Coping with Stress & Anxiety

Wellness Center
Emotional Well-Being
Coping with Stress & Anxiety

According to APA, stress generally refers to two things: the psychological perception of pressure, on the one hand, and the body’s response to it, on the other, which involves multiple systems, from metabolism to muscles to memory. Some stress is necessary for all living systems; it is the means by which they encounter and respond to the challenges and uncertainties of existence. The perception of danger sets off an automatic response system, known as the fight-or-flight response, that, activated through hormonal signals, prepares an animal to meet a threat or to flee from it. Stress can lead to a faster heartbeat, muscle tension, and gastrointestinal issues. It can lead to heavier and faster breathing, which can strain the lungs, and blunt the immune system’s ability to respond to threats. Learn more about stress here.

Also check ***The Student in Distress: Intervention and Referral, A Guide for Faculty and Staff***

If you’re so stressed that you don’t have the time or energy to devote to self-care, that’s when you need replenishment the most! Prioritizing self-care is a decision that only you can make, and changing behavior can take some effort. These are some tips to help make changes and maintain them.

Set a goal: Be specific about what you’d like to try. E.g. spend 5 minutes a day focusing on breathing, or hang out with friends and not think about work 3 times a week.
Make a plan: How will you meet your goal? What are the necessary steps? Breaking your goal into incremental steps will make it feel more manageable.
Write it down: Just writing down your plan increases your chances of success by 30%. Telling other people will increase the likelihood of following through even more.
Get support: Find a “buddy” who will engage in your plan with you, or find a role model, mentor, or coach.
Reward actions, not results! It’s important to reinforce yourself for taking positive steps, rather than focusing exclusively on achieving your end goal.
Turn bad days into good data: Try to view setbacks as information. What happened and how can you handle it differently? Get curious, not depressed! Give the new behavior at least three tries before giving up on it.

Source

Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan

Prevention

Good self-care: Taking care of yourself will help maintain your physical, emotional, and mental reserves to prevent and manage stress. This includes regular sleep, exercise, relaxation, and eating well. For more self-care ideas and planning guides visit our Self-Care Planning website.
Evaluate your priorities: There are so many amazing activities to engage in at Amherst, but if you try to do everything, you may spread yourself too thin to really reap value from the activities you’re engaged in. What is most important to you? Imagine yourself 5-10 years in the future, looking back. Will you wish you invested more in academics? Developing friendships? Co-curricular activities?
Consider doing less: Try to leave yourself some down time to relax and replenish. Before taking on an additional responsibility, take some time to think about whether it is going to contribute to or detract from your overall well-being. Are the benefits worth the potential stress?
Practice setting limits: It can be tough to say “no” to others, or to limit yourself from doing everything, even if you know it might be better for you in the long run. Rather than automatically saying “yes” to new responsibilities, consider changing your default response to, “Let me think about it” or “I’ll get back to you” to buy yourself some time to consider the impact of the decision.
Work hard, play well: Working hard is draining, and you deserve to relax and let loose. Choose activities that will help you unwind, have fun, and refuel.

Source

Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan

Cognitive reframing is a mental activity that involves looking at a stressor or negative situation and explaining it (realistically and honestly) in a positive or neutral way. Reframing is not a denial that the challenge that we have been dealt is a difficult one. Many times, when something bad happens to us, we get emotionally wrapped up in the negative. But, this is a bit dishonest as it’s usually not the whole picture. There’s usually another vantage point.

For example, sometimes when something bad happens to use we tend to have:

All-or-nothing thinking: Seeing situations in absolute terms
Blaming: Attributing complex problems to a single cause
Catastrophizing: Always imaging the worst thing that can happen in any situation
Discounting the positive: Ignoring or discounting the good things that happen to you
Mental filters: Focusing only on the negatives and never on the positives
“Should” statements: Always feeling like you’ve failed to live up to expectations of what you “should” do in a situation

Sound familiar? Using reframing techniques can actually change your physical responses to stress because your body’s stress response is triggered by perceived stress, more often than actual events.

Cognitive Reframing steps:

Learn About Your Thinking Patterns
Notice Your Thoughts
Challenge Your Thoughts
Replace Your Thoughts With More Neutral/Positive Thoughts

Strength tip: Use your strengths of critical thinking and hope to look at any negative situation in a fresh way. You might tap into hope to see how there are benefits to the stressor. You might deploy critical thinking to examine the situation from multiple, detailed angles. This will help you see pros and cons, positives and negatives.

Sources: The Anxiety Toolkit by Alice Boyes, Ph.D. & Relieve Stress and Anxiety by Shifting Your Attention by Tchiki Davis, Ph.D.

Breathing Techniques

Mindfulness Meditations

Much of the emotional distress people experience is the result of thinking about upsetting things that have already happened or anticipating negative events that have yet to occur. Distressing emotions such as anger, anxiety, guilt, and sadness are much easier to bear if you only focus on the present – on each moment one at a time. These are exercises to increase your mindfulness of the present moment so that you can clear away thoughts about past and future events. These meditations are presented by Dr. Wendy Wolfe.

5-Minute Guided Meditation, Meditation Studio, Breethe Meditation YouTube Playlist, H4Happiness – Relaxing Focus Music Youtube Playlists,

Additional resources:

Recommendations for Coping with Race-Related Stress: Fortunately, there ways to combat the negative effects of race-related stress and produce positive outcomes.

