Unit 3 How to deal with stress ?
Our "good practices" to manage stress
Please write on a paper what you have found helpful to calm or re-gather yourself when you felt you were about lose control.
All of these actions will help you reconnect the prefrontal cortex with the limbic area and the reptilian brain
When you feel yourself flipping your lid, you can think about this model and how to help your brain calm down”.
As soon as you are relaxer, your brain are integrated, you will again have access to your higher functions such as control planning, attention, impulsive control and empathy.
Stress is the emotional and physical strain caused by our response to pressure from the outside world. It is a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well being.
Lazarus and Folkman (1984)
Thinking
Emotion
Behavior
Challenge
Enthusiasm
Motivations
Envy
Creativity
Proactivity
Cognitive openness
Threat
Irritability
Fear
Anxiety
Avoidance
Escape
Attack
Cognitive closure
Your turn !
My resource, yesterday and today
Step by Step Activity:
- Think of a current situation that is stressing you out regarding the future
- Place yourself in the room according to your level of stress about this situation: 0 being “no stress”, and 10 being “a lot of stress”.
- Share your situation with the rest of the group.
- Draw this stressful situation – and represent yourself in the drawing.
- Identify one internal resource you think would be helpful in dealing with this situation (ex courage).
- Now think and try to find a moment in your life where you have used this resource.
- Take a second sheet of paper, and draw this past situation
- Take a third sheet of paper, and imagine yourself dealing with the stressful situation identified at the beginning of this activity but this time, using the internal resource (courage).
- Hang your three drawings on the wall from the oldest to the most recent
- You can write on the third drawing the name of the resource. (ex : “courage”).
- Share your reflection on its three drawings with the group.
- Focus on the last posture (confronting their stressful situation with the resource) and try to relocate your level of stress on the scale from 0 to 10, using the same method as in step 2.