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Stress lab: SELF-ASSESSMENT

“Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”

- Alan Watts

Real People, Real Stories

The Stress Management 101 class was about to begin. Today's topic was Assessing Your Stress. Angie sat quietly in the back of the classroom. “Ok class, let's start by checking our resting heart rate”, the teacher announced. Angie's pulse was 105 beats per minute. “Next, check the number of breaths you take per minute.” Angie counted 30 breaths. “How long does it usually take you to fall asleep once you lie down at night?” Angie said it usually takes about two hours. “How much of the time do you feel high levels of stress?” Angie said she feels that way almost all the time. “Doesn't that feel unpleasant to always feel so stressed?” the teacher questioned. Angie's reply was both sad and common among college students, “I didn't know there was another way to feel. I assumed this was the way college life was supposed to be, and that everyone feels this way.”

SELF ASSESSMENT

Several years ago author Richard Carlson created a very catchy title for his best-selling book, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff…It Is All Small Stuff. He offered some important advice for our over-stressed society. We need to step back and relax. That is great advice. The problem is, not all stuff is small stuff. Some things are worth sweating over. The tricky part is determining what is really important and worthy of your energy and what is the “small stuff” that causes needless worry and decreases the quality of your life.

One of the great challenges for successful stress management is determining what it is that causes you stress. A certain level of stress can energize and motivate you to deal with the important issues in your life. You want to focus your energy on those things in your life that are truly important. How do you determine what factors are causing unnecessary stress? Is my stress level normal? These are important questions we will answer in this chapter.

Where Are You Now?

How do you assess stress? How do you measure stress? In this lab assignment, you will find some tools to help assess your stress. Each of them has been selected to increase your understanding of stress in your life. Each of these tools will provide information that you can use to develop a stress management program that works for you. The first step in developing a plan is assessment. Assessing where you stand right now is critical to making progress in achieving a balanced life. You may be so busy living your life that you don't take time to stop and assess. You just keep doing what you are doing.

There is not one best tool for assessing stress, in part because reactions to events vary from person to person. What absolutely frazzles one person may excite and positively challenge another. Research supports the idea that it is not the actual stress that matters most, but our ability to control how we perceive and react to the situation that contributed to the stress. External events do not cause stress; how we perceive and cope with them does.

It is important to know that the information you gain from the assessments in this chapter is for you to take and use as it seems relevant to you and your life. These assessments and surveys are not intended to be diagnostic, but only to guide you in understanding yourself better. Taken together you will discover an overall picture of your current stress status. This will help you decide where you want to go and how you can get there.

Begin with a few simple, yet informative, measures of potential stress. Using the Assess Stress Table, fill in your response for each item based on the instructions following the table.

Assess Stress Table

Resting Heart Rate	______ Beats per minute
Breathing Pattern	_______ Abdomen _______Chest _______ Both
Respiration Rate	______ Breaths per minute
Stress-o-meter	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Resting Heart Rate

Check your resting heart rate (pulse) after you have been sitting or relaxing for a period of time. You will need a watch or clock with a second hand (or digital seconds). First, find your pulse. You can find your radial pulse on the thumb side of your wrist or your carotid pulse on your neck just under the jaw. For sixty seconds count the number of beats that you feel. Place this number in the first line of the Assess Stress Table.

Breathing Pattern

Next, find a chair that has a back to it. Sit in the chair so your back is primarily straight up and down against the back of the chair. Place one hand on your abdomen with your palm covering your navel. Place your other hand on the upper part of your chest with the palm of that hand just above the heart. For a minute or two, become very aware of your breathing. While sitting straight up, notice your breath as it goes in and comes back out. Become aware of your hands as you breathe in and out. Which one seems to move more? Is it your abdominal hand or your chest hand? Or do they both move equally?