Build a support network. You are not the only person dealing with race-related stress and connecting with other people with similar experiences and feelings can help you successfully navigate racism.

If spirituality plays an important role in your life, utilize your belief system as a way to cope with stress. This could involve connecting with others who share your spiritual beliefs, confiding in your spiritual leaders, or participating in your spiritual rituals (e.g., prayer, meditation).
Having a positive cultural identity and a strong sense of self is particularly helpful in combating race-related stress, stereotype threat, and the Imposter Phenomenon.
Take classes that focus on the historical experiences and contributions of your cultural group and join campus organizations that celebrate your cultural norms and ideals.
Make positive reinterpretations of negative thoughts and reframe negative situations with a three-step process:
- Identify negative feelings. For instance, a failing grade on an examination may lead to the negative thought “The admissions committee made a mistake when they accepted me.”
- Perform a reality check. Understand that your feelings can often distort the reality of the situation. Think of examples that counter the negative thoughts and feelings that you are experiencing. For instance, the admissions committee most likely made their decision because your past academic performance fit their acceptance criteria. Additionally, failure on one examination does not automatically indicate that you cannot succeed in any of your classes.
- Make a positive reinterpretation. You can reframe the initial negative thought by saying “The admissions committee accepted me because they believe in my potential to succeed” and “I know I am a highly capable person and I can improve my academic performance with additional support.” You can also reframe your experiences with racism with statements such as “This can only make me stronger” or “My elders have gone through this and persevered and so can I.

Sue, D. (2003). Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Other writing resources:

Writing is a fantastic stress reliever.

One example is writing about stressful events, traumatic experiences, or expressing one’s feelings through writing. The type of writing that involves these situations is expressive writing. Expressive writing is best for people coping with trauma or unexpected life developments like disease diagnosis, layoffs, or critical accidents, which throw them off balance. It helps deal with the situation thus reducing one’s stress levels. However, expressive writing does not work for everybody. Writing reduces stress as it helps individuals process their thoughts and emotions. It helps people think critically and review a situation in a different light. Another writing example is reflective writing. Reflective writing enables people to think of a situation and evaluate it extensively. The extensive nature of reflective writing helps people discover new things about themselves and various situations. It thus becomes easier to deal with loss and other stressful situations. Writing is also therapeutic and helps individuals deal with the things they cannot disclose to other people. People who write about the things that trouble them look at those things in a different light. In most cases, such individuals find themselves working towards solving the situations that bothered them in the past. They delve into their feelings and try to figure out why they do certain things or behave in a particular way. In doing so, they tend to act differently in the future or deal with problematic situations in a better way.

Want to try writing for stress relief?

First, think about how to set yourself up for success:

Use whichever format works best for you, whether it’s a classic journal, a cheap notebook, an online journaling program, or a blog.
If it makes you more interested in writing, decorate or personalize your journal/notebook/blog.
Set a goal to write for a certain amount of time each day.
Decide ahead of time when and/or where you will write each day.
Write down what makes you want to write in the first place – this could be your first entry in your journal.

Next, follow the five steps to WRITE:

W – What do you want to write about? Name it.
R – Review or reflect on it – close your eyes, take deep breaths, and focus.
I – Investigate your thoughts and feelings. Just start writing and keep writing.
T – Time yourself – write for 5 to 15 minutes straight.
E – Exit “smart” by re-reading what you’ve written and reflecting on it with one or two sentences (Adams, n.d.)

Finally, keep the following in mind while you are journaling:

It’s okay to write only a few words, and it’s okay to write several pages – just write at your own pace.
Don’t worry so much about what to write about, just focus on taking the time to write and giving it your full attention.
Don’t worry about how well you write – the important thing is to write down what makes sense to you and what comes naturally to you.
Write as if no one else will read it – this will help you avoid “putting on a show” rather than writing authentically (Howes, 2011).

Writing Prompts

The following ideas and writing prompts are great ways to continue your journaling practice or to get yourself “unstuck” if you’re not sure what to write about next. For instance, you could try the five writing exercises from this blog:

Writing a letter to yourself
Writing letters to others
Writing a poem
Free writing (just writing everything that comes to mind)
Mind mapping (drawing mind maps with your main problem in the middle and branches representing different aspects of your problem)

If those ideas don’t get your juices flowing, try these prompts:

Journaling with Photographs – choose a personal photo and use your journal to answer questions like “What do you feel when you look at these photos?” or “What do you want to say to the people, places, or things in these photos?”
Timed Journal Entries – decide on a topic and set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes to write continuously.
Sentence Stems – these prompts are the beginnings of a sentence that encourage meaningful writing, such as “The thing I am most worried about is…”, “I have trouble sleeping when…”, and “My happiest memory is…”
List of 100 – these ideas encourage the writer to create lists of 100 based on prompts like “100 Things That Make Me Sad,” “100 Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning,” and “100 Things I Love” (Farooqui, 2016).

Psychologist Margarita Tartakovsky provides a handy list of 30 prompts (2014). Some of these include:

My favorite way to spend the day is…
If I could talk to my teenage self, the one thing I would say is…
Make a list of 30 things that make you smile.
The words I’d like to live by are…
I really wish others knew this about me…
What always brings tears to your eyes?
Using 10 words, describe yourself.
Write a list of questions to which you urgently need answers