While the effort must be lauded, it needs tackling at the very root. 

First, we must acknowledge that stress amongst students is not a phenomena linked with time (i.e. just before exams); while it’s true that this stress peaks around exams, the stress felt is all-year round and needs addressing accordingly.  Stress management has to be part of our routine lives and not an incident-based, one-time exercise.

Second is the pivotal role that the parents play in the creation of this stress; don’t get me wrong, there is no parent in the world who would intentionally add to his child’s stress hence the fact that the parent group is creating and adding stress without even knowing it is worse.

It is a competitive world out there and we’ve seen and experienced it up close, so as parents we want our kids to succeed and thus avoid life’s struggles and failures, BUT at what cost?

Should the goal be, “success at any cost” or should it be that your child work towards being the best that he or she can be?

Besides what good can pressure do? Forget excelling, kids are unable to optimise even their basic potential under undue stress.

We inadvertently compare our kids with peers, give them examples of how things are different from our ‘times’; these actions on our part inculcate fear in young minds and does nothing to boost their confidence.

Till about the age of maturity, kids mostly do things to get parental approval and hence as parents we have a huge responsibility.

Whatever our kids do should be in sync with trying to discover their hidden talents and optimising their potential and not for our approval.

Besides, isn’t it a known fact that if you make a career out of what you love, you not only make a success out of it but happiness and contentment happen as corollaries?

Mind you, am not saying you molly cuddle or cushion them from the realities of life; all I’m saying is that you allow your child to discover her potential, offer unconditional love and support and encourage her to be the best that SHE can be.

After all, imagine if Tendulkar went to IIT or Madhuri Dixit became a microbiologist?

Wouldn’t the world have lost some rare talent?

Because of the quick development and widespread use of mobile phones, and their vast effect on communication and interactions, it is important to study possible negative health effects of mobile phone exposure. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether there are associations between psychosocial aspects of mobile phone use and mental health symptoms in a prospective cohort of young adults.

Methods

The study group consisted of young adults 20-24 years old (n = 4156), who responded to a questionnaire at baseline and 1-year follow-up. Mobile phone exposure variables included frequency of use, but also more qualitative variables: demands on availability, perceived stressfulness of accessibility, being awakened at night by the mobile phone, and personal overuse of the mobile phone. Mental health outcomes included current stress, sleep disorders, and symptoms of depression. Prevalence ratios (PRs) were calculated for cross-sectional and prospective associations between exposure variables and mental health outcomes for men and women separately.

Results

There were cross-sectional associations between high compared to low mobile phone use and stress, sleep disturbances, and symptoms of depression for the men and women. When excluding respondents reporting mental health symptoms at baseline, high mobile phone use was associated with sleep disturbances and symptoms of depression for the men and symptoms of depression for the women at 1-year follow-up. All qualitative variables had cross-sectional associations with mental health outcomes. In prospective analysis, overuse was associated with stress and sleep disturbances for women, and high accessibility stress was associated with stress, sleep disturbances, and symptoms of depression for both men and women.

Conclusions

High frequency of mobile phone use at baseline was a risk factor for mental health outcomes at 1-year follow-up among the young adults. The risk for reporting mental health symptoms at follow-up was greatest among those who had perceived accessibility via mobile phones to be stressful. Public health prevention strategies focusing on attitudes could include information and advice, helping young adults to set limits for their own and others’ accessibility.

 Read more: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/11/66

China’s tremendous financial growth and prosperity would obviously come at a price. But this – ‘hiring’ partners (‘especially’) during holiday season to please your parents is in my opinion, is plain alarming.

Alarming because we’ve taken consumerism too far by hiring ‘love interests’ like one would do a car or some other utility.

And the need to please the parents instead of coming clean indicates the tussle between old values and new.

Chinese youth by ambition are perhaps finding no time for love or delaying dating or settling down; the older gen probably thinks that in the need to run the growth race, the youth are not focussing on what actually makes our race tick – RELATIONSHIPS!!

In that case, wouldn’t it be simpler to explain to the older generation that times have changed and our priorities and needs are not the same as yours?

‘The need to please’ defies meaningful, true relationships, no?

Am also thinking, if your parent found out about the ‘hire’, would the hurt caused to them be worth the money spent and the risk taken?

Is balance really so difficult to find or are we unwilling to pay the price for balance?

Will we reach a point where even intangibles like love, companionship and friendship will be E-bought and sold?  Well, I hope not; and I earnestly believe that it’s never too late to reprioritise.

So before you buy that loved one a gift the next time, think about replacing that with quality time and listening instead.

