Psychology of Life

Elizabeth Hildenbrand

PSY-100

November 27, 2016

Amanda Laster-Loftus

Psychology for Life

        After taking the stress-assessment from http://www.stress.org.uk/stresstest.aspx, it showed that my results are high and I should watch out, because it could put me in danger. Of course I knew that I get stressed easy and it was no surprise to me. I have always got stressed over the smallest things and now that I am getting older, it is changing. I am more aware of my stress levels and know when I need to just walk away to calm down.

        Stress can impact your body by increasing your heart rate. In older adults, this can cause more serious issues like, heart attacks and stroke, if stress gets too strong. For younger adults and adolescents, this can cause anger issues or depression. A sign that I have got way too stressed is, my eye will start to twitch a little. Others do not always notice this, but I do, it is my eye. Some people, you can see it in their face when the stress gets strong and they need to just take a couple of minutes. One of my own children, will just give up. She does not know how to handle her stress and it is like her body just goes limp and she will go lay down. Everyone has a different reaction to how stress affect them though.

        When a person is stressed it can interfere with their motivation and emotions. If something, like learning a no task, gets stressful, it can cause stress levels to rise and the motivation to finish learning a task to fall. For example, learning Spanish, it is a difficult language and has many small parts to understand. I for one, had a very hard time understand every little detail and finally just called it quits since I did not feel I was getting anywhere. It was a very stressful class when I did not understand what the instructor was talking about. When having my third and final child, I had an issue with the epidural and it caused me to have seizures. This has now become a stressful issue, since the three seizures I had affected my brain. Some of my memory has been affected and I cannot remember some details of my life, or, if I am asked to do something and I do not do it right then I will forget what it is. I now have to write everything down in a notepad just to remember the small things.

        I normally just walk away from anything that is stressing me out. Now I have breathing exercises that I can do, even with my children. The YouTube video, Stress Management: Fun Stress Relief! Robert Rivest. Which is very interesting. Watching this video showed that even the simplest breathing can calm and de-stress a mood in minutes with no real physical movement. Another was counting, just by counting slowly it will calm nerves and take the stress off the mind to lower stress levels. I tend to count to ten when needed. Also, when someone sees me count and close my eyes, they know I have reached a breaking point.