KAPLAN UNIVERSITYHW410 STRESS: CRITICAL

ISSUES IN MANAGEMENT AND PREVENTION

Stress Management and

Prevention Program
Resource Guide

KAPLAN UNIVERSITY

Stress Management and Prevention Program

Resource Guide

By
Chari Tauser
Kaplan University
HW410: Stress: Critical Issues in Management and Prevention
May 23, 2014

Table of Contents
Unit 1: The Nature of Stress
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
My health philosophy.
Tools: Journal Writing
Personal stress inventory: Top 10 stressors.
Unit 2: The Body as Battlefield
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Are you a product of your culture?
Tools: Journal Writing
Stress physiology review.
Unit 3: Feast or Famine
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Anger recognition checklist.
Tools: Journal Writing
My health profile
Unit 4: One Planet Under Stress
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Your personal value system.
Tools: Journal Writing
Under the gun: Stress and personality.
Unit 5: Under Stress: What Now?
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Healthy boundaries.
Tools: Journal Writing
Value assessment and clarification.
Unit 6: Ageless Wisdom of Meditation
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Focus!
Tools: Journal Writing
Too much information.
Unit 7: Sight, Sound, and Body Work
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Self-assessment: Nutritional eating habits.
Tools: Journal Writing
Stress related eating behaviors.
Unit 8: The Wellness Mandala
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises

My body, my physique.
Tools: Journal Writing
Exercise 28.1: Physical exercise.
Unit 9: Applying Stress: Critical Management and Prevention to Your Professional Life
Information to Remember
Resources: Exercises
Exercise 17.1: Defining your support group.
Tools: Journal Writing
Exercise 17.5: Sweet forgiveness.
Additional Information

Unit 1: The Nature of Stress

Information to Remember
The key points in this unit are identifying stressors, understanding the General Adaptation
Syndrome, and manifesting health and wellness. These are all important because they help determine
the cause, reaction and recovery of stress. Understanding these concepts helps to reduce stress and
increase positive manifestation.
Resources: Exercises
My health philosophy.
This exercise in important because the definition of health can mean so many things to
different people. Understanding personal characteristics will determine how health is manifested
throughout life.
Tools: Journal Writing
Personal stress inventory: Top 10 stressors.
Completing this exercise can be done as many times as necessary. It helps to identify stressors
and opens the encouragement to be honest with any issues that may not seem relevant at first glance.
Unit 2: The Body as Battlefield
Information to Remember
The key points in this unit are the understanding of the autonomic nervous system, the
physiological response to stress, and the effects stress has to memory. The physiological
response to stress explains the chemical reaction and releasing of hormones that takes place with
the body and brain. The release of hormones will engage in either the sympathetic (fight-orflight) or the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous systems. Finally, increase in stress
reduces memory function due to increase glucocorticoids.

Resources: Exercises
Are you a product of your culture?
This exercise allows you to see how much the world around you influences your
decisions. Understanding cultural or societal triggers can increase awareness.
Tools: Journal Writing
Stress physiology review.
This exercise breaks down the endocrine glands and the hormones they release in
accordance to stress. Keeping this information handy helps when explaining to clients how the
stress response works chemically.
Unit 3: Feast or Famine
Information to Remember
The key points in this unit include self-love, understanding anger style, and the basic
human fears. Obtaining self-love reduces fear and anger, thus stress is reduced as well.
Determining how you deal with anger, whether be an exploder or somatizer, is pertinent to
getting anger under control. Finally, knowing the basic human fears, failure, rejection, the
unknown, death isolation, and loss of self-dominance, encourages one to know that more than
just them deal with the same and helps to push forward.
Resources: Exercises
Anger recognition checklist.
This exercise is easy to make aware what makes you angry, even when you feel as if you
are not an angry person. Because life changes fast, this is a good resource to use regularly when
going through changes.
Tools: Journal Writing

