Health Stress Unit (Study Guide + Review) PDF

Dimensions of Health Healthy behavior is engaging in activities that are mentally and emotionally healthy. Being healthy isn’t the same as just not being ill or injured. It’s a state of overall well-being that includes many different dimensions, not just how a person’s body feels and functions. Ph...

Dimensions of Health Healthy behavior is engaging in activities that are mentally and emotionally healthy. Being healthy isn’t the same as just not being ill or injured. It’s a state of overall well-being that includes many different dimensions, not just how a person’s body feels and functions. Physical Health Physical health has to do with how the body feels and works. When a person has good physical health the body feels well and strong, and all the parts of the body work the way they should. Be physically active each day. Eat foods that provide good nutrition. Get enough sleep. Wear a safety belt when riding in a car or other vehicle. Wear sunscreen. Brush and floss your teeth. Stay away from tobacco, alcohol and other drugs. Get regular medical checkups.) Mental/Emotional Health Mental or emotional health has to do with how people think, feel and act as they cope with life. A person with good emotional health can feel, express and respond to a wide range of emotions in healthy ways and share those emotions with others. They have ways to manage stress and deal with difficult situations. They are able to cope with anger, sadness, worry and other upsetting feelings and the ups and downs of life without hurting themselves or others. Learn about healthy relationships. Communicate clearly with others. Express feelings in healthy ways. Get support for troublesome feelings. Manage stress in healthy ways. Learn skills to make healthy decisions. Social Health Social health has to do with how people build relationships with others. People with good social health can connect with others. They can communicate effectively and contribute to family, friends and the wider community. Meet new people. Be nice to family and friends. Build a support network. Participate in extracurricular activities. Show concern and respect for others. Volunteer in your community. Spiritual Health Spiritual health has to do with how people find meaning and purpose in their lives. People with good spiritual health have a sense of something bigger than themselves and their own day-to-day lives. They follow their values and beliefs. Take time to think about what gives your life meaning and purpose. Follow family, religious or personal values. Act in ways that reflect your values. The dimensions of health are interrelated. A behavior that strengthens one dimension might have positive effects on another dimension as well. For example, people who join a sports team can improve their physical health by being physically active. But their social health may also improve because they’ll be meeting and interacting with other people on the team. Getting regular physical activity can help manage stress and elevate a person’s mood, which will improve emotional health. And being part of a team may give them a sense of meaning or purpose, which is part of spiritual health. Each dimension of health can affect the others, both positively and negatively. All of the dimensions of health contribute to your overall health. When you improve one dimension of health, other dimensions are often improved as well. In the same way, when one dimension of health becomes weak, the other dimensions are also negatively affected. The choices you make and the actions you take every day to keep your body strong, express your feelings, manage stress, solve problems, connect with others and follow your beliefs and values are what will help you maintain and improve your physical, emotional, social and spiritual health. Exploring Emotional Health Emotional health is the ability to feel and express a wide range of emotions in healthy ways. Remember that mental and emotional health has to do with how a person thinks, feels and acts as they cope with life. A person with good emotional health can feel, express and respond to a wide range of emotions in healthy ways and share those emotions with others. Your emotional health affects how you respond to feelings, relate to others, manage stress and make decisions. Emotional health isn’t about always feeling happy. It includes being able to cope with difficult, troublesome or upsetting feelings and the ups and downs of life without hurting yourself or others. Good emotional health enables people to enjoy life and survive pain, disappointment and sadness without losing a sense of well-being and an underlying belief in their own worth. People with good emotional health accept who they are. They appreciate the things that make them unique. They’re realistic about their strengths and challenges. They like themselves, feel confident about using their skills and understand their limits. They have high self-esteem, which means they have confidence in themselves and value their unique qualities. They also have self-respect, which means they want to keep themselves healthy and safe, and believe they are worthy of respect from others. People with good emotional health build healthy relationships. They connect with others at home, school and work and in the community and treat them with respect. They have people they care about, trust and can depend on, who care about, trust and depend on them in return. They listen to others and share their thoughts, feelings, joys and problems. People with good emotional health show care and concern for others. They respect and accept other people without judging them. They try to be kind and help when they can. They are able to show empathy, or put themselves in another person’s place. People with good emotional health know how to manage stress in healthy ways. They avoid or reduce stress in their lives when they can. They can see the positive side of changes in their lives and manage the stress these changes might bring. They find ways to deal with stress that don’t