Stress Management - How to Reduce, Prevent, and Cope with Stress

Stress produces numerous symptoms, which vary according to persons, situations, and severity. These can include physical health decline as well as depression. The process of stress management is known as one of the keys to a happy and successful life in modern society. Although life provides numerous demands that can prove difficult to handle, stress management provides a number of ways to manage anxiety and maintain overall well-being.

Stress Management

It may seem that there is nothing you can do about stress. The bills won’t stop coming, there will never be more hours in the day, and your career and family responsibilities will always be demanding. But you have more control than you might think. In fact, the simple realization that you are in control of your life is the foundation of stress management. Managing stress is all about taking charge: of your thoughts, emotions, schedule, and the way you deal with problems

• Identify sources of stress
• Look at how you cope with stress
• Avoid unnecessary stress
• Alter the situation
• Adapt to the stressor
• Accept the things you can’t change
• Make time for fun and relaxation
• Adopt a healthy lifestyle
• Identify the sources of stress in your life
• Learn about hidden sources of stress

Stress management starts with identifying the sources of stress in your life. This is not as easy as it sounds. Your true sources of stress are not always obvious, and it is all too easy to overlook your own stress-inducing thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Sure, you may know that you are constantly worried about work deadlines.

Start a Stress Journal

A stress journal can help you identify the regular stressors in your life and the way you deal with them. Each time you feel stressed; keep track of it in your journal. As you keep a daily log, you will begin to see patterns and common themes. Write down:

• What caused your stress (make a guess if you’re unsure)
• How you felt, both physically and emotionally
• How you acted in response
• What you did to make yourself feel better
• Look at how you currently cope with stress

Think about the ways you currently manage and cope with stress in your life. Your stress journal can help you identify them. Are your coping strategies healthy or unhealthy, helpful or unproductive? Unfortunately, many people cope with stress in ways that compound the problem.

Unhealthy ways of coping with stress

These coping strategies may temporarily reduce stress, but they cause more damage in the long run:

1. Smoking
2. Substance or Alcohol Dependency
3. Overeating or under eating (Binge eating)
4. Zoning out for hours in front of the TV or computer
5. Withdrawing from friends, family, and activities
6. Using pills or drugs to relax
7. Sleeping too much
8. Procrastinating
9. Filling up every minute of the day to avoid facing problems
10. Taking out your stress on others (lashing out, angry outbursts, physical violence)

Learning healthier ways to manage stress

If your methods of coping with stress are not contributing to your greater emotional and physical health, it’s time to find healthier ones. There are many healthy ways to manage and cope with stress, but they all require change. You can either change the situation or change your reaction. When deciding which option to choose, it is helpful to think of the four As: avoid, alter, adapt, or accept.

Since everyone has a unique response to stress, there is no “one size fits all” solution to managing it. No single method works for everyone or in every situation, so experiment with different techniques and strategies. Focus on what makes you feel calm and in control.

Dealing with Stressful Situations: The Four A’s

Change the situation:

• Avoid the stressor
• Alter the stressor

Change your reaction:

• Adapt to the stressor
• Accept the stressor

More on each A`s coming up in next installment. 

Teaching the importance of Clear and Concise Communication

Knowing how to communicate well with others is an essential skill. Effective communication should generate the desired effect and maintain the effect, with the potential to increase the effect of the message. Therefore, effective communication serves the purpose for which it was planned or designed. Possible purposes might be to elicit change, generate action, create understanding, inform or communicate a certain idea or point of view.

Blindfolded Object Recognition

For this exercise, you need two sets of objects:

Use some of the objects in the classroom that kids are already familiar, Examples are:

Marker pen

Paper basket

Stapler

Computer mouse

Folder

Water bottle

Glove

Book

Watch

Glasses

Glasses container

Use some objects, which are not in schools, like:

A battery

A doll

A toy car

Kitchen sponge

Pegs

Coins

Lego pieces

Salt-shaker

Toothpaste

Toothbrush

Old mobile phone

Hair clips

Socks

Newspaper

Put both sets in a box and make sure no one can see them.

Now ask a child to come forward for this fun exercise. Blindfold the child. Pick one object from the box and give it to him/ her. Other kids should not say anything at this point. The child should feel the object and guess what it is.

If the child cannot guess the object, ask other kids to help him/ her by describing the features of the object but not stating the name of it. Whoever states the name cannot be a volunteer in the next rounds and gets out of the game.

