2012-10-17-Stress Management
Seminars@Hadley
Stress Management
Presented by
Sylvia Perez
Moderated by
Larry Muffet
October 17, 2012
Larry Muffet
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminar team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is stress management, managing the daily challenges. Your presenter is Sylvia Perez. Sylvia has a master’s degree in both visual disabilities and social work and she has worked in the field of visual rehabilitation for more than 15 years. Today Sylvia will share some strategies for dealing with stress in your daily life. Now let me welcome Sylvia and I’m going to turn the microphone over to her. Sylvia?
Sylvia Perez
Thank you, Larry. It’s wonderful to be here and to be at Hadley. One thing Larry didn’t say that I think is important is that I too, myself am visually impaired since birth. I’ve had a lot of years of being visually impaired so know the challenges and know the stress that can caused by being visually impaired. I think I’ve developed some strategies over the years on how to deal with some of that. It’s said that public speaking is the number one thing that stresses people out that people are most afraid of. They always give this advice that you can possibly imagine your audience as being naked when you speak to them. I’m going to ignore that advice today because it’s possible that some of you are in your homes and could very well be. I’m just going to ignore that advice and pretend that you all have clothes on to make myself feel better.
We’re going to have fun today and I think that one of the biggest things—and we’re going to get into that—one of the biggest things you can do to manage stress in your life is to have fun and to have a good sense of humor. Stress, there are many different definitions of stress and I’m not going to go over the very academic definitions. Stress is really caused by any change in your life, anything that changes in your life. Whether that be your vision loss, changes in your vision, a change in job, a loss of job, changes in relationships, physical health even just getting a cold can be stressful. So anything can cause stress and there are emotional as well as physical implications to stress.
I want to start off, before we go into the real meat of what I think people think about stress, they’re thinking about all of the negative things of stress. But stress can also be a very positive and good thing in our life because we did say it’s change and change can be a very good thing if we look at it in the right way. Some things that can be positive about stress is it can motivate you to do things differently, to try new things. It can motivate you to set new goals or different goals or to pursue your goals. It can motivate you to change your situation. Maybe it’s changing your job or taking some classes or whatever it may be, changing a relationship, moving. Change can be very beneficial. It can maybe lead to changes in habits that you have. Maybe lead to you furthering your education or experience. I think that’s important, furthering your experiences. But also another really important thing is that stress can help you build confidence because when you see that you can overcome whatever that situation was that caused stress in your life that can really build greater confidence.
We’re going to talk about some of the negative things. Maybe just think about if any of these are going on with you, some of the implications of stress that are really how stress can emotionally or physically impact your life. Some of the physical ones would include using alcohol, drugs or tobacco more or excessively. Over or under eating, sleeping too little or too much, watching television too much, reading too much. Sometimes I’m guilty of that one because I’ll say reading is one of my biggest stress management strategies; reading too much, doing anything too much. Zoning out, isolating yourself, withdrawing from people, these are all things that are symptoms of stress. Obviously taking too much medications. Not taking care of yourself whether that be grooming or your physical health. We’re going to talk about some strategies to deal with those things but I wanted to first point out that yes, there are some positive ramifications of stress or change in our life.
I think that I want to say to everyone today, I don’t know if you’re taking notes. That would be a great thing but if you’re taking notes or you’re going to leave the seminar, one thing I’d like to say is when you leave the seminar today don’t think “I need to put everyone of those strategies, those marvelous strategies into place.” Don’t think that. Think you can just take one of the strategies, one thing that will help you manage your stress, do that. You can always come back and listen to the seminar again or refer back to your notes and use another strategy at another time. Really think about what is one strategy, what is one take away that you can leave with today and start working on. It is very stressful. I once heard someone say that it takes ten times as much energy to live with a visual impairment as it does for sighted people. I’ve got to agree. It takes a lot of energy. You have to be aware of what’s going on around you all of the time. You’ve got to know so much more. I think we have to be much smarter. We’ve got to be constantly solving problems.
It can be very stressful. It is very stressful. But hopefully today you’ll walk away with some strategies that really will help you. I think sometime soon take some time yourself and identify the sources of stress in your life. Just sit down and type them out, Braille them out, whatever you record them and really identify what stresses you out and there are going to be some things that you can control and obviously there are going to be a lot of things that you can’t control. So think about that. Before we get to that I’m going to talk about some things that we can control. These aren’t specifics but they’re very, very relevant.
Number one is our attitudes. Larry mentioned that I have a degree in social work. I have a degree in psychology and social work from a long time ago but I think my whole life I’ve been a pretty positive person. Things happen and I just let them go because you’ve got to have a good attitude. It takes a lot more energy to have a negative attitude and it doesn’t get you anywhere. Someone once said to me, I was really stressed out about something, and this person came to me. They had this big piece of paper and they wrote a really dark little dot, little tiny dot. I could barely see the little dot. I’m like “What? What are you showing me here?” They finally got me to see the little dot. They said “That’s the person that’s stressing you out. Why are you giving them your whole piece of paper?” And that’s so true, is that person was one little dot in my life. It was one little piece of my life but I was giving them the energy of that whole piece of paper. I’m not saying it happened overnight. It took me awhile but now when something happens or a person stresses me out, you know what? They’re probably having a bad day. They’re possibly having a bad life. That doesn’t mean I have to. I think that a positive attitude is critical.
