have the support of someone that just accepted his passion as a normal, everyday pursuit was the difference between Craig spending the rest of his life battling mental health demons and being able to forge forward with his mental health under control and launch himself into a life that was underpinned by the thing he most wanted to be doing.
Craig is now a published author. The person who had a nervous breakdown five years prior and was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression, the person who made two suicide attempts, the person who, on occasion, was unable to leave their bedroom for days is a published author.
Today, Craig tells others that suffering from a nervous breakdown, being diagnosed with mental health conditions and being unemployed should not make you feel inferior or useless since you are a person, not a statistic.
You are defined by the person you choose to be, not by your occupation.
Exercise 3.11: Nervous Breakdown Quiz
• Was there an answer that stood out to you more than the others?
• Why did it stand out?
• Is this an area you feel you need to do some work around?
• What is one step you will take to reduce the impact of this?
• How will you hold yourself accountable for taking that step?
Course Manual 12: Environment, Community and Self
Introduction
Environmental influences will affect the majority of us and cause changes to our mental health at some point in our lifetime. While the impact may be slight for some, for others it can have a significantly negative impact on their mental health.
Your degree of comfort, stimulation, and social support can all be impacted by your surroundings. Your health and safety might be affected by factors like crime, racism and pollution, which can have a significant impact on your mental wellbeing. Your stress levels can be affected by the surroundings, which can subsequently have an effect on your physical and mental health.
Our attitude and emotions are greatly influenced by the environment we live in on a daily basis. An airy, light-filled atmosphere inspires different emotions than a dark, congested room.
However, the effects go beyond our initial response; for instance, one study discovered that living in a messy environment can actually boost the production of cortisol, which is one of major stress hormones.
So, given most of us spend all the majority of each day in one area (whether that be where we live or where we work), the surrounds that we spend our time within can play a significant role in our mental, emotional and physical health.
The ways in which your environment impacts your personal wellbeing
There are three primary categories of environmental influences on mental health:
• physical elements including pollution, the workplace and the climate
• social variables including abuse, inadequate support and unhealthy relationships
• other elements, including a lack of excitement, a lack of green spaces outside and dirty surroundings.
Your environment at home and at work can:
• Affect your disposition; for instance, studies show that bright spaces, both natural and artificial, might lessen anxiety and despair
• Have an effect on your motivation and behavior; for instance, a cluttered hallway filled with shoes, bags, and other items may tempt you to leave the item you’re carrying there, but a tidy entrance and enough storage may motivate you to take the time to put it away
• Encourage or discourage interactions between members of your family and visitors; for instance, a welcoming area with cozy chairs can entice guests to relax and speak
• Increase or decrease stress, which affects both your physical and emotional health, even how long you live!
The link between your environment and your emotional wellbeing
There is more to your environment’s ability to affect you than just how it looks. In fact, multiple research studies have shown that after spending a lot of time somewhere, we stop seeing our surroundings.
When you stop focusing on them for a few days or a few weeks, the mountain of papers piling up on your work-from-home desk or the heaps of laundry spilling out of your closet seem to vanish. This is a result of habituation, which is also referred to as ‘attentional blindness.’
But that doesn’t mean your surroundings aren’t having an impact on your mental health even though you’re not paying attention to them consciously.
As your mind mirrors your surroundings, the sounds in the room, how warm or cold it feels, and how your room smells are just as essential as what we see. In fact, young adults who work remotely or take online college courses spend a large part of their day staring at their computer screen in their rooms. However, their other senses are constantly absorbing different inputs, such as the room’s temperature, smells, and sounds.
Your immediate environment affects you and your state of mind whether you live in a city or the country, at home with your family or with roommates, in a brand-new apartment complex or in an ancient farmhouse.
Additionally, it also works the other way around: Your environment will reflect your attitude. For instance, sad people frequently lack the motivation to clean, organize or open the windows to let in light and air. As a result, the environment becomes yet another cause causing poor mental health, creating a kind of vicious cycle.
What Influences Your Physical Environment?
For decades, researchers have been examining how our environment affects our health. Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich’s research is referenced by author Esther Sternberg in her book Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well Being. Ulrich evaluated how quickly patients recovered from gallbladder surgery in his most well-known study. He discovered that patients who were given rooms with views of a grove of trees generally recovered more quickly than those whose windows overlooked a brick wall.