My health profile
Knowing where you want to be from a health standpoint can be challenging if you do not
know the current situation. Referring and updating a periodic health profile keeps the goals on
track physically, mentally and emotionally.
Unit 4: One Planet Under Stress
Information to Remember
This unit is about stress prone and stress resistant personalities. Particularly, the type A
(stress prone) personality is common in a fast paced world in that these persons are time urgent,
competitive and multi-tasking to name a few. The opposite side to that, the Hardy (stress
resistant) personality, uses control, commitment, and challenge to deal with stressors. Finally,
self-esteem can make the difference in which style personality one is and is greatly influenced by
friends, family, and society.
Resources: Exercises
Your personal value system
Designing a value system based on core and supplemental values is important because it
clarifies what creates a standard in ones world. It also helps map out what to look for in future
opportunities.
Tools: Journal Writing
Stress and personality
This exercise helps break down a stressor in relationship to the matching personality type
to come to a conclusion of handling it. This can also allow creativity in handling stressors in the
future.
Unit 5: Under Stress: What Now?

Information to Remember
In this unit, a valuable concept to understand is the components of cognitive distortion,
including: All-or-none thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, disqualifying the positive,
jumping to conclusions, emotional reasoning, should statements, labeling and mislabeling and
personalization. Another concept is the changing of a negative thought or action using the steps
of The Behavior Modification Model; awareness, desire to change, cognitive restructuring,
behavioral substitution, and evaluation. The final concept is the steps to good time management
including: Prioritization, scheduling, time mapping, and execution.
Resources: Exercises
Healthy boundaries.
This exercise helps to establish boundaries with things about life such as finances,
personal relationships, or technology. Being able to identify which areas create strong impulsive
behavior and the areas that have strict limitations, can help create a better balance to honoring
what is appropriate to each individual.
Tools: Journal Writing
Value assessment and clarification
This exercise maps out core values and the representation of those values within ones
life. Understanding how core values influence ideas, beliefs or attitudes helps to redefine
priorities and change lifestyle behaviors.
Unit 6: Ageless Wisdom of Meditation
Information to Remember
The first concept is the proper way of diaphragmatic breathing using the 4 phases:
Inspiration, pause before exhale, exhaling, then pause before next inhalation. The next concept
to understand is the difference between an exclusive meditation, where the focus is on one object
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to the exclusion of all other thoughts, and inclusive meditation, where all thoughts are invited
into awareness without emotional evaluation, judgment, or analysis. The final idea to remember
is the concept of visualization, meaning to have thoughts and choices with intention.
Resources: Exercises
Focus!
This exercise is generated around the idea that ADD exists within everyone at some level.
The goal is to identify behaviors that decrease mental focus to reduce the stress response brought
on by a constant stimulus in attention.
Tools: Journal Writing
Too much information.
Living in the information age, this exercise is perfect to seeing how technology provides
information overload creating stress responses. Listing ways to decrease how much information
one receives offers awareness to disruptions and opens the view to change lifestyle practices or
situations.
Unit 7: Sight, Sound, and Body Work
Information to Remember
The health domino showcases the relationship among nutrition, stress and the immune
system. The progression of this system is as follows: Stress depletes nutrients, depleted
nutrients are not restored, high sugar, caffeine, processed flour and salty foods keep stress
response elevated, and the ingestion of processed foods accumulate toxins such as pesticides and
synthetic materials. The second thing to remember is to eat a colorful meal because the
bioflavonoids, what makes the color of a food, has high antioxidant properties. Finally, herbs
showcased that provide medicinal properties include: Astragulus, Goldenseal, and Echinacea-

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boost the immune system, Feverfew-reduction of migraines, Garlic-cardiovascular enhancer,