You can then repeat the exercise with other kids one by one so they can all have a go at it. Each time they should pick a new object from the box.

Communication: Body Language

Body language is a form of mental and physical ability of human non-verbal communication, consisting of body posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals almost entirely subconsciously. (Body language in this sense should be distinguished from sign language.)

James Borg states that human communication consists of 93 percent body language and paralinguistic cues, while only 7% of communication consists of words themselves.

Body language may provide clues as to the attitude or state of mind of a person. For example, it may indicate aggression, attentiveness, boredom, relaxed state, pleasure, amusement, and intoxication.

Body language is significant to communication and relationships. It is relevant to management and leadership in business and in places where many people can observe it. It can also be relevant to some outside of the workplace. It is commonly helpful in dating, mating, in family settings, and parenting. Although body language is non-verbal or non-spoken, it can reveal a lot about your feelings and meaning to others. How others reveal their feelings towards you. Body language signals happen on a conscious and unconscious level.

Purpose of activity:

To understand how we send messages using our body and without using words.

Skills: communication, self-awareness, critical thinking

Materials: Pieces of paper/card

Steps:

Divide participants into pairs.

Each pair should think of a discussion that one of them has had with someone else, which became an argument or a conflict.

The participants then act out the argument using their bodies and faces only. They must not speak and should only mime.  After a few minutes of practising the mime, choose two pairs whose scenes look the clearest. Ask the first pair to act their scene.  Ask the group what they think is happening. Point out that it is often easy to know more or less what is going on from our body movement and facial expressions.

Repeat the exercise with the second pair.

Brainstorm the different parts of the body we can use to communicate with (eyes, arms, mouth, whole body, fingers, legs, shoulders, etc.) and the emotions we can communicate though our bodies (pleasure, anger, weakness, disappointment, etc.).  Write or draw symbols for emotions on paper/card.

Give each participant a paper showing one of the emotions (you can also do this in pairs). Ask them to model the emotion with their body. Go through the group guessing what the emotion each participant or pair is modelling.

Final discussion:

Which is more effective in sending a message, body language or words?  Why?

What are some of the body language messages that are particularly positive or Negative?

Influences: Adverts and Media

Purpose of activity: To understand how adverts affect us. Advertisements are part of the environment and they can reflect the values of our society and create peer pressure.

Life skills: Critical thinking, creative thinking 

Important points: People who smoke cigarettes put their own and others health at risk. Advertisements for cigarettes try to influence people to start smoking and to buy cigarettes.

Materials: Three adverts for smoking (and/or other adverts in the environment which the children may see often). You can use the illustrations below but it is better to cut out local ones from magazines or newspapers or go on the streets to look at billboards, where appropriate.  

Steps

1. Ask the group what messages are being given by each advertisement. How does the advertisement try to affect us? For example: By being colourful and eye catching; by linking a good life with the product; by using sexy image; or by using words that make us laugh or catch us by surprise
2. Discuss whether these advertisements tell the truth.
3. Ask the children to describe or show a poster advert s/he likes very much and say why.
4. Ask children what other kinds of adverts they hear or see (radio, TV, magazines).
5. Discuss why we like or dislike advertisements and how they affect the way people think.
6. In pairs or groups, ask children to act out a role-play in which one child has seen an advertisement for something that s/he wants to have or to do. S/he has to try to convince the group and the others in the group have to change his or her mind. Allow 10 minutes and then the pair or group have to declare the outcome. 

Final discussion:

Ask the group to remember how the discussion developed. Ask the children if they have been affected by an advertisement. Which advert? Should we be careful of adverts? (Think about how we gain or lose from having or doing what is advertised.)

Rights and Responsibilities

Purpose of activity:
To share ideas about children's rights and responsibilities
To discuss how to ask closer to achieving their rights
Life skills: Critical thinking, creative thinking

Important points: Before the session, find out about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the laws on children's rights in the country. 