Light, in addition to a view of nature, is crucial for both physical and emotional wellbeing. Our circadian rhythms – the biological clock that signals when it’s time to sleep – are directly impacted by light, and sleeping patterns are strongly correlated with mood.
Stress and anxiety can be exacerbated by insufficient levels of natural and/or artificial light in your space. University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists discovered that rats held in the dark for six weeks exhibited depressed behavior. The parts of the rats’ brains that produced norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin, the neurotransmitters involved in emotion, were also damaged, according to the researchers. These are the same brain regions that are underactive in depressed individuals. Additionally, night-time light that is overly bright disturbs sleep, which directly affects mood.
Furthermore, the state of disarray and disorder in our surroundings has a direct impact on our mental health. Women who lived in crowded houses had greater stress levels and more depressive moods, according to a study that compared the cortisol levels of women to those of their husbands.
Clutter has been connected to lower cognitive functioning, procrastination, lower productivity, and emotional tiredness in addition to reducing wellbeing.
Similarly, there is a 63% higher risk of depression associated with having too much light in your bedroom while you’re trying to sleep.
Most of us are generally unaware of how our surroundings affect our thoughts and actions. The more conscious we can become about the way our surroundings impact us, the easier it becomes for us to make changes that are beneficial to our health.
Here are three examples of ways in which your environment can have an impact on you:
• The more clutter, the more munching: According to research, clutter makes us more likely to make poor food decisions. In a study involving college students, subjects who were placed in chaotic settings consumed more cookies. Because sugar has a detrimental effect on mental health, this is an important environmental factor to be aware of.
In a cluttered environment, we are also more likely to succumb to other forms of distraction, such as watching TV or browsing social media, in disorganized workspaces.
• Making poor decisions might be influenced by a cluttered environment: People’s judgement might be hampered by disorderly surroundings, which can also encourage impulsive behavior. Lots of time between lectures could translate into internet shopping binges or publishing that Instagram photo you probably shouldn’t have.
• Your space has the power to promote or prevent social interaction: Family members or your roommate are less likely to spend time in your bedroom if it is completely filled with clothing or books and the only place to sit is in your bed. That might sound advantageous to some people, especially if you work or attend school in your bedroom, as many young adults do at the moment.
But in the end, making a more welcoming setting where people feel at ease will make you feel less alone in your own space and in your own head.
Because our environment has such a significant impact on our mental health, trauma-informed care is provided in settings such as outpatient therapy, residential treatment, and therapeutic modalities. A healing environment is facilitated by tranquil colors, cozy furnishings, and plenty of light.
How to create a healing environment at home and in the workplace
The study of the connection between our environment and our health is a subfield of mind-body studies. According to studies, having a pleasant and healthy environment can have an impact on your immune system and physical health in addition to making you feel better. Examples of this include having plants in your office or hanging a special photo on the wall.
Here are a few ways you can start to create beneficial environments:
1. Choose comfort
All of us as humans have a strong desire for security and safety and search for those qualities in our surroundings. We also look for psychological comfort, which is a combination of stimulus and familiarity, as well as physical comfort, such as the proper temperature in the area. So think about how you may increase your comfort level!
• Boost your sense of security by doing a house audit, perhaps with advice or assistance from your police department.
• Consider your home’s physical comfort, including the furnishings, flooring, and temperature, to mention a few. You could be able to add a tiny carpet besides the bed or opt to start saving money for bigger goods like more comfy chairs to make it cozier.
• Take into account how you could add some originality or appeal to your house to provide some stimulation.
2. Reduce the mess
Stress is increased by visual “noise”. We can experience anxiety, sadness, or helplessness in a cluttered, filthy, or perplexing setting.
Start with a modest space. De-clutter a shelf, organize a drawer or clean off a counter. You’ll feel accomplished as a result, which will motivate you to keep going and offer you something to focus on when the turmoil around you becomes disheartening. From now on, keep that area clear of clutter, and build on it by conquering one more area at a time.
3. Give your senses a treat
• When choosing colors for your walls and furniture, consider your personal taste.
