Stress Management

If you don't know much about stress when you are a freshman at Michigan Tech, you will definitely know all you want to know about it by the time you are a senior. Michigan Tech is definately a high-stress school. The classes are among the most demanding in the country, the competition with your classmates is one of the most intense, the cold and the snow of the Copper Country combine to make for exceptionally demanding winters, and the wild isolation of the Upper Peninsula for most of the students coming up here from the Metro Detroit area and from other, quieter places downstate make for a wild academic ride for most Michigan Tech students spending anywhere from four to six-plus years here getting their Bachelor's degree.

Stress is generally defined as "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand" (Selye).

"Nonspecific" means that, as far as stress and its effect on your body is concerned, the body responds to every stressor in pretty much the same way, whether that stressor is positive or negative, internal or external.

"Demand" can be understood as pressure, either external (such as an upcoming test, an argument with your boyfriend or girlfriend, a really drafty window over your bed in your apartment or noisy roomates at 3 am) or internal (such as your demand on yourself that you "have to" get an A on your upcoming calc exam or your fear that you'll make an idiot of yourself if ask out that attractive person sitting next to you).

Stress also occurs in your body when you don't get enough sleep, when you eat too much junk food or drink too much alcohol, smoke too much, or when you are studying so much that you can't think straight anymore.

Symptoms of Excess Stress
There are a number of classical symptoms of when stress gets to be too much:

Increased muscle tension
especially in the back of the neck, the top of the shoulders and between the shoulder blades, the back of the legs, the temple, the jaw, and the orbital muscles around your eyes. Unfortunately, increased muscle tension may be hard to detect, as the body accomodates to the increased muscle tension and starts to perceive it as "normal." You may not notice how tense you are until you attempt to do some standard stretching exercises, a friend tries some finger pressure massage on your back or you suddenly develop intense tension headaches or maybe even migraines... or you might suddenly tear a muscle while playing a friendly game of basketball or even getting out of bed in the morning!

Emotional irritability
You slowly lose the ability to have any fun. You find you get really upset at the smallest of things. Small delays or frustrations really start, not just to irritate you, but to set you off on a major tantrum. Friends start to comment on how "run down" you feel or you mother starts warning you about not "burning your candle at both ends."

A deterioration in performance, impairment in your ability to pay attention and concentrate
during your classes or while you're studying, and an increased feeling of "what the hell," "who cares?" or "what's the use?" regarding your grades, your main squeeze or your life in general.

Restlessness, insomnia and disruptions of your appetite
You start to feel "wired and tired" all the time. You begin to have trouble falling asleep or you wake up early. You begin to experience intrusive, racing thoughts about your classes or grades that just won't turn off. You find you're either skipping meals a lot, eating a lot of junk food, or pigging out every spare moment. You may start experiencing a lot of stomach upset, intestinal gas, diarrhea or constipation. You may find yourself smoking or drinking a lot more all of a sudden, and feeling belligerant towards anybody who notices and comments on that to you.

Anxiety or panic attacks
You begin experiencing a constant sense of impending doom or disaster, imagining that you are going to flunk all of your classes regardless of how you are doing realistically. You may start worrying that you might suddenly drop dead of a heart attack or a stroke, that you are beginning to lose your mind, or that some national or global catastrophe is about to take place that you can do nothing about. You begin experiencing full-blown panic attacks, which are far more terrifying than you could have ever imagined, and which none of your friends can understand.

Physical illness or injury
You might actually begin getting sick, either with a nasty bronchitis, flu or maybe even mono. You may find yourself becoming "accident prone" and find yourself in a few narrow scrapes on the road driving your car or find yourself losing things or dropping things all over. You may start tearing muscles or getting "stupid" sports injuries or having "stupid" accidents at home.

Beginning to manage stress: MTU Survival Tactics
There are a number of things you can begin to do to manage the excessive stress in your life. At Michigan Tech these things can be considered "survival tactics," in that if you don't begin to incorporate these things into your everyday routine, chances are that you will fall prey to negative stress reactions sooner or later in your academic career.

Get enough sleep
This may sound simplistic, but getting enough sleep goes a long way to handling the stress in your life. While you are sleeping, your body essentially goes through what can be called "microrepair," healing all of the "microdamage" all of us incur as we go about our business day to day. You may not have thought about it, but when you slipped a bit on the grass hurrying to make it to your chemistry class on time yesterday, you incurred a bit of microdamage to the muscles around your right ankle and knee without knowing about it. Those late hours you put in studying for that last test incurred a lot of microdamage to your internal organs as you secreted small amounts of adrenaline (which mixed with your five cups of coffee) to keep yourself awake.

When you get enough sleep you repair all of the microdamage you incurred throughout your body from the day before. When you cheat on your sleep, your body doesn't finish microrepair and you wake up achey and tired, and then you go through the day accumulating even more microdamage on top of the microdamage you already have. Eventually something's gotta give, and sooner or later your immune system will compromise and you will get sick.

