Stress Awareness Month: Stress Relief and Resilience
Resilience is our ability to bounce back from stressful situations, which helps buffer the impacts of stress (Bajaj et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022). The other key feature of resilience is that resilience is not about avoidance, but rather our ability to adapt to, manage, and recover from stress. Avoiding stress is something altogether different. And, resilience is something that we can develop through things like social connections, building our self-awareness, etc. Believe it or not, positive affect can be a resilience resource as higher levels of positive affect can help protect people from impacts of stress (Egan et al., 2024). The focus for today is diving into what helps us build resilience so that we can flip challenges on their head and turn them into growth opportunities.
Stress Awareness Month: Mediating Factors
What are mediating factors? Mediating factors is a fancy way of saying factors that explain how or why a stressor ends up in a specific outcome. These factors help explain the mechanism that conveys the effect of stress on us as humans, whether physically, psychologically or both. For example, why do some people end up with a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and others do not, despite going through the same event? The simple answer is because we are not the same. The long answer is because of mediating factors that we cannot necessarily see on the outside. These factors are worth talking about because they help us understand ourselves better and our relationship with stress.
Stress Awareness Month: Impacts of Stress
We spent much time in the last post talking about the different kinds of stress. Now we will come back to this point. There is a lot of overlap of impact between the different types of stress. Let’s look at environmental stress as our example. In one study they looked at air pollution, climate change, solar radiation, and meteorological conditions and their impact on different health outcomes, such as respiratory, cardiovascular, metabolic and gastrointestinal, renal and urogenital, neurological and psychological health, infectious and skin diseases, and major cancers, and let’s say the outcomes were not good (Sundas et al., 2024). Additionally, many of us experience many types of stress throughout our lives, which leads to cumulative impacts. For people who report high levels of cumulative stress in many different life domains and across time the negative impacts of daily stress are worse for their health (Haight et al., 2023). It’s time to take stress seriously. Do not wait. Today is the day.
Stress Awareness Month: Types of Stress
April is Stress Awareness Month. While we have a month devoted to bringing awareness to stress, let’s call a spade a spade. We experience stress in our lives everyday. Before we spend more time on the challenges of stress, let’s remember why the human body has the ability to experience stress. Stress is a natural physical and emotional response to the challenges we experience in our lives as a survival mechanism that activates the “fight-or-flight” to face what our bodies or minds view as threats.
Returning to the Sport You Love
Returning to the sport you love from a serious injury can be challenging, as there are many physical and psychological factors to consider. This post focuses on three psychological factors pulled from self-determination theory (SDT) that a sport and performance professional (SPP) and an athlete may want to address.
Mental Preparation for Adolescents Before the Big Game, Meet, or Race
It’s the week before a big game, meet, or race. What can you do mentally prepare? This post focuses on adolescents, but many of the ideas are applicable to adult athletes as well. Additionally, there are so many more to consider. This post just has three to get you started.
Stress Awareness Reframed into Advocacy!
You are not going to learn anything new or different. Instead, you are going to be reading about a reframe. What if we reframed how we viewed our lives and schedules and instead of making stress relief a “priority” we shift our perspective to advocate for change in our lives so that stress relief and mental health is “the priority.”
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