It will be time well invested:)

The AAP guidelines on depression screening – American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Society for Adolescent Medicine all recommend routine screening of adolescents for early signs of depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses.Teen Screen, a standardized mental health screening test designed by physicians at Columbia University, is now offered to adolescents with parents’ permission at more than 550 school and community sites across the country, and is widely used by physicians to identify kids who may be at higher risk of depression or other mental illness. With earlier warning of a child’s psychological suffering, psychotherapy may be all that’s needed, and more intensive therapies, including prescription medication, can be avoided.But the trick is to find them first.

Reference: http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-depressed-20110428,0,3658610.story

Why would cognitive ability predict emotional hardiness? In truth, it doesn’t. But the tests that measure cognitive ability do. When you tell people they have 12 minutes to show whether they are smart or dumb, the ability to stay calm and focused under duress has a huge impact on the scores.

Heightened anxiety has long been shown to dramatically impair people’s ability to think. It affects basic functions such as short-term memory and processing of simple information, as well as more complex thinking, where anxiety can aggressively interfere with the ability to differentiate between important and irrelevant tasks. In today’s business environment of unrelenting pressure, aspiring leaders must learn how to confront heightened levels of urgency without allowing the accompanying mental agitation to be disruptive.

The CEO of a consumer products company once interviewed was hired to evaluate by his parent company because his company had been doing poorly. In fact, it was the worst-performing brand in the parent conglomerate’s portfolio. Just a few minutes before, when asked about his history with the company, he had confidently articulated the direction in which he was taking the business. Later he was struggling to offer even the most basic sense of how to proceed in a hypothetical, but very plausible, real-world crisis. When asked a question, he would offer an answer that was virtually incoherent. He recognized the shift in eye movements, the slight rise in room temperature, and the slight increase in human body odor. These are all the physical responses of someone experiencing an adrenaline flood that is overloading their higher-order functions. When this happens, a person is prepared to run, not think.

Anyone witnessing the above answers would shudder at the thought that this person was responsible for a company with revenues over $1 billion, but was not nearly as incompetent as he appeared during the case study portion of our evaluation. Day-to-day, on the job, he appeared fine; it was when he was confronted with a high-stress crisis that his physical response overcame his mental processes. He had been promoted to the CEO role at a time when the competitive environment was changing, and he had not been prepared to handle unfamiliar complexity. He had not yet learned to tame the cognitive overload that occurs for people in response to high levels of duress.

And the above organization is not alone. A full 20% of the executives interviewed — senior leaders of some of the world’s leading businesses — become almost incoherent during similar processes, unable to provide answers to more than one-third of the questions posed. Human beings are not naturally wired to engage in complex problem solving when they are under pressure, but it can be learned.

Aspiring leaders must be taught how to manage their stress in such a way that it actually increases their focus and clarity. They need to gain experience in stressful situations where they get an elevated — but not overwhelming — sense of adrenaline and are set up for success. Confidence under pressure can be built like a railroad track in the brain through exposure to repeated experiences over time.

This capacity can be developed in many ways. One simple exercise involves memorizing something, be it a poem or the 50 states, and then reciting it before friends at a dinner party, while encouraging them to taunt you if you make mistakes. At first, you are more likely to have missteps in this context. Eventually, you will find that you can do the exercise faster, with more accuracy, in front of an audience than when you do it by yourself. Toastmasters uses the same concept, teaching people to do something they often fear — public speaking — by first exposing them repeatedly to speaking in a small, supportive environment before putting them in front of larger and larger groups.

Mentors can also nurture this quality in future leaders by creating similar experiences. For instance, if your next-in-line is slated to present before the board, don’t let him do so without preparation. Have him present first in front of a few colleagues, then at the Monday morning meeting, then before the management team, all before they present in the higher-pressure environment of the boardroom.

Once an executive learns how to manage adrenaline without panic, he or she can grow confident that the sensations that stress induces will not lead to collapse. While it is a noisemaker in the untrained mind, when channeled properly adrenaline can help people accomplish things that they never would have imagined possible. The ability to make adrenaline a friend is a necessity for executives in today’s environment of ongoing duress. Not surprisingly, it’s also a hallmark of the world’s best CEOs.

Reference: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/dont_let_stress_break_your_per.html

Previous studies have shown that long-term elevated cortisol levels lead to increased abdominal obesity, hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular risk.

Findings:

- Show that cortisol might play an important part in the development of obesity and increased cardiovascular risk for those working in shifts.

- Unraveling the role of cortisol in the health problems found in shift workers could result in new approaches to prevent cardiovascular damage in this specific group.

- This is the first study that shows that working in shifts leads to changes in long-term cortisol levels, suggesting that the stress hormone cortisol might be one of the factors contributing to the increased cardiovascular risks of shift workers.