We also need to have positive habits. If you know that you don’t get enough sleep, that’s something you can control. I know that I need nine hours of sleep to be my best. Do I always get nine hours? No but I know that is the best for me. I know if I’m going to go on six hours it’s not going to be pretty. Think about what you need. We’ll talk about that whole thing with sleep in a little bit. But think about what habits do you have that really are leading to stress in your own life. Excuses, making excuses; we always want to blame others and we have to take responsibility for our own stressors, the things we can control and how we can control those and how we manage our stress. No more excuses, we’re going to invent some strategies and you’re going to try them. Now here is one we can’t always control, people. I bet every single one of you has a person, possibly people, in your life who stress you out.
Now one of the big things we’re going to talk about is avoiding those stressors but there are people in your life you can’t avoid. We all have them. They’re usually called family members. We’ll talk about some strategies to work on that. Think about the people in your life and enjoy the people in your life. There are things, as we said, things that are out of your control and we did already kind of talk about that. Things you can’t control, you’ve just got to decide if you’re going to let that impact you. Illness, vision loss, those are all things that you can’t really control. So you just kind of have to say “Okay, I accept that and I’m going to move on. I’m going to come up with some strategies for managing those stressors.”
Larry is going to tell me when we’re going to take some time for some questions but I’m going to jump into some things starting with some strategies that we can do. Avoiding stressors; as we said you can’t always avoid the stressor but those you can avoid then you need to. Sometimes that means spending your time differently. Sometimes that means planning ahead so that you don’t have certain things happen. When we talk about family members for example, planning that time, planning an activity that you know everyone will enjoy and not bring up conflict but you can’t control everything. Know that not everything is your control. Enjoy the part of it that you can and let the rest of it go. Another thing is, I think really important, really important is when we talk about people who are visually impaired which I assume a majority of people on today’s seminar are, it’s really important to get the right amount of sleep, to eat right, to get some exercise. We’re all guilty of not doing all of these things.
Why are those things important? If you think about it, and try to keep yourself from getting a cold or getting sick. I don’t know about all of you but the little bit I can see, which is enough to get me in lots of trouble. But he little bit I can see pretty much evaporates when I do not get adequate sleep, when I am really tired, when I’m feeling sick, all of those things. Those are really important for you to really think about. I can’t tell you how much sleep is the right amount of sleep for you. All of our bodies are different. You know what is right for you. I think exercise is another critical thing we can do to manage stress. There are many, many studies out there that show it’s the number one thing you can do to manage your stress. I recently took up running. I’m running my first 5k this weekend. It was hard to get going with that. It was really, really, really hard. I had to find a sighted partner to run with and just the whole physical part of running, all of that space. But I can’t tell you how much it helps me manage my stress.
Find something that you can do physical to manage that stress. It could be maybe goal ball, bowling, I don’t know if that’s a real exercise but if that’s the best you can do, go for it. Try to get out there. Walk, especially those of you who have guide dogs. I have a guide dog. It’s important for them to get out and get some exercise. It’s a great way for you to get out there and get some exercise with them. So getting that exercise is really critical. To find an exercise partner it takes some work. You have to really work hard at finding people. You can even put an ad in Craigslist. That’s not how I got mine but it’s a good idea. I think another thing that is really, really important is—and this is for all of us who are visually impaired—you need to be very organized. I bet a lot of you are shaking your head right now going “Oh my god, yeah. That’s true.” Because a big part of my stressors are when I can’t find something. Think about that, when you can’t find something how frustrating is that?
Get yourself organized. Use some Braille or large print labeling methods to get yourself very, very organized. Know where everything is. Declutter because all of that causes more stress and that stress you can control. Manage your time; I know we all hate that one. But manage your time because that’s another thing, if we really talk about it, that’s another thing that really gets us stressed out is that we don’t manage our time well. Is now a good time for some questions?
Larry Muffet
Well, yes. I’m going to start off with one for myself. I don’t think I’m the only person that has this issue. It touches on something you said earlier. Let’s say you do something and you get reviewed by 100 people and 99 of them tell you it was a fantastic job and one of them tells you it was only okay, that you stress out and focus on the one person that didn’t give you the positive review. What’s some strategies for dealing with that or letting go of that sort of tendency?
Sylvia Perez
Well, I really believe that—I used to teach community college and I always say the best definition of excellence is doing your best. None of us are perfect. I think we all have to realize that none of us are perfect and this is a perfectionist telling you this. I have to remind myself all of the time and I supervise people too. If any of them are on the call, they’re like “Oh, I hope she remembers that when she gets back to the office.” None of us are perfect. We can’t produce a perfect product. We can’t always have the perfect thing to say. We rarely get perfect evaluations because people feel differently about everything. Everyone has their own perspective. If you know you’ve done your best, I think you can walk away from that saying “I’ve done my best. I’ve done excellent. I’ll try to please that person next time but we can’t please everyone.” We need to stop trying to be people pleasers.