Dealing with stress

During chapter 13 the main idea has been stress. Stress is any situations that threaten or seem to threaten one’s well-being and thus strains one’s coping abilities. Stress is common after an illness, break up, assault, or type of trauma. When stress occurs, people have different ways of coping with it. Some people are more destructive and they yell, blame things on other people, become violent, or trying to use drugs and alcohol to overcome the feeling that come with stress. Also some people use defensive coping which deals with the body protecting someone from anxiety or guilt without even knowing it.
For me when I get stressed out I tend to use more constructive coping methods. I have my good friends Taylor and Shawnee who I can talk to and lots of times they can relate to what I am going through so they know what to say. When I have a lot of homework to do as well as work I write down a list of everything that I have to get done and cross things off my list when I finish them because it helps me to see that I am accomplishing things and makes my stress go away.
I have been able to figure out the methods that work best for me because one time I was pulling an all nighters trying to cram in a twelve page paper that was due the next day. While I was working on this paper I got a call from one of my best friends and they told me that their parents were making them move to South Dakota in less than a week. I started crying, I didn’t get any sleep, I didn’t finish my paper, I wasn’t hungry and since I was so stressed and failing to give my body what it needed, my immune system started to crash and I was sick with a cold for the next week. After that I figured out how to cope with my stress and it has really helped me juggle all the work that I have had to do this senior year!