- The study will run in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Reference: http://www.massagemag.com/News/massage-news.php?id=11624&catid=stress-hormones-may-increase-cardiovascular-risks-for-shift-workers&title=

]]> http://www.stressmanagement.in/blog/2011/10/stress-hormones-may-increase-cardiovascular-risks-for-shift-workers/feed/ 0 http://www.stressmanagement.in/blog/2011/10/job-hunt-how-to-cope-with-the-stress-of-unemployment/ http://www.stressmanagement.in/blog/2011/10/job-hunt-how-to-cope-with-the-stress-of-unemployment/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:39:09 +0000 admin http://www.stressmanagement.in/blog/?p=307 One of the most stressful experiences an individual can undergo is being informed that he/she is no longer employed.

For those who’ve been through this, now is not the time to take a vacation. However, it’s good to take a ‘cooling off’ period to regroup and chart your plans for the ensuing job search. The immediate priority is to deal with the aftershock. Be careful about what you say or do or you may seriously damage your prospects for reemployment later on.

Things To Do Are:

-      Take a “cooling off” period

• Immediately find a close friend, a confidante to whom you can ventilate your feelings, critical for emotional recovery.
• Let negative feelings out and not bottle them up with someone with whom you can be irrational without fear that the conversation will be repeated somewhere else, do not try to contain your feelings.
• Take a “cooling off” period from the job market of a few days but do not make the mistake of re-entering the job market too soon.

-      Use the cooling off period to

• Regroup your thoughts and
• Chart your plans for the ensuing job search
• Update resume

-      Think positively

• It may be hard at first but have to regard your situation positively.
• Remember this is an opportunity to start over in a better job somewhere else.

-      Establish a daily routine

• Keep busy.
• When one is unemployed, there suddenly is a large blocks of time to fill that were formerly occupied by the job.
• Beware of developing a tendency toward idleness by keeping busy.
• The regular business hours should be devoted to interviewing on a non-stop basis.
• Make your preparations for the next day’s interviews the prior evening so that you do not waste time during the business day.

-      Keep up normal social contacts

• Some people react to unemployment by drawing within themselves and shunning their usual social contacts. Do not try to hide from the world.
• There is absolutely no shame attached to being unemployed, especially when so many people have become victims of mass layoffs in the wake of downsizing, through no fault of their own.

-      Do not take a vacation

• Taking a vacation takes someone out of the job market.
• Account time to prospective employers and most are reluctant to hire people who have a long period of unemployment on their records.
• It does not look good to tell the prospective employer you are on vacation.

-      Draw up a budget that conserves your assets.

• You may have made the statement numerous times that you are going to cut back on unnecessary expenses but now you have to do it.
• Start out with a basic spending plan that includes mortgage or rent, auto payments, food, insurance, gasoline and the expenses of job hunting.
• If you have income left over, budget for other expenses on a priority basis.

Avoid the Following Missteps:

Emotional outbursts or arguments with the ex-employer

-      They serve no purpose and may harden the company’s stance against you in regard to severance issues.

-      Your first impulse may be to want an explanation, but the employer is under no obligation to let you know their reasoning.

-      People are discharged usually because someone in authority no longer likes them.

-      Other “official versions” are given but the real reason usually comes down to likability.

The urge to sue the former employer

-      Trying to “get even” by suing an employer can be extremely damaging to your career.

-      A lawsuit against the ex-employer may effectively turn you into a non-person in the job market.

-      Most prospective employers shun anyone who has sued a former employer, although such an action is illegal.

-      Ask yourself how you would react if you were an employer with several qualified candidates, one of whom turns out to have sued a former employer.

-      Would you risk hiring the one who sued?

-      Chances are you would not, out of fear of being sued yourself at some point.

Burning your bridges behind you when you leave.

-      Telling the ex-employer off is a great temptation, especially in the immediate wake of being discharged.

-      You should leave without acrimony or criticism.

-      You may need the ex-employer for a reference, even though fewer companies are giving references in fear of triggering lawsuits if they say unfavorable things about the former employee.

Dumping on your family when you get home.

-      It’s not their fault you were discharged and they should not be made to bear the brunt of your anger and frustration.

-      You may say things in the heat of anger that will impair your relationships with the family.

-      Do not try to hide the discharge.

-      Tell your family what has happened.

-      Keep it factual and to the point.

-      Engage and involve each family member in your search campaign.

-      Tell them you fully expect to find another job. Especially where children are concerned, trying to conceal a discharge can have damaging effects. You do not want them to overhear it at home or on the grapevine at school.