• Put pictures and mementoes that hold special importance for you in places you frequent.
• Include an aquarium or art that you admire.
• If the sound appeals to you, include a water element.
• If you want to diffuse any enticing essential oils, think about obtaining a diffuser or vaporizer.
4. Improve the lighting
Natural light, or daylighting, is linked to elevated spirits, decreased weariness, and decreased eyestrain. So, make use of any available natural light. Add a variety of other light sources, such a floor lamp, to it after that.
5. Incorporate nature
According to studies, even a brief encounter with nature can considerably lower stress, calm anger and fear, and heighten positive emotions. Put a comfy chair where you may appreciate views of trees, other plants, or other natural features if you have them. To achieve a similar result, you might also add aquariums, indoor plants, or works of art with a natural theme.
6. Quiet down the roar
Utilize these straightforward suggestions:
• Be aware of the noise you make on your own. For instance, are you actually watching TV, or is it just playing in the background? Instead of a power model, may you utilize a push mower? Or what about choosing “vibrate” as opposed to the newest ringtone? The peace is increased by even modest acts.
• To provide a noise barrier, plant trees, particularly evergreens.
• To drown out stressful urban noise, try playing recordings of natural noises like birds or water.
7. Remember the garden
According to research, having a garden has a variety of advantages. The more frequently you visit it and the closer it is to your home, the less stress it will cause. As exercise, gardening is beneficial.
8. Begin modestly
Picking a space you can transform into a healing area, such as a room or a corner, is one place to start. It’s great if you already have a favorite location that you can use. Even better if it has a view of the outside and good natural lighting.
Next, decide which activities you find to be the most restorative, and modify the environment to suit them. Do you enjoy reading? Bring a nice chair and good lighting into the area. Are you a meditator? Maybe a water feature would make you unwind and concentrate. You might even discover that your healing room is a workbench where you construct or repair items, in which case you’ll need to arrange your tools and provide adequate lighting.
9. Bear in mind your own environment
Think about your mental environment as well as your physical environment. Recognize that positive attitudes, resilience, self-efficacy, and a sense of control are associated with good health and can be acquired through practice. For your encounters at home, make a good intention!
The way that nature impacts your wellbeing
According to research, our stress levels are influenced by our surroundings and can rise or fall. Your neurological, endocrine, and immunological systems’ functions are all changed at any one time by what you are seeing, hearing, and experiencing.
You might experience anxiety, sadness, or helplessness as a result of the stress of an uncomfortable situation. Your immune system is subsequently suppressed as a result, which also raises your blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle tension. Positive surroundings change that.
People find nature to be beautiful regardless of their age or country. More than two-thirds of people select a natural setting to go to when overwhelmed, according to research studies conducted around the globe.
Natural healing
Being in nature or even just watching natural scenes makes you feel better and less stressed, angry, or afraid. Not only does being in nature improve your mood, but it also benefits your physical health by lowering your blood pressure, heart rate, muscular tension, and stress hormone production. In some circumstances, it has even been shown to lower mortality.
A single plant in a room can significantly reduce tension and anxiety, according to research conducted in hospitals, companies, and schools.
Nature is calming
In addition, nature provides us with natural pain relief. We are drawn in by natural surroundings and distracted from our suffering and misery because we are naturally predisposed to find trees, plants, water, and other components of nature fascinating.
This is effectively illustrated in a now-classic study of gallbladder surgery patients, of which half had a view of trees and the other half had a view of a wall. Robert Ulrich, the doctor who led the study, claimed that patients who could see trees were better able to manage pain, appeared to be having less side effects, and spent less time in the hospital. Similar outcomes have been shown in more recent trials using natural scenery and plants in hospital rooms.
Nature heals
The effect of nature on overall wellness is one of the most fascinating topics of current research. In one study published in Mind, 95% of individuals surveyed reported that their mood changed from being gloomy, stressed, and nervous to being calmer and more balanced after spending time outside. A happy mood, psychological wellbeing, meaningfulness, and vitality are all linked to spending time in nature or viewing nature-inspired landscapes.
