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Part 1, Listening Comprehension
SECTION A MINI-LECTURE
How to Reduce Stress
Good morning! Today we look at how to reduce stress. As you all know, life always has stresses, Ur, things which are causing us stress and living without stress is virtually impossible. So, if we have to live with stress, we may as well find out more about what it is, how we can deal with it and so on.What is stress, then? The term was originally used in physics to describe the force exerted between two touching bodies. That was strictly a term describing a physical reaction. Then in the 1930s, a doctor named Hans Selye, S-E-L-Y-E, first used this term to describe a human’s reaction to a demand placed on it, pleasant or not. And he included in this response, things like accelerated breathing, accelerated heart rate, increased blood pressure, muscle tension and so on.
Now, please notice that I said that stress can be pleasant or not, this response can also be pleasant or not. And stress can be both negative and positive.Let’s take a look at positive stress. Positive stress occurrs in a life situation towards which one feels positively, things like Christmas or getting married are usually positive events, but still stressful, nonetheless.Another example is the pressure in a job can give some people incentive to work and excitement, but it still is stress. Negative stress is what most of us think of when we think of stress. And negative stress occurs logically enough in situations towards which one feels negatively. And those examples could be test-taking, a friend’s death and so on. But here a thing to remember is that stress in itself is not hazardous. Rather, the danger is in the individual’s reaction to the stress. So psychologists have found that if we develop appropriate ways to cope with stressful situations, individuals can reduce the physiological harm which is caused by stress, or which can be caused by stress. And that’s what I want to talk a bit about today – what are these appropriate ways to deal with stress, how to minimize any negative reactions.The first thing that most psychologists suggest is to learn to recognize your own stress signals. We all have different types of stress signals, but individuals should monitor themselves for stress signals, so that they can focus on minimizing or acknowledging the stress before it gets out of control.And common early signs for many people include irritability, insomnia, weight loss or even weight gain, smoking, drinking, increases in small errors, all kinds of things that people get which could be an early signal of stress.
You can consider ways to protect yourself when you start seeing these signs coming on. So you might decide to withdraw from a stressful situation or reward yourself with equal amounts of low stress activity time. That’s really the first important way to deal with stress appropriately. The second important way to deal with stress is to pay attention to your body’s demands. Most psychologists are finding that a good exercise program, good nutrition, decreases the amount of stress, or the effect of stress on the body or in the mind. And this seems quite apparent because exercise can provide a stress-free environment away from your usual stresses and it keeps your body busy and preoccupied with non-stressful things. OK, the third thing to reduce stress is to make plans and act when appropriate. What is suggested is that rather than wasting energy on worrying, an individual can direct his or her energy to plan the steps and act.And often, just the planning of the action helps to reduce the stress, because it reduces the worrying. And also the results of the plans or action may serve to remove or weaken the original cause of the stress. Please notice that I just now said “when appropriate”. And this next suggestion has to do with that idea of when appropriate. The third suggestion was to make plans and act when appropriate, rather than just sit around and worry. But the fourth plan, or fourth idea, says to learn to accept situations which are out of your control. These two then go hand in hand. You can make plans and act when it’s appropriate, but when it’s not appropriate, or when it’s impossible, the only way is to learn to accept that some things are unchangeable and out of your hands.
So, for example, if you are in traffic, lateness caused by traffic is out of your hands. There’s no sense in getting really crazy about that. If you do so, it only increases your stress to waste energy trying to resist what’s inevitable or what can’t be avoided. The last item that psychologists suggest is to pace your activities. By “pace”, I mean giving yourself some manageable tasks to do at a reasonable speed. That is, you go at a speed that you can handle, break your task into manageable parts, rather than try to deal with the whole task all at once. So, as an example in your lives as students, a whole term paper might feel overwhelming. But if you say to yourself, today I’m going to the library and gather resources, tomorrow, I’m going to read three articles, and so on, you’ll have broken this one large task, that’s writing a term paper, down into many smaller and more manageable tasks. This will certainly reduce your stress.Ok. Having said all these, I want you to remember that the problem is not in the stressful experiences themselves. We all experience stress and stressful events. The problem is in our reactions to these experiences. And each of us has our own limits for stress and our own ways of coping with stress. So long as we have our own appropriate ways, stress or stressful situations can certainly be dealt with.Ok. That’s all for today’s lecture. See you next week.