Read More on:  http://www.northjersey.com/news/business/126863603_Job_Hunt__How_to_cope_with_the_stress_of_unemployment.html

Well the above would be true anywhere in the world…

Some tips for how to be stress free and successful in college:

-          Registration: Choose at least one subject that will lift the spirits, whether a new language class, an art class something one enjoys makes the whole course load feel lighter.

-          Buy a planner or agenda and make sure to use it.

-          Keep off the clutter, keeping the living spaces organized is therapeutic.

-          Take good notes: The act of physically writing down key lecture points keeps the person engaged.

-          Take care of the health: Eat well, keep a regular sleep schedule, exercise and meditate. A half hour of cardio is a great way to work through stress.

-          Laugh: These are the moments a person always remembers in his/her lifetime.

-          Look presentable. Looking good makes one feel less stressed.

-          Don’t Procrastinate: Do not procrastinate out of laziness. A technique while studying for exams, take time about two weeks before the exam to plan to study, leave the last two days before the exam open for review sessions and study group meetings. Remember that studying in a group should help polish what one already knows and fill in gaps of things not completely understand.

-          Speak out. Do not criticize self.

-          If overwhelmed, find the source of stress.

-          Discuss with a trusted friend, family member or a counselor.

-          Thought control – keep noxious self-deprecating thoughts out of your mind.

Reference: http://collegecandy.com/2011/04/24/how-to-be-stress-free-and-successful-in-college/

Ragging – is just a word to those who have not experienced it and hence all of us will not fathom the grief of Mr Rajendra Kachroo, father of Aman, when he expresses his disappointment on the quantum of punishment.

Let us try and understand what Ragging is like?

Ragging has been defined differently

-      According to the Chambers English Dictionary, Ragging is an outburst of organized horseplay, usually in defiance of authority, riotous festivity, especially of under-graduates in British Universities, associated with the raising of money for charity.

-      According to the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedia Dictionary, “Ragging means a noisy disorderly conduct, annual parade of students in fancy dress to collect money for charity, playing rough jokes, or throwing into wild disorder a person’s room etc.”

-      The Hon’ble Supreme Court of India perhaps has given a more comprehensive meaning of ragging as under: “Ragging is any disorderly conduct, whether by words spoken or written, or by an act which has the effect of teasing, treating or handling with rudeness any student, indulging in rowdy or indisciplined activities which cause or are likely to cause annoyance, hardship or psychological harm or to raise fear or apprehension thereof in a fresher or a junior student and which has the effect of causing or generating a sense of shame or embarrassment so as to adversely affect the psyche of a fresher or a junior student.”

Ragging in recent years has transcended all of the above definitions; there have been umpteen instances of students leaving college, studies, suffer a scarred psyche for life or even commit suicide.

Ragging today borders on lowest form of humiliation!

Have you ever been humiliated? I am sure, yes!

How did you feel then?

I am sure that is one instance you would rather not remember; but however hard you may try, it is not humanly possible to forget that humiliation!

For those fortunate of us, who have never been humiliated, please read on…

“A leading researcher on humiliation, Dr. Evelin Lindner, defines humiliation as “the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honor or dignity.” Further, humiliation means to be placed, against ones will, in a situation where one is made to feel inferior”. One of the defining characteristics of humiliation as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, made helpless.” Johan Galtung, a leading practitioner, agrees with Lindner that the infliction of humiliation is a profoundly violent psychological act that leaves the victim with a deep wound to the psyche.

Reference: http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/Humiliation/

All of above, put together, is what a victim of ragging undergoes, today. One can now understand why students leave colleges they entered against fierce competition; give up careers for which they dreamt all their life or even end their life because they cannot take the humiliation any more or face their family afterwards.

Despite four state legislations in India that prohibit ragging and two landmark Supreme Court judgments prohibiting ragging, ragging continues unabated because average Indian does not understand the agony faced by the victim and misery of the family.

Till there is mass protest against ragging, there is faint hope that it will stop!

Dr C H Asrani

Sadly so, because if there is one truth, it is that people cannot be categorised; agreed that our culture and experiences mould who we are as people but generalisations take away from us a vast, second-to-none chance of discovering people and cultures.The full-page, UTV Bindaas press ad is an important, albeit small step towards an effort to change this perception.

The bold, matter-of-fact way in which the youth challenge our stereotypes is what I’d call a pleasant jumpstart; teenagers wearing their ‘typical’ rebellious attitude glare at us from this full-page ad and tell us that just because they are ‘bindaas’ we dare not slot them as immoral, careless or non-believers.

It’s time we stopped judging a book by its cover; in fact it’s time we stopped judging at all and started challenging our perceptions and generalisations which are often largely based on the external.

Let’s now hope that the channel matches its content to this very refreshing ideology.