Try this second technique to see if you get the same results. First, breathe out and empty your lungs. Count to three as you inhale deeply. Now, hold it. Did your shoulders go up? Did you feel like the air filled the upper part of your lungs? If so, you probably lean toward chest breathing. If you are a diaphragmatic breather, you would feel your abdominal area expand, your belt tighten, and fullness in the lower part of your lungs and chest. Record your results on the Assess Your Stress Table.

Respiration Rate

Now, for about a minute, become aware of your breathing again. This time, just count how many natural, effortless breaths you take in a minute. Be sure to breathe as normally and naturally as possible. Each inhalation and exhalation cycle is considered one breath. The number of breathes in one minute is your respiration rate. Record the number of breaths you take per minute in the Assess Your Stress table.

Stress-o-meter

Another self-assessment is the Stress-o-meter. Think back over the last month of your life. Include all of your waking moments, as you think back. Give yourself a rating according to the following scale. A score of “1” would indicate that you feel your life has been relatively stress-free during that period. You have felt blissful, calm, peaceful and serene at all times. You have been able to adapt and “flow” with situations as they arise. A “10” score would mean that you felt very high anxiety most of the time. You may have had periods bordering on neurosis, suicidal, or very depressed feelings. A score of 10 would mean that this was a month packed with high levels of stress.

Considering the last month as one single period of time, it is most likely that you would rank yourself somewhere between these two extremes. If you were to average the month (we all have highs and lows), what number would you give yourself on this scale from 1 to 10? Make a note of this number on the Assess Your Stress Table. We will refer to this number again later.

Assess Your Stress Results

Many factors are involved in determining a general level of stress. A couple physiological measures that relate to increased stress are increased heart rate and increased respiration rate. While there are many factors that affect these rates, you will learn in chapter three why the stress response can increase your pulse and respiration rates. The average pulse rate for an adult is approximately 70-80 beats per minute. The average respiration rate is around 12-16 breaths per minute. A faster heart beat or breathing rate might be an indicator of higher than desired stress levels.

Were you primarily a chest breather or an abdominal breather? Many of us are primarily chest, or thoracic, breathers. Chest breathers tend to take shallower breathes. Diaphragmatic, or abdominal, breathing involves the abdominal muscles to facilitate deeper breathing. This allows you to take in more oxygen with each breath. Later you will learn more about why deep breathing is effective as an important relaxation technique.

Your perception of stress primarily determines how your body responds. The Stress-o-meter increases your awareness of the level of stress you perceive in your life. When we exercise we can follow a perceived exertion scale that will give us some idea of how hard we are exercising. We can determine our intensity level. Similarly, we can use the Stress-o-meter to assess our general levels of perceived stress over the past month. You will learn later in the book how your perception of stress relates to your health and your physiological responses. Your body responds the same, whether the stress is real or imagined, so your perception becomes your reality.

The Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences

Another useful scale used to measure stress levels in a different way is called The Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences (ICSRLE). The ICSRLE (Kohn, Lafreniere, & Gurevich, 1990) was designed to identify individual exposure to sources of stress or hassles and allow for an identification of the extent to which those stressors are experienced over the past month. The ICSRLE was developed uniquely for college students. As you know, the sources of stress in a university environment can be unique and different from other settings.

What do college students typically perceive to be the major sources of stress? The ICSRLE is helpful in assessing the major sources of stress and in identifying individual exposure to sources of stress or hassles. This inventory also allows for an identification of the extent to which those stressors are experienced over the past month.