Don't do that to yourself. Get enough sleep

Eat nutritiously
This means eat pleanty of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and drinking a lot of water--about 8 glasses a day. Go sparingly on the meats, fats, oils and sugars. Go easy on the alcohol and the cigarettes. Go easy on the coffee and the pop. Go easy on the processed food. Consider whole-grain or "natural" cooking. Consider juicing or trying some of the safe nutritional supplements such as brewer's yeast, ginko biloba, vitimins C and E or others (remember to check with your physician before going too far along with nutritional supplementation!). One major source of undetected stress on your body is mild dehydration. Drinking a lot of coffee, tea or caffienated softdrinks (such as Jolts or Diet Pepsi's) do not provide your body the water it needs to do its job. Instead, the caffiene stimulates the kidneys to flush the system, and you quickly urinate, not simply the fluid you took in with that last cup of coffee, but also water your body held in metabolic storage. You can be drinking all this coffee while slowly dehydrating and making yourself sick! Don't do that to yourself. Drink water or natural fruit juices instead of coffee, tea or pop

Learn some basic relaxation procedures
One of the simplest relaxation procedures comes from the Japanese martial art of shin shin toitsu aikido. It is called "weight underside."

Artificially tense yourself up. Notice your overall body pattern of tension. If you pay attention, you will notice that, in the tense state, you experience a line of tension on the "upperside" of every body part. This state is called "weight upperside" and is one of the best indicators of stress available.

Now, just for demonstration purposes, stick your arm out to the side and just let it sit there hanging in the air. You might want to imagine your arm is suspended in the air by an invisible string, or that you have your arm extended along the back of an invisible couch. If you just let your arm sit there, you will notice a line of weight or heaviness going across the bottom of your arm (it's just gravity).

This sensation is called "weight underside" and is a bodily signal that you are relaxed. Notice that you are not "limp" or asleep, that you can move freely, but that you are not carrying any excess tension. When you are truly relaxed, you will have the weight underside feeling on the bottom of every body part.

Also, when you are walking you should notice that if you are swinging your arms in a relaxed and natural armswing, that you should have a feeling of centrifugal force pulling the weight of your arm into your hands and fingers. In the summertime, this centrifugal force should leave you feeling as though the blood is being pulled into your hands and making them feel especially full, or pink. Another way of imagining a natural arm swing is that your arm sould feel like a shot put swinging on a thick rope.

In contrast, when you walk in a tense or stressed out fashion, your arm often resembles a rigid stick on a pivot (your shoulder).

Get enough stretching and aerobic exercise
Also consider learning basic breathing exercises. Studying is hard work physically, even if it looks as though you are simply sitting there.

Every fifty minutes while you are studying you should take a stretching, oxygen and water break. Stand up, jump up and down a little, stretch your legs, get outside and gulp a little fresh air, and then go over to the water fountain and take a few sips of dihydrous monoxide.

Walk around campus a little more vigorously than normal. Get involved in cross country skiing, jogging, tae kwon do or competitive rowing. Have fun and breathe deeply!

Learn assertiveness and conflict management
Call Counseling Services at 487-2538 and ask about when the next group is going to take place. Practice greater assertiveness whenever and wherever you can.

Learn to stop demanding and catastrophizing
It's perfectly healthy to say to yourself "I want to get an A on the test" or "I want to do my very best." It's perfectly neurotic and stress-inducing to take that perfectly healthy desire, however, and turn it into some nutty demand on yourself, such as "I have to get an A on this exam" or "I neeeeeeed to get an A on this test." I know you want to, but who said you "must?" Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai? I know you want an A, but who but you said you "neeeeeeed" it? Is an A like oxygen that you're going to die if you don't get? It's perfectly natural to be disappointed if you don't get your A, but who said it's "awful," "horrible" or is going to utterly destroy you if you don't get it? If you do poorly on the test, is your professor or MTU President Tompkins going to come after you with an assault weapon? Of course not! Are your parents going to drive up from downstate and beat you up? Of course they won't! They may not be happy campers, but your performing poorly on a test or in a class is not going to destroy either them or you. You will simply be displeased with yourself--perhaps strongly displeased with yourself for a while--and then life will go on. Hopefully you will study more effectively the next time and do better. But if you don't want to stress yourself out and perhaps even set yourself up for test anxiety, stop demanding that you perform perfectly at everything and stop telling yourself that your life as you know it will end if you make some mistakes or do less than outstandingly sometimes.

Interestingly enough, if you stop making these perfectionistic and neurotic demands on yourself and stop telling yourself that the awful-awfuls are going to happen if things don't work out exactly the way you want them to, you will actually feel significantly less anxious and your actual performance will usually improve substantially.

Come into Counseling Services
Begin to work on your stress issues in a confidential, one-on-one setting, or attend the next group on stress management when it comes up. It's easy to make an appointment.