Assessing Stress

Assessing Stress in Your Life Stress is something I deal with on a regular basis, and due to the fact that I am young, I am still learning how to cope with it. I first started experiencing stress when I was in fifth grade and my mom deployed to Turkey for fifteen months. Since then, I have gained a lot of experience with stress and how to get it somewhat under control. Although, when I started high school, a new wave of stress and other emotional issues rushed over me, some of which have to do with school, and others occur at home, in sports, or internally. Maintaining good grades seems to be a common stressor for people my age, and I find myself dealing with it almost daily. Feeling stressed and pressured to do well in school is eustress …show more content…
I spend six days a week practicing for three and a half hours, which takes up a lot of my time. Not only does being apart of a swim team create conflict with getting schoolwork done, but it also causes stress within the sport itself. I struggle with mild anxiety, which can become a problem during swim meets because I feel a lot of pressure from my teammates, coaches, and parents to do well. Before each race, I get very overwhelmed from the amount of people watching me and expecting me to do well, which causes me to feel nauseous, shaky, and like I am suffocating. This type of stress is eustress because although it doesn’t make me feel good in the moment, the stress is necessary to psych me up before a race. My body reacts by activating stress hormones that come from adrenaline glands, therefor creating arousal and increasing my chances of performing well. Although, sometimes these feelings are very overwhelming, so to combat this I have developed a “pre-race tradition” that helps me to calm down: take several deep breaths, shake my arms and legs to get blood flowing, say out loud, “you can do it, it’s just a race” four times, and pray. These steps may seem cheesy or even superstitious to some people, but I can never swim a race without doing them. I would classify this type of conflict as an approach-avoidance because although swim meets cause me to feel very anxious and put me under a lot …show more content…
I had never dealt with the death of a family member before this, so I was very torn up about it for a while. Following my grandmother’s death, I found myself in a constant state of sadness that was unlike any other emotion I had felt before. I missed a lot of school because I had migraines from crying the night before or because I was too sad, which eventually led to bad grades. This type of stress in my life would be classified as distress because it caused a lot of negativity in my life and posed more of a threat rather than a challenge. For a while, I suppressed my emotions and didn’t go through the grieving process like I should have, which sent me in a downward spiral. Finally, my mom decided that we should go to a specialist and see if it’s something more serious than just sadness. After going to the doctors, we learned that I had a mild case of depression due to the death of my grandma and a hormone imbalance. The doctors decided to put me on birth control to help balance my hormones, as well as give me some tools to help work through the grieving process properly. Once my body regulated with the birth control, I started to feel much better and learned how to deal with sadness and other emotions rather than bottle them up. I like to think of this stressor as an approach-approach conflict because my ultimate goal is to be happy and have peace with my