Get a free chair massage from a licensed massage therapist!

In celebration of National Massage Therapy Awareness Week,
the Connecticut Chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association
is offering free chair massages to Wesleyan community members.

Drop-in for a relaxing break in your day; no appointment required.

Monday, October 20, 2008 AND Thursday, October 23, 2008
10:30am to 2:00pm in Usdan 110

As students have begun arriving on campus for the start of another exciting year, many of my colleagues have been sharing a common thought with you: it is a sign of strength — not weakness — to ask for help when you need it. Whether that come in the form of asking your RA about where an office is located or seeking out an academic tutor, asking for help is the best way to ensure your own success at Wesleyan and beyond. 

Now the Mayo Clinic reminds us that asking for help by creating your own support system is key to your health, by sharing the story of East African distance runners. Lessons learned?

1. We need to take care of ourselves as did these runners.
2. If we are isolated, if we are marginalized, if we are without a support system, we are at a profound disadvantage dealing with life’s stresses.

Stress is probably the most common health complaint I hear about from students; it’s even worn as a badge of honor by some. But dealing with life’s stressors — which will never completely go away, just change as time passes – is a skill that is best learned now when you’re in a supportive environment like a college campus.

Very simply put, stress management is about consciously choosing how to respond to what is happening in your life, rather than letting your stressors take charge. And your support system — your friends, family, Peer Advisor, RA or House Manager, professors, other campus offices, or whoever helps you — will make all the difference in your health and well-being personally and academically.

Wesleyan Resources:  Stress Management

The new academic year hasn’t even started and perhaps you’re already feeling stressed out. Experiencing stressors in our lives may be inevitable, but how we respond to them is the key to keeping your stress at a manageable level.  Letting stress go uncontrolled can have a negative impact on our emotional as well as physical health.

A new study, discussed in Scientific American, indicates that the impact of stress may be greater on our physical bodies than previously thought, especially our immune systems.

It might seem counterintuitive, but Kiecolt-Glaser believes that stress makes our immune systems less effective because it actually elicits an immune response itself. Stress, she says, causes the body to release pro-inflammatory cytokines, immune factors that initiate responses against infections. When the body produces these cytokines over long periods of time—for instance, as a result of chronic stress—all sorts of bad things can happen. Not only does it hamper our body’s ability to fight infection and heal wounds, but chronic inflammation also increases our risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, and autoimmune diseases including type 2 diabetes.

What’s more, because regular stress causes a chronic immune response, it can also increase a person’s risk for allergies, which occur when the body elicits a chronic immune response against something that’s not really dangerous (like pollen). In her most recent study, announced yesterday, Kiecolt-Glaser found that when people are under lots of stress—for instance, when they are forced to deliver a speech or do difficult math problems on the spot—their allergies worsen over the course of the next day.

Read the full article here.

Discussion Question: Experiencing stress is not inevitable; it’s about responding in a manner that helps you rather than hurts you. What small steps can you take this semester to manage your stress more effectively?

Wesleyan Resources: Stress Management

Our reaction is usually a greater predictor of how stress will impact us rather than the stressor itself, so stress management techniques usually focus on improving your responses. Dr. Edward Creagan of the Mayo Clinic offers these three very simple ideas in how to avoid and deal with stress, taken from a spy novel!

While waiting for an airplane, an interesting thing happened to me. I picked up a novel in a bookstore at a local airport and came across a story of a James Bond-type character who lived on the edge. His work was challenging, dangerous, and vital to national defense. When queried by his colleagues about his survival tactics, he mentioned three things which I think also apply to us. Regardless of the assignment or the project, there were just three things that he kept in mind.

-  Keep it simple. The more moving parts, the more individuals involved, the more complex the program, the higher the risk of failure.

- Always be prepared for contingencies. What if … what might go wrong … how will I deal with x, y, or z? For example, as a public speaker, I always keep in mind plan B if my laptop explodes, if the projector “freezes,” or we lose power.

- Never panic. This means being prepared within reason for what may lie ahead.

As an afterthought, this agent also embraced the uncertainty of life.  Things go wrong, relationships become painful, the goal sometimes is not reached.  We need to be flexible, we need to be adaptable, and to recognize that there is great merit in staying in the day and turning over our needs and our concerns to a higher power however we may define that power.

The moral of the story? Always be open to new ideas — they can come from anywhere — and often less is more!

Wesleyan Resources: Stress Management

Discussion Questions: How do you implement these simple keys to survival in your life? Or what barriers do you believe exist to their implementation?

It’s the end of the academic year. Your brain may literally feel baked from the over-stressed, over-caffeinated, over-sleep-deprived, over-done year you’ve just completed. The summer months hopefully offers a much-needed respite and time to recoup. But if you want to un-bake your brain a bit faster, blogger Jonathan Fields at Awake at the Wheel offers a list of suggestions that can help:

While we’d all like to rid ourselves of the daily brain-burn, most of us are not willing to extract ourselves from the professional and lifestyle circumstances that are creating that stress (though, I have to tell you, trading in my Ferragamo’s for bare feet has been pretty friggin sweet for me).

