MOS: resources needed ahead of lesson…

• Class set of slide 2 – silent starter activity – please print black and white – do yourselves

• Class set of exercise books/ folders/ lined paper – already received

• Class set of slide 7 for each student to fill in

Do Now! Silent Starter…

Read the information carefully. Answer the questions below, in the spaces given…

1. What might cause you stress this year?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2. What do we mean by ‘daily hassles’?____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3. Thinking about the final paragraph, what things do you think affect YOU more? Daily hassles or big events?________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shh!Stress might bother you this year for a variety of reasons.

You might work too hard and get overly anxious about the exams you are preparing for. You might try to ignore the fact that you’ve got exams this year and not do enough work, causing you to stress out. There might be other things that happen, on top of having exams, that upset you.

Some people cope better with stress than others. It might be down to the type of personality you have, the way you’ve been raised or the things that you’ve had to deal with already that make you better able to deal with stress than another person. However, there are lots of ways to train yourself to cope better with stress, and rising to the challenge is part of the test; will you give up, or will you live out our ARCH values and do the best you possibly can? It would be absolutely fantastic if everyone in this year’s Year 11 cohort got to the end of the year and could say that they had genuinely tried their vey best.

There’s been lots of research done into stress and how people handle it, and whether big stressors, like moving house, or the loss of a loved one affect us more than ‘daily hassles’ like losing our keys or breaking our phone. The research seems to imply that the greatest help to dealing with any kind of stress is the approach a person takes. A person who thinks positively and takes positive action gets over things and bounces back much more quickly that people who dwell on events and can’t move on from setbacks and disappointments. These positive thinkers are the ones who are more likely to be successful in life, and report greater happiness than their negative thinking counterparts.

Today’s DateManaging Stress 1

.

• Put the date and title of this topic on your lined paper

WALT: to begin to explore sources of stress and how

to manage stress

Why? Because you

need to know how

to control your

response to stress

so that you

perform at your

best in your

examinations

P4T: Can

you develop

a mature

and

resilient

stress

response??

I can… identify some

stressors and

understand about

arousal/ peak

performance

I can… apply learning

on stressors/ peak

performance and arousal

to my own life and exam

preparation

I can… identify a

range of possible

stressors and apply

understanding of

arousal/ peak

performance

BestBetterGood

Yerkes –Dodson law

What does this graph tell us about the relationship

between arousal and peak performance?

The Yerkes–Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. The process is often illustrated graphically as a bell-shaped curve which increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal.

Too little stress… I can’t really be bothered… we

haven’t got a chance against South Africa… we’ll never win, so we might as

well go home now…

Too much stress… Oh my God, I can’t breathe…the

whole world is watching… what if we

can’t do it… what if someone gets injured?

What if we let everybody down?? There’ll be 12m people watching in the

UK alone…

Top psychologists work with athletes and people in positions of power/authority to help them deal with the stress created by their job. Coping with

exam pressure needs the same attention – it’s not something you should expect just to do naturally

How much stress do you feel when you think about your

exams?

Managing stress – the long game

• The best thing you can do to help you with exam stress is to work hard all year – you’ll get into a routine of hard work, you’ll feel in control, you won’t have left things to the last minute, you’ll get lots of revision done (using many of the techniques we’ve already looked at)

• Your teachers will be telling you what you need to learn for when –you have mock exams at various points. These allow you to plan your revision, see if it has gone into your long term memory, find out which bits still aren’t learnt etc.

• You need to think about having a balance between working for your exams and having a social life too. No social life will just make you miserable and resentful – so plan to do both, but in the right balance

Managing stress – in the moment

• We all might have panicky moments now and then – it’s normal! It also shows you care about your exams and your future. The trick is being able to handle these and not get things out of proportion. There are LOTS of ways to control panicky moments, for example:

• Mindfulness

• Meditation

• Deep breathing

• Fresh air

Mindfulness: what is it and how do I do it?

• what is mindfulness

• mindfulness exercises

However weird ‘mindfulness’ might sound, lots of people are hooked and say it REALLY helps reduce

stress. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, and be prepared to give it a go… what’s the worst that

could happen?

5 minute meditation

Meditation: what is it and how do I do it?

• Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought or activity –to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. Scholars have found meditation difficult to define, as practices vary both between traditions and within them.

• Meditation has been practiced since antiquity in numerous religious traditions, often as part of the path towards enlightenment and self realisation – in other words, getting where you want to be in life!

Deep Breathing: what is it and how do I do it?

“What is the best way to relieve my stress and relax?” Our typical answer includes an explanation that just as the definition of stress is different for everyone, so are “the best” stress reduction techniques. However, there is one “Super Stress Buster” that evokes the relaxation response that we widely recommend as useful for everyone-even kids. Can you guess what it is? BREATHING! That is right, simply breathing. It is free and can be practiced anywhere- I bet you are even breathing right now! The key, of course, is focused breathing.American Institute of Stress

Deep breathing to counteract stress

Anxiety is a common mental health disorder affecting approximately 3 million people in the UK. Self-help can be valuable for sufferers, especially when a panic attack strikes out of the blue or if you’re anxious before/after a stressful event and can’t seem to calm down. One of the ways in which to alleviate anxiety is to step outside into nature because it has such a powerful effect on the mind.

Getting more fresh air outside can help you to make such breathing exercises more effective. This is because how much oxygen you have in your brain affects your serotonin or “happy hormone”, which affects your mood. If you have too much serotonin, you’ll feel tense. When you boost your body’s oxygen by taking deep breaths in a calming space, such as in nature, you’ll improve your serotonin levels so that you feel happier. A study conducted in Scotland found that when scientists measured stress hormones in 25 healthy adults, people who were living near green spaces (such as parks) had lower levels of stress than those who weren’t. Dealing with stress can be as easy as spending time outside, especially in a park or garden.

Recap: What have we found out…?

1. What does research tell us about what helps most to deal with stress?

2. What is the Yerkes-Dodson law?

3. How can we best manage stress over the whole year?

4. What techniques are there to help us manage stress in panicky moments or in our regular daily life?

Next time.. More information on how to manage stress…