hurt themselves or others. People with good emotional health know how to resolve conflicts in healthy ways. They understand that conflicts are normal—it’s how you deal with conflicts that matters. They try to see the other person’s side and take responsibility for their part in a conflict. They know how to manage their anger and work with others to resolve disagreements or problems. People with good emotional health are optimistic. They tend to choose the positive over the negative. They can replace negative thoughts with positive ones and overall have a good feeling about their lives and a belief that things will work out for the best. People with good emotional health have a growth mindset. This means they enjoy learning new things, even about something they already know or can do well. They believe that skills and abilities can be improved. They don’t give up when they fail at something. They can take credit for their successes and learn from their mistakes. People with good emotional health take responsibility for their personal choices and actions. They don’t blame others for their problems and accept responsibility for their mistakes. They also do their best to take care of the things that they’re expected to do. Other people can depend on them to follow through. They can set goals and work to achieve them. They believe they can affect what happens in their lives and can change when they need to. People with good emotional health ask for help when they need it. They know that it’s OK to ask for help. They have people they can talk to about problems or difficult feelings. They are able to reach out to others for support. Having these characteristics of positive emotional health helps people live happy, healthy lives and gives them the strength and skills to cope when they are faced with life’s challenges and stresses. How emotional health can affect the other Dimensions of Health: Physical Health Liking and feeling good about themselves can motivate people to take care of their bodies. Being able to honestly assess strengths and weaknesses can help people see when they need to make changes to improve or maintain physical health. Being able to cope with change will make a person more likely to implement and stick with habits that promote physical health. Having skills for resolving conflict and managing stress can help protect the body from physical harm. Social Health Sharing feelings in respectful ways strengthens connections with others. Building healthy relationships helps a person develop a social network. Taking responsibility for choices and actions earns the respect of others. Knowing how to resolve conflicts helps people get along in groups. Spiritual Health Having an optimistic attitude helps people feel a positive connection to the world around them. Caring about others can inspire a person to look beyond the self. Knowing oneself can be a basis for positive change and personal growth. Prosocial behaviors are the things you do to get along with and help others. The prefix pro- means to be “for” something. So to be prosocial means that something contributes to the welfare of a group in a positive way. Behaving in prosocial ways helps you build supportive and respectful connections with others. There are many behaviors that might be considered prosocial. For example, taking responsibility for your own choices and actions can build trust between people, contribute to healthy relationships, and minimize stress and conflicts. Prosocial behaviors are ways to help maintain or improve your social health. And many of them are very similar to the characteristics of positive emotional health. This is another way that the dimensions of health are related. Positive emotional health contributes to social health and vice versa. Prosocial behaviors can help people and groups—including our class—function at their best. Nobody has perfect emotional health—there’s always room for improvement. Positive emotional health requires not only knowing your strengths, but also accepting or working to improve the areas that challenge you. There will always be ups and downs, good things and difficult things that happen in life. But you can take steps to improve and maintain your emotional health. Optimists VS Pessimists Optimists are people who have a generally positive outlook on life. They tend to see the good side of most situations and expect things to work out for the best. Pessimists are people who have a more negative outlook. They tend to focus more on the problems or challenges of a situation and expect more-negative outcomes. Being optimistic, or choosing the positive over the negative, is one of the characteristics of emotionally healthy people. Many experts who study human psychology believe that optimism contributes greatly to a person’s emotional health. On the other hand, a pessimistic outlook is sometimes more realistic. Life can be challenging and bad things do happen to people. Pessimism can protect people from disappointment—if they don’t expect something good to happen, they won’t feel as bad if it doesn’t. In general, optimism can better help people keep their emotional balance in tough times. Being optimistic doesn’t mean a person has to refuse to look at or acknowledge negative events, but optimists tend to recover or bounce back more quickly from difficult circumstances. Even when a situation or event doesn’t go the way they wanted, optimists believe that, however things turn out, they’ll be able to handle it. Let’s look at some potentially stressful or challenging situations teens might face and explore what a pessimistic versus an optimistic view might be for each one. Your family is going to move to another state. (Pessimistic response: I’ll never see my friends again. It can’t be as nice as where we live now.) (Optimistic response: I’ll have a chance to make new friends. There may be some different and fun things to do there.) You have to work the same weekend your friends are going to a concert. (Pessimistic response: I’ll miss out on all the fun. It isn’t fair.) (Optimistic response: I’m