Materials

Pieces of paper large enough to make a life-size drawing of a child
Marker pens or crayons
Stickers (optional)
Steps:

Explain that this activity explores children's rights and responsibilities.
Rights: what children should have (food, shelter, safe water, health care play etc.) and Responsibilities: what children should do (respect others' rights, help one another etc.)
Ask a volunteer to lie down on the large piece of paper on the floor and draw the outline of their body shape.
Ask all the children to sit around the body drawing. Explain that the body drawing will become a child's rights and responsibilities.
Children brainstorm all the rights they think children should have. The educator writes all these suggestions inside the ‘body’ using a pen in one colour.
Children are then asked to list the responsibilities they have. To help them, show them that many rights have a corresponding responsibility, for example: A right to speak and a responsibility to listen.
Tell the children about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and your country's laws.
You can have a break here
Read through all the rights that the children listed inside the body.
Ask each child to vote for the three rights that are most important to them. Children can make three dots beside three different rights using a pen in a different colour, or if possible, give each child three stickers. If the children are not literate you can create symbols for different rights. Make sure the children can easily identify what the symbols represent. Then children tell the educator which rights they want to vote for and the educator shows them where to put their mark or sticker.
Select the three rights with the most votes and discuss how this right can be realised, for example: What needs to happen for children to ask the right to protection from violence?
Draw a thin line from each of these three rights. On a card outside the body, write children’s ideas about how to achieve this right.

Follow up: Encourage the children to work together to develop and implement an action plan to improve their rights

Case study

In India, children in a project formed a Child Rights Club. The children were interviewed by the media about their rights at the launch of the club. Here are some of the replies…
I was not allowed to play because I am a girl.
My mother does not send my sister to school, but she sends me. [ a boy]
A right to live a proper life is important because it is only after having this right that we can ask for the other rights. For example, if a girl does not even have the right to live, then what will she do with the other rights?
Because I was not educated, a vegetable seller cheated me.
The police beat me up and put me in an observation home. I wish I could live freely and safely. I hope the police will not beat me in future.

Communication: Fight and Flight

Purpose of activity: To understand that in some situations, assertiveness and negotiation don't work
Life skills: communication & interpersonal relationships, self-awareness, critical thinking

Materials: Small prizes for the winners of the race and the screaming contest.

Steps:

Take children into a large open space where they can run and scream without disturbing anyone.
Tell them that you are going to teach them two methods of being assertive.  However, first you want them to race each other. (Find a short race they can run, for example, to a nearby tree or wall and back again.)
After the race, explain that there are some situations where assertiveness and discussion (fight) do not work. These are usually situations where you are threatened with violence. In these situations, flight (running away) is the best options.
Announce that now you will have a screaming contest. The person who screams loudest wins.
After the contest, explain that in some situations, screaming may be the best defence, particularly if many other people are nearby. These situations include children being followed or touched by people they do not know or like.
Give prizes to the best runner and loudest screamer.
Ask the children to brainstorm some situations and to explain whether they would run or scream, and why.
You can finish your session with some games.

Communication, Saying No!

Purpose of activity:
 • To develop skills to help children when they are being teased or bullied by other children.

• To help children learn how to say 'No' to what they don't want.


Life skills: Communication & interpersonal relationships, self-awareness, critical thinking


Important points

Girls in particular need to practice being assertive and be praised for assertive behaviour.

Materials

 • None


Steps

1. Explain that one way of negotiating is to make a very clear statement when you don't want something. Ask the children what they would say if someone in the market says, 'Come with me I have a special present for you.'

2. Divide children into groups of girls and boys only. Ask them to discuss the main pressures they face in their lives (demands for sex being forced to work etc). Here are some examples from a group of children in Delhi:

- If someone wants you to go with them

- If someone ties to ask you to take bad things (drugs, cigarettes)

- If a man tries to give you a gift

3. Explain that we have to practise saying NO to these pressures. For example, in the case of girls, they can practise saying ‘No’ to a man who strokes them on the  while talking to them.  The girl turns round fast and shouts NO loudly before moving away quickly. Here are some other examples:

For girls

• A friend is trying to make you steal fruit from the market stalls.

• A man asks a girl to go to the cinema with him.

For boys

• A boy is trying to make you smoke cigarettes.

• A group of boys thinks it is funny to tease girls  and he wants you to join them. Puppets can help children role-play situations and responses.

 4. Continue practising until you are sure that everyone has overcome fears and embarrassment. Make sure all say, ‘NO’ firmly, loudly and clearly. A group of children were asked what were the hardest situations for them to say, NO. Here are some replies: If my friend is cheating in exams and he wants me to join him; When you don’t want to go somewhere with someone; When your friends encourage you to do something e.g. to smoke, to go to the cinema on a school day.