Ginger-reduces nausea, Ginkgo-improve memory, Ginseng-boost energy levels, Milk Thistlecleanse the liver, St. Johns Wort-antidepressant, Saw Palmetto-prostate function, and Valerianrelaxation or sedative.
Resources: Exercises
Self-assessment: Nutritional eating habits.
This exercise allows one to map out eating habits to visually see what foods or habits are
a negative benefit to the diet. By performing this exercise regularly, it is easier to gauge if the
stress response food triggers are reduced.
Tools: Journal Writing
Stress related eating behaviors.
This exercise helps to pinpoint the behaviors that parallel stress and consumption. This
questionnaire can be used as a guideline of progression to a healthier diet.
Unit 8: The Wellness Mandala
Information to Remember
The first concept to remember is the physiological effects of cardiovascular exercise,
including: Better sleep, immune support, decrease blood pressure and heart rate, and/or slows
aging. The second concept is the psychological benefits of exercise, including: Improved selfesteem, mental alertness, and/or decreased depression, anxiety and overall stress. Finally, the
transition to a new fitness program should contain the following parts for success: Starting
cautiously and progress moderately, choose an activity that is enjoyable, dedicating a time of day
for exercise, have the right clothing and equipment, have a support group, set goals, and use care
to prevent injury.

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Resources: Exercises
My body, my physique.
This exercise is perfect for unwinding the cultural stipulations that may influence the
perception of how our body is viewed. It allows one to point out the beauty while gathering a
better understanding to why one might compare, obsess, or have negative attitudes or beliefs,
thus being able to change the nature of our perception.
Tools: Journal Writing
Physical exercise.
This exercise helps to determine a fitness program by evaluating current habits, likes,
motivations, or excuses that pertain to exercise. It is a great starting point for mapping out a
schedule.
Unit 9: Applying Stress: Critical Management and Prevention to Your Professional Life
Information to Remember
The cognitive-dissonance theory as it relates to patients, supports the idea that support
groups can reduce the negative experience of stress. Next, forgiveness should be viewed as a
cognitive process of pardon for resolution, not condoning, absolution, or self-sacrifice because
otherwise the forgiver is essentially saying the action was ok. Finally, the difference between
prayer and meditation is prayer is when we talk to God and meditation is when God talks to us.
Resources: Exercises
Defining your support group.
This exercise helps evaluate the influence the important people in your life have on the
decisions and life choices one makes. Understanding how certain people effect decisions,
positively or negatively, can lead to the discovery of who to put on the hierarchy of support.

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Tools: Journal Writing

Sweet forgiveness.
The practice of forgiveness is essential in letting go of resentment. This exercise enables
a person to identify feelings about a person and forces the acknowledgement of what it truly is.
Honesty of true feelings is the first step in forgiving someone to let go of toxic thoughts.
Additional Information
Book: Secondary Source
Luce, G. (1971). Biological rhythms in human and animal physiology. New York: Dover
Publications, Inc.
This book identifies patterns in a persons life by circadian rhythms, influences of culture to
behavior, and/or the relationship between disease and patterns. Understanding the cycles and triggers
of the body, will allow a better dissection to correcting the body to optimal health and function.
Article: Secondary Source
American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA). (2012). In touch with you. Massage Therapy
Journal, (winter), 49-52.
This article showcases the importance of having awareness to the things around you or
practicing mindfulness. It is suggested that there is a parallel to this practice and health and wellbeing, therefore making it pertinent to reference.
Website: Secondary Source
University of Minnesota Center for Spirituality & Healing. (2014). Integrative healing practices.
Retrieved from http://www.csh.umn.edu/free-online-learning-modules/index.htm

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This website offers modules for explanations with mind/body/spirit practices. It is a great
reference guide to better understanding modalities such as botanical medicine, healing touch,
Osteopathy, or yoga.
Website: Secondary Source
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2012). Managing Stress. Retrieved from
http://www.cdc.gov/features/handlingstress/
The CDC offers a wide variety of information as it pertains to ones health and preventing
disease among many other categories. This website provides knowledge for strategies and awareness
to a healthier lifestyle.
Video: Primary Source
Tedx Talks. (2011). The shocking truth about your health: Lissa Rankin at TEDxFiDiwomen.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tu9nJmr4Xs
Lissa Rankins speech about the truth behind your health is a reminder that evaluating our
health should be beyond the symptoms. She instills that our stressors, mental, physical, emotional, or
spiritual, play important factors in disease.

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