The following is a list of experiences which many students have some time or other. Please indicate for each experience how much it has been a part of your life over the past month. Mark your answers according to the following guide:

Intensity of Experience over the Past Month

0 = not at all part of my life

1 = only slightly part of my life

2 = distinctly part of my life

3 = very much part of my life

____1. Conflicts with boyfriend's/girlfriend's/spouse's family

____2. Being let down or disappointed by friends

____3. Conflict with professor(s)

____4. Social rejection

____5. Too many things to do at once

____6. Being taken for granted

____7. Financial conflicts with family members

____8. Having your trust betrayed by a friend

____9. Separation from people you care about

____10. Having your contributions overlooked

____11. Struggling to meet your own academic standards

____12. Being taken advantage of

____13. Not enough leisure time

____14. Struggling to meet the academic standards of others

____15. A lot of responsibilities

____16. Dissatisfaction with school

____17. Decisions about intimate relationship(s)

____18. Not enough time to meet your obligations

____19. Dissatisfaction with your mathematical ability

____20. Important decisions about your future career

____21. Financial burdens

____22. Dissatisfaction with your reading ability

____23. Important decisions about your education

____24. Loneliness

____25. Lower grades than you hoped for

____26. Conflict with teaching assistant(s)

____27. Not enough time for sleep

____28. Conflicts with your family

____29. Heavy demands from extracurricular activities

____30. Finding courses too demanding

____31. Conflicts with friends

____32. Hard effort to get ahead

____33. Poor health of a friend

____34. Disliking your studies

____35. Getting “ripped off” or cheated in the purchase of services

____36. Social conflicts over smoking

____37. Difficulties with transportation

____38. Disliking fellow student(s)

____39. Conflicts with boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse

____40. Dissatisfaction with your ability at written expression

____41. Interruptions of your school work

____42. Social isolation

____43. Long waits to get service (e.g., at banks, stores, etc.)

____44. Being ignored

____45. Dissatisfaction with your physical appearance

____46. Finding course(s) uninteresting

____47. Gossip concerning someone you care about

____48. Failing to get expected job

____49. Dissatisfaction with your athletic skills

Scoring the ICSRLE

Add your total points: ________

Your score on the ICSRLE can range from 0 to 147. Higher scores indicate higher levels of exposure to hassles. Focus on two key outcomes from your results. First, you can determine your current level of stress by adding your score for each hassle and getting a total. Second, you can discover which of the hassles play a greater part in your life. Higher scored items that you rated with a 3 indicate those stressors are more of an issue for you.

Conclusion

Assessing stress is a complex and challenging process. In this chapter you have had the opportunity to assess your stress from many different perspectives. Look back over each of the assessment surveys and tools. You will see that these tools measured stress from a variety of perspectives including:

·        Physiological indicators of stress

·        Your perception of what is happening in your life

·        Sources of stress and frequency of hassles

·        Your level of satisfaction with events in your life

·        Type of life events you have experienced

The real impact of this unit is in what you do with the information you learned about yourself. It is like putting a puzzle together. Each of the assessments is like a piece of the puzzle. When you put all the pieces together you have a complete picture. Stress Management for Life will provide you with all the tools and information you need to develop a plan that will help reduce stress and enhance the quality of your life.

Key Points

·       Assessment is the first important step in developing a plan to reduce and manage stress.

·       Stress can trigger physiological changes like increased pulse and increased respiration rate.

·       Symptoms of stress can include headache, muscle tension, insomnia and a host of other warning signs.

·       Perception is key when assessing stress. The same situation can elicit a very different stress response in different individuals due to the individual's perception of the experience.

·       Frequency of exposure to different stressors and hassles can be another way to measure stress.

·       For a balanced picture of stress in your life, consider all dimensions of health, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social.

·       A daily stress log can be a valuable tool for increasing your awareness of stress in your life.

·       No single survey or tool can tell the whole picture when it comes to assessing stress. Consider the results from all the assessments to gain a better understanding of your personal stress level.

What you will turn in as your Stress Lab:

Write a 1 1/2 -page minimum (Typed, double spaced, 12 font) reaction paper to your stress analysis. Be sure to include the results of the Assess Stress Table as well as The Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences. What does this information tell you about your stress level? Were there any surprises or do you have a pretty good perspective of your stress? Lastly, address what you typically do to control your stress and if it has not been effective, what new strategies might you incorporate into your stress management?