glad I have the job and I’ll get some extra money by working. We can do something together next weekend.) You want to try out for the basketball team but it’s very competitive. (Pessimistic response: There’s no way I’ll make the team. The other people trying out are sure to be better players than me.) (Optimistic response: If I don’t make it this time, I’ll practice hard and try again next year. Having the best players will help the team win.) The pessimistic response tends to focus on the problem or negative aspects of the event, and can contribute to feelings of loss, unhappiness or being left out. The optimistic response looks for solutions or ways to reframe the situation to create more pleasant or positive feelings. Taking an optimistic view helps people accept themselves and the situation and take more responsibility for how they feel and what they can do about the problem. Focus on the positive. This doesn’t mean you just ignore challenges or problems or pretend nothing bad is happening. But it does mean you look for solutions and what good might come from a situation. Think of problems as temporary and specific. Optimists tend to see specific causes for their problems rather than making far-reaching general assumptions. For example, after doing poorly on a test, an optimist might say, “I just didn’t study hard enough. I need to spend more time preparing for the next test,” rather than, “I’m just no good at taking tests,” or “I’ll never understand that subject well.” See yourself as the cause of your success. Optimists give themselves credit when they do something well or something good happens to them. They see their achievements as the result of their own qualities, talents or hard work. For example, an optimist might say, “I enjoyed myself at the party because I was friendly and made an effort to talk to some new people,” versus “I had a good time because everybody was so nice.” View mistakes as a chance to learn. Optimists don’t blame themselves for setbacks or spend a lot of time being down on themselves when they make a mistake. Instead they view mistakes as a chance to learn something and do better in the future. Keep a sense of humor. Optimists can laugh at themselves or think of something lighthearted to say that can ease a difficult situation. Finding the humor in a situation can help you keep a positive outlook when faced with a problem. Stay healthy. Eating healthy foods, being physically active and learning to manage stress can all contribute to feeling more positive about your life. Spend time around positive people. Optimism tends to be contagious. Being around other people who can see the potential benefits or good things that can come from a challenge or difficult situation can help you shift your own focus. Use positive self-talk. Self-talk is all of the ideas you think to yourself or things you say to yourself over the course of the day. You’re going to be learning more about how to use positive self-talk to support having an optimistic attitude in just a few minutes. Imagine a person who’s always down on themselves. What kinds of negative things might that person think or say? These things represent different negative patterns of thinking and negative self-talk. Remember that self-talk is all of the ideas you think to yourself and things you say to yourself. Negative thought patterns can lead to feelings of being discouraged, upset or unhappy. They’re problematic because the thoughts and beliefs they cause are often unrealistic or mistaken. Negative patterns of thinking can add to stress, which can affect your physical health, and may cause conflicts with others. They can also be defenses that keep a person from seeing what’s really going on in a situation and having to change or accept personal responsibility for their choices and behaviors. We’re going to examine some common negative thought patterns and think about how you could counter them with more positive self-talk. Expecting the worst. Sometimes people predict or anticipate problems and difficulties before they happen. A person who does this all the time may be pleasantly surprised when something does go well, but expecting things to go badly keeps you in a pessimistic frame of mind and can sometimes even contribute to a negative outcome. Overgeneralizing. To generalize means to make universal or broad assumptions based on certain evidence. When people overgeneralize, they use one example or only a little bit of evidence to draw conclusions that are often incorrect. For example, the person might see one mistake or setback as representing a never- ending cycle or pattern of defeat. When you hear people say, “I never...” or “It always...” they are Overgeneralizing. Blaming others. Sometimes people blame other people, the circumstances or the world in general for the things that happen to them. This can be a way to avoid taking any responsibility for the consequences of their own choices and actions. It can also keep a person from believing they can solve the problem or change the circumstances. Requiring perfection. Sometimes people don’t allow themselves any room for error or making a mistake, which can cause a lot of stress and put a lot of pressure on them. It also isn’t realistic. Mistakes and misunderstandings do happen even when people are trying their best. Exaggerating. Sometimes people exaggerate or magnify the importance of events or situations. This means they make something bigger than it really is. For example, having a misunderstanding with a friend doesn’t usually mean the friendship is over, but someone with this negative thought pattern may assume it does. Personalizing. With this negative thought pattern, people see themselves as the cause of a negative event for which they were not actually responsible. It can also mean taking things personally that are not meant that way. For example, if someone waves at a friend at a crowded event but the friend doesn’t wave back, a person who’s personalizing would assume the friend is ignoring them or angry, when in fact the friend simply didn’t see the person wave.