Professional Practice
Skills
PPS-20: Stress
Management
(Adapted
from MPS 37,
Pre-class assignment
What is It?
Stress, as all good mechanical
engineers know, is force divided by area.
Unfortunately, the physicians and psychologists have co-opted the
term. Instead of “forces”, they talk
about “stressors”, which are events or conditions that affect the human mind
and body. We used force per unit area to
define engineering stress; they use magnitudes of stressors with respect to
time as a measure of physical/psychological stress. For example, the Holmes - Rahe stress
inventory is a way to quantify stressors in a 12 month period.
New Concepts
Stressors,
Stress Management
Why Do It?
We know that if our engineering
stress exceeds the capacity of our system, damage, poor performance, and
failure can occur. Likewise,
physical/psychological stress has been linked to poor performance, poor
decisions, and physical disease. Most
professionals carry significant responsibility and stress in their lives.
Stress Management techniques have
been found that can reduce the negative consequences of stress. During this unit, you can take some of these
techniques for a test drive, and see which you find useful.
How to Do It
Let’s consider snow on a roof as an
analogy for stress in your life. To deal
with large snowfalls, the roof designer has two main approaches. One, they can build the roof with really
stout materials and lots of extra support.
Two, they can use a pitch and materials that tend to shed the snow, so
less weight has to be supported. Stress
Management uses a similar two pronged approach.
We’ll suggest a number of techniques
that people have found useful to either increase your stress carrying capacity,
or shed stressors as they arrive. We are
going to be very brief in our presentation, since in-depth descriptions are
readily available in books and on the Web.
Focus on Problems You Can Control
Many of the
things people worry about are outside of their control. Take your problems and figure out what parts
you can affect, and let the rest take care of themselves.
For
example, in your fraternity leadership role, you are concerned that recruiting
will be down because the national organization instituted a no alcohol policy,
and the latest term statistics show that your seniors’ grades are the lowest in
the Greek system.
In this
scenario, you have no control over national policy, and no one has control over
seniors’ study habits. Rather than use
time and energy worrying, just take the no alcohol policy and the bad grades as
givens and move on. Find areas in which
you do have control to invest your energy.
Do Something Physical (Regularly)
Regular
exercise is well known for helping to get rid of the effects of stress and
building up your system to be able to better handle stress. This can take the form of aerobic activities
(running, swimming, stair climbing, tennis, basketball) or strength training
(not 12 ounce curls, alcohol appears to be a poor long term stress reducer).
To keep it regular,
find a way to build it into your schedule.
Some people find that exercise partners help maintain motivation. This can be with regularly scheduled
racquetball games, aerobics classes, or bike outings. Others find that early morning hours or lunchtime
can be scheduled more easily. The best
exercise program is the one that you actually do.
Take Advantage of the Relaxation
Response
Much of the
time we are sitting at the traffic light of life with the clutch partially
engaged. You know that continually
riding the clutch of a manual transmission car will cause it to burn out. Likewise, you need to learn to disengage your
own clutch when you aren’t using it or you too will burn out.
Disengaging
the clutch means activating your body’s relaxation response. There are a number of ways to do this, but
two good and easy ones are relaxed breathing and muscle contraction/relaxation.
For muscle
contraction/relaxation, contract some muscle (you can work from your feet to
your head), hold it taut (clutch engaged) for 3-6 seconds while remembering to
breathe, then let the tension go (clutch disengaged). For a quick version, just use the facial
muscles and tongue.
You may
have heeded the advice to take a couple of deep breaths to help dissipate
feelings of anger or stress. Relaxation
breathing can be much more involved than that.
Stressed people tend to take shallow breaths while holding tension in
their trunk muscles. In diaphragmatic
breathing, you allow your abdomen to distend as you inhale slowly through your
nose. This is done while sitting
straight or lying down. This should be
done for 4-10 breaths. When combined
with relaxation of facial muscles, this makes an effective technique that can
be done anywhere.
Sleep
Sleep is
one of those great unsolved mysteries of life.
Humans know more about the behavior of sub-atomic particles than why
mammals spend so much of their time asleep.
We do know that lack of sleep has consequences. Mice deprived of sleep die in a few
weeks. College students deprived of
sleep don’t die, but they tend to get cranky, drift off in class, and do more
poorly on tests.
Scheduling
time to sleep is probably the single most important thing you can do to reduce
stress. Naps in class may help some, but
you don’t usually get to the REM (rapid eye movement) stage that you need. Pushing all your sleep to the weekend is not
as good as spreading it out more uniformly.
Encourage Yourself
Negative
self talk (I can’t do this stuff. It sucks to be me. Everybody else is smarter.) is not so
very helpful. While you should have a
sense of your own limitations (don’t try to jump the
You
probably don’t need to go all the way to Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley (“I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and
doggone it, people like me."), but reminding yourself that you do have
a range of talents and are working hard helps keep you in a positive rut rather
than a negative one. If you are reading
this handout, you have the skills.
Adding a positive “Can Do” attitude through positive self-talk will only
help.
Author Commentary: We are currently passing through a period of popularity for irony. Unfortunately television (comedy and commentary)
is one of the few places where cynicism and sarcasm sell well. Negative attitudes are much less effective
for store clerks, Olympic athletes, or manufacturers of heart valves.
