Brandon Castaneda

Psychology 1010

Signature Project

My project is going to be about the topic of stress. Before starting my research, I was

planning to do my project on how self-esteem develops throughout a person’s life. I found it

interesting, but lately I feel that it would be better for me and those around me to do it on stress. I

have been feeling more stress in my life in the past few months than what I am used to. I also

have a few friends that get stressed too easily. So, I’m hoping that this project will help me out

with working to lower the stress levels of myself and those around me. My structure for this

project is to talk about where stress comes from and how it develops, then I’ll finish it off with

how to properly deal with stress. I’ll be adding little bits here and there about how stress affects

me personally.

A good way to start the conversation about stress, is to talk about what exactly stress is.

In Experience Psychology (Third Edition) by Laura A. King, it states that, “Stress is the response

to environmental stressors, the circumstances and events that threaten individuals and tax Their

coping abilities.” Stress is your body’s way of protecting you by telling you that there is

something wrong. Even in emergency situations. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Stress can show

itself in a wide range of ways. You could have decreased appetite, increased heart rate, muscular

weakness, loss of energy, and even decreased interest in things that you would normally have an

interest in. Stress shows itself in way more ways than what I have said, a quick way to find out if

you are feeling stress is to do some quick research. A good way to begin with trying to work on

better handling stress is to first find out what your body’s response is to stress. Common
stressors include a wide range of things, things like: Death of loved ones, job requirements,

financial problems, marriage, moving, illnesses and injuries, and even regular emotion issues.

When I’m personally stressed, my common signs are: anxiety, impatience, increased

heart rate, slight feeling of dread, and loss of interest. I don’t feel all of these signs every time

that I get stressed. It is generally a few at a time, and it goes away when I stop thinking about the

stressor. My major problem with stress lately is that I have been feeling it more often than I used

to.

Stress development starts in the first few years of life. It all begins with how someone

learns how to regulate and manage their own emotional responses. You learn this through being

shown through social means. You could learn negative and positive emotion regulation from

family, friends, strangers, and even the environment. Examples of how one could learn from

their family could be that when a mother feels stressed, she reaches for alcohol to suppress it.

Friends could show signs of aggression when stressed. Strangers could cry. These all combine to

help show how one could learn from their environment. There is also the idea of the intensity of

stress. The article, “Early Life Stress: Effects on the Regulation of Anxiety Expression in

Children and Adolescents”, shows that children and adolescents that experienced heightened

early life stress in the form of institutional care had higher levels of observed anxiety expression

than non-adopted youth in response to a socio-evaluative stressor. In basic terms, children with

more intense early life stress showed more anxiety.

Personally, I agree completely with how stress is developed. I think that the research and

the book suggest that you learn to incorporate how people deal with stress into how you deal

with stress. For example, your Mother drinks to lessen stress, so you learn to drink to lessen your

stress. I would like to add that your experiences can also be shown in how you don’t deal with
stress. For my personal example to this idea, my mother was very emotional in stressful

situations. Whenever she would get into an argument about something, she would end up crying

because of the heightened stress. I don’t have this problem when in a high stress situation. It

might come from our differences in biological functions, but I seem to remember this being a

decision to not act in that fashion. There are probably biological factors in place to provide ways

for dealing with stress, but from research and my own experience I believe that it is a large

majority of learned behaviors.

Dealing with stress can be a challenge for many. If you do a search for how to deal with

stress, you could get a wide range of suggestions. Suggestions like; avoid caffeine, become more

physically active, try to increase sleep, gain a healthier diet, talk it out with someone, and even

time management. But the one that seems to be a universal method of decreasing stress is

through meditation. There is a lot of research and experimentation that promotes meditation as

being a very healthy way to deal with stress. While it decreases stress, it also increases;

creativity, focus, satisfaction, productivity, and even autonomy. Meditation should be done at

around 10 minutes a day. Time yourself by setting a timer. Don’t try to check the timer, utilize

the time that you have. Don’t worry about being done with the process, worry about the journey.

The actual act of meditation includes sitting on something comfortable with proper posture and

you try to bring all of your attention and focus to your breathing. Don’t think about your

problems. Don’t analyze your breath. Try not to focus on the act of breathing itself, just breath

and have your attention follow your breath. It is okay to have your mind wander, just try to bring

it back to your breath.

I haven’t had as much experience with meditation as I would like. I have a good friend

that sets aside the proper amount of time a day for meditation. He started doing this around a
year ago, and he swears that it has worked wonders on him. I plan to try to meditate more often. I

haven’t done it consistent enough to get the proper results out of it.

I have given a little bit of a break in-between this paragraph and the last. I have done this

so that I can try to use what I have learned so far, in my own life. For the past week, I have tried

incorporating meditation into my day to day life. It was very hard for the first few days. My

initial approach was to set aside 10 minutes at the beginning of the day, after I woke up. The

reason it didn’t work for me was that I was still very tired from my sleep. On the second day, I

even fell back to sleep only to be woken back up by the timer. That day I decided to begin

meditating after I had gotten ready for the day, and after breakfast. That way I could get more

time to wake up, and more time to be prepared for meditation. This worked immensely better for

me. The results that I have started to see are: Decreased stress levels. Increased productivity at

work. As well as increased focus. The results aren’t as major as you might be thinking. They are

small improvements, but the main thing to focus on is that they are noticeable improvements. I

just need to keep meditating.

I learned a lot about stress from this assignment. I knew when I was stressed, but I had a

vague idea on where it comes from and how it shows in others. I would like to know more about

how to help others deal with their stress. A lot of my research showed ways to make yourself less

stressed, and not enough ways to help others become less stressed. I feel that this is information

that should be more talked about in society. Everyone feels stress, and everyone has ways to deal

with it. But not everyone knows how it develops, or the healthy ways to cope with it.
Work Cited:

King, L. A. (2016). Experience psychology. Mcgraw-Hill.

Burkholder, A. R., Koss, K. J., Hostinar, C. E., Johnson, A. E., & Gunnar, M. R. (2016). Early
Life Stress: Effects on the Regulation of Anxiety Expression in Children and
Adolescents. Social Development, 25(4), 777-793.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libprox1.slcc.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=13&sid=ec
84c8d8-a06b-4caa-a3dc-948ce9e6288f@pdc-v-sessmgr06

Coppola, F., & Spector, D. (2009). Natural Stress Relief Meditation as a tool for reducing
anxiety and increasing self-actualization. SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND
PERSONALITY, 37(3), 307-312.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libprox1.slcc.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=19&sid=ec
84c8d8-a06b-4caa-a3dc-948ce9e6288f@pdc-v-sessmgr06