So, for those who choose to endure, rather than extract, here are 10 powerful practices that will help get you back to a calm, focused, relaxed and rejuvenated state of mind and allow you to take back body and health:

1. Mindfulness-based stress reduction™

Developed by acclaimed psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, more than 20,000 people, from all walks of life have now completed this 8-week mindfulness-based stress reductiontraining with remarkable results. And, the good news is, now you don’t have to live in Massachusetts to do it. There are many trained affiliates or you can do it at home with Kabat-Zinn’s book and audio CDs (or mp3s) with only 45-minutes a day.

2. Get lost in great music.

This is pretty intuitive, but there is actually significant research that reveals listening to the right music can actually be a powerful de-stressor and help get you back into a better state of mind relatively quickly. And, if you think listening to music drops you into the chill-zone, try learning or playing music. A fascinating study on the impact of playing music on stress reveals that keeping a guitar handy in the corner of your office and cranking out Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Little Wing on your lunch break will help you feel oh so much better!

read full article for more suggestions…

Strive to implement some of these now, continue with them throughout the year and you might just find yourself in better shape a year from now.

 Discussion Question:In addition to those techniques listed in the article, what helps you un-bake your brain?

WesWELL’s Stress Free Zone is back!

Reduce your finals-induced stress by stopping by the Stress Free Zone to play a game, get crafty, hang out with your friends or even get a massage from the Peer Health Advocates.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Games, Crafts, etc.
6:00 to 9:00pm @ Usdan Cafe
Massages
7:00 to 8:00pm @ Usdan 108

See you there!

From Zen Habits…

Focus is something of a novelty these days. We’ve got cellphones for texting and calls, IM, Twitter, Email, RSS feeds, Facebook, Myspace… the list goes on and on. If you don’t have ADD before you start working online, it seems it’s almost inevitable thanks to these inputs. If you’re a web worker who uses the Internet for the majority of the day, you’re especially at risk for losing focus.

Focus is something that must be fought for. It’s not something that automatically switches on when you want to. You have to make sure your surroundings are perfect for working if you want to be focused. Here’s a few ways I’ve found this to work:

1. Use offline tools. Paper products, pens, and other physical tools are a Godsend for those of us who have a hard time focusing throughout the work day. They’re so simple that we can use them quickly, without having to worry about becoming distracted.
2. Take more breaks. More breaks = More productivity. It may sound wrong, but it’s true. Breaks allow us to re-group our thoughts and focus for the task at hand. They also keep us fresh so that we don’t end up burning out after only a few hours work.
3. Smaller tasks to check off. When you’re planning your day, make sure that your “action steps” (aka items in the checklist) are small actions. Instead of “Paint living room”, try breaking it down into many tasks, like “buy paint, buy rollers, pick colors” etc.

read full article…

From the New York Times…

THE e-mail messages marked “urgent” fill your in-box. Your most profitable client has moved up the deadline. The boss is yelling, and the computer system has crashed — again.

Pressure comes with the job, of course. But some deal with it better than others.

Nicole Cusick, writing in Men’s Journal, suggests the following to use stress to your advantage:

• Embrace the pressure. “At the right levels, stress is a good thing,” she writes. It shows you care and can cause you to work harder. “It may seem obvious, but being conscious” of the symptoms of stress is the first step, she says, in calming down.
• Work out. People in better shape have more confidence at crunch time.
• Try meditation. “Researchers from the University of Wisconsin found that meditation can improve your focus — beneficial when preparing for a stressful event.”
• Prepare. No surprise here. The more you have practiced, the more confidence you will have.
• Think positive thoughts. If you visualize success, the odds of its occurring increase. “Negative ruminating may prime you to fail.”
• Learn from mistakes. For those who still let their nerves get the better of them, take solace in this:

  “Ironically, it’s people with more cognitive ability, more working memory, who tend to choke under pressure,” says Sian L. Beilock, a University of Chicago professor.

read full article…

 Dr. Edward Creagen of the Mayo Clinic discusses the problem of stress being “untestable”, meaning that there is no simple diagnostic tool for it. Yet, excessive and unmanaged stress contrinbutes to or causes a wide variety of health concerns. Read on.

A cornerstone of medical management is the history from the patient; a physical examination; and appropriate X-rays and blood studies. For example, if a patient develops cough, thick sputum production, shortness of breath, and fever, and with a haziness on the chest X-ray and an abnormal blood count, the diagnosis in all likelihood is pneumonia and treatment can be prescribed.

What about stress? There is no simple blood study. There is no simple CT scan or X-ray to diagnose the condition. We may be stressed out, frazzled, and not know it. read full article…

Read more on Stress Management at WesWELL’s website by clicking here.