Preparation Prevents Stressors
A little
contingency planning (or planning in general) goes a long way toward minimizing
some unpleasant stressors that can crop up.
I have watched a number of student groups scrambling and sweating, because
their PowerPoint presentation wouldn’t load or display. Stressors like these go away with a little
preparation/planning.
This topic
is really part time management and project planning, topics covered more
thoroughly in other units, so we’ll limit ourselves to two brief comments. Think about the worst case scenarios before
the event, and have some plans ready.
When you do get blindsided, chalk it up to experience and make sure that
one never happens again.
Say No
Eventually
(and perhaps already) your schedule will get full. At this point, you have to be able say “No”
to some activities. This can be very
hard when the people requesting your time are friends, your boss, or
professors.
Often a
direct “No” is better than trying to make an excuse. The requesting person will try to find a
work-around for your excuse, but there is not much you can say to “No”. You can still be polite by thanking them for
considering you or by suggesting someone else for the task, but you don’t want
to leave room for discussion.
Build and Use Your Support System
Support can
come from people in many areas of your life.
Consider the people you know in the following categories. Family, Friends, Religion, Social Groups,
Service Groups, Neighbors, Co-workers, Hobbies, Mentors, Professional
Organizations. When things get tough,
the people who may be there to help will come from this network. It is a good idea to maintain that network
during the times when you don’t need help.
Building
and maintaining a network requires that you are willing to contribute without
expecting reciprocity. Thus, it will
cost you in terms of time and energy.
Many people feel that the rewards are worth the effort.
Positive Addictions
People
self-medicate with food, alcohol, and drugs to deal with stress, but find that
the “cure” exacerbates the disease. Some
activities can be useful forms of self medication. Often the activity requires enough of your
attention that it can give you a needed respite from stressors.
For many
people this is called a hobby. It may be
furniture building, painting watercolors, playing the piano, target shooting, volunteering
at the senior center, or playing Tetris.
You can have an avocation as well as a vocation, and even if your
paintings aren’t likely to hang in the Louvre, they’ll look good on the
refrigerator, and you will be keeping yourself healthy.
Keep Your Perspective
The second
World War dumped a lot of British sailors into the ocean in lifeboats (mostly
courtesy of German U boats). Survival
rates were higher for the older sailors than for younger sailors despite the
additional years of drinking, smoking, and getting tattoos. The reason turned out to be that the old guys
didn’t give up as easily. They had been
through a lot of things already in their lives and just kept plugging along,
while the younger ones were more likely to see no hope.
Perspective
comes with distance from a problem. Try
to step back and see how the problem fits into the bigger scheme of
things. Will it cause the end of
civilization? Have other people gotten
through a problem like this?
Reward Yourself with Breaks
All work
and no play make Jack a dull boy (with high blood pressure). When you complete a task (or devote a set
time to a task), reward yourself. After
watching dolphin shows, we are apt to relate rewards to food, but in this case
the reward should be a de-stressing one.
Caffeine, refined sugars, and unsaturated fats (coffee and a donut) tend
to be stressors.
You could
eat an apple, do five minutes of stretching, practice your relaxed breathing,
play a game of Freecell, or chat with a friend.
You’ll probably have your own favorites.
Learning Objectives
Name 6
relaxation techniques
Practice
several relaxation techniques
Select at
least 3 techniques
In-Class Exercise
Exercise 1
Individually
List
three things you do to reduce stress
As a Group
Describe
your preferred stress reducers and listen to other’s ideas
Exercise 2
Individually
For the problem statement presented
by the instructor
As a Group
Exercise 3
Relaxation response practice
Exercise 4
Individually
Exercise 5
As a Group
Brainstorm ways to say “no”
Exercise 6
As an Individual
Fill out
the chart below
|
Relaxation Technique |
Not for Me |
May Work |
Will Try |
Currently Use |
|
Focus on Problems you Can Control |
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Do Something Physical (Regularly) |
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Take Advantage of the Relaxation
Response |
|
|
|
|
|
Sleep |
|
|
|
|
|
Encourage Yourself |
|
|
|
|
|
Preparation Prevents Stressors |
|
|
|
|
|
Say No |
|
|
|
|
|
Build and Use Your Support System |
|
|
|
|
|
Positive Addictions |
|
|
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|
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Keep Your Perspective |
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|
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Reward Yourself with Breaks |
|
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|
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Stress Management
Assignment 1
Develop and describe a plan to
manage your stress that can be used for the remainder of the school year and
for the next school year.
The plan should
Evaluation
Actions and Assessment:
Excellent (10): 3-5 techniques are used and all implementations
are specific. All Assessment is
measurable and verifiable.
Mediocre:(5) Fewer than three techniques, or some descriptions of actions and
assessment are vague.
Weak:(0) No techniques from unit or all actions and assessments are
vague.
Writing
Excellent (10): Neat, mistake free (spelling, punctuation,
grammar, etc.) Clear memo format with To, From, Date, Subject. One page or less.
Mediocre:(5) Poor format with grammar/structure errors.
Weak:(0) Several mistakes and/or missing format.