Additionally, spending time in nature or watching scenes of nature improves our capacity for concentration. Humans naturally find nature fascinating, so we may readily concentrate on what we are seeing outside in nature. This also gives our busy minds a break, recharging us for new duties.
Nature connects
Time spent in nature strengthens our bonds with one another and the wider world, according to a series of field experiments done by Kuo and Coley at the Human-Environment Research Lab.
According to a different University of Illinois study, people who live in Chicago public housing that is surrounded by trees and greenery tend to know more people, feel more united with their neighbors, care more about helping and supporting one another, and have stronger feelings of belonging than people who live in buildings without trees.
In addition to having a stronger feeling of community, they also had a lower risk of street crime, lower levels of domestic violence and aggressiveness, and a better ability to handle the rigors of daily life, including the strains of poverty.
Studies that measured brain activity using MRI may help to understand this feeling of connection. Participants’ empathy and love-related brain regions lit up when they saw scenes of nature, whereas their fear- and anxiety-related brain regions lit up when they watched scenes of cities.
It seems that nature stimulates emotions that bind us to one another and our surroundings.
Case Study: Attention Restoration Therapy
The belief that spending time in nature improves focus is the primary foundation of the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), a theory that was put forth by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in 1989.
The Kaplan’s initially highlighted the theory in their book, The experience of nature: A psychological perspective, where they talked about how easily observing natural occurrences, like seeing the clouds float or the leaves move, makes us more aware and observant.
Their theory separates attention into two categories:
• When we voluntarily pay attention to something, we totally devote our brain resources to internalizing the experience.
• Unknowingly paying attention to something and becoming immersed in it is known as involuntary attention.
According to the ART, exposure to natural settings can both build and redeem attention levels. The theory proposes that we can avoid common stressors, feel good and joyful, rediscover our innate motivation, and become more aware of our sensory stimulations by developing a strong connection to nature.
According to the ART hypothesis, nature has some ‘soft fascinations’ that aid in regaining focus when we become disoriented or mentally fatigued. The calming natural components that we all enjoy being near (such flowers, breezes, or mild sunlight) are what we refer to as ‘soft fascinations.’ We naturally connect and immerse ourselves in the experience of nature when we are near these features and don’t have to exert any effort to do so.
The notion that people who spend more time in nature are more intuitive, active, and consciously aware because they feel happier and more content thanks to this connection has been validated by a number of studies and extensive surveys. It’s an area of research that environmentalists continue to find fascinating.
Exercise 3.12: Perceived Benefits of Nature
• Was there a big variance in the total score for the members of your group?
• Of your group members, how many of you need nature to function in a more efficient and connected way?
• Thinking about your work environment, does it provide a connection to nature that individuals can access easily and on a daily basis?
Project Studies
Before the commencement of Workshop 4, the Head of each department is to provide a detailed report relating to the introduction of managing stress, burnout, depression and anxiety within their department.
The report should include the following:
– Initial evaluation of the current status of stress, burnout, depression and anxiety within the department.
– A SWOT analysis relating to the department’s current stress, burnout, depression and anxiety status.
– Strategic process for implementing and managing stress, burnout, depression and anxiety on an ongoing basis. The process is to include the following 12 elements:
o Stress
o Stress vs Distress
o Secondary Stress
o Stress and Mental Health
o Burnout
o Depression
o Anxiety
o Doom Scrolling
o Stress Management
o Stress Myths
o Support Recovery
o Environment, Community and Self
– Detail any challenges experienced whilst implementing the process.
– Confirmation that the process has been successfully implemented and is now fully operational.
Program Benefits
Human Resources
- Improved engagement
- Improved culture
- Reduced burnout
- Increased retention
- Employee loyalty
- Performance improvement
- Empowered workforce
- Healthy organization
- Increased effectiveness
- Happier workplace
Management
- Stronger leadership
- Increased focus
- Cohesive workforce
- Greater collaboration
- Wellness mindset
- Greater potential
- Improved communication
- Consistent management
- Greater creative flow
- Positive environment
Business Operations
- Improved wellness
- Reduced costs
- Operating efficiency
- Improved quality
- Operational synergy
- Enhanced environment
- Clarified priorities
- Improved effectiveness
- Organizational resilience
- Increased productivity
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.