Coping With Stress and Challenge

We need to help our students to develop strategies to deal with stress and challenge.
Our students need to view challenges as opportunities and to build resilience.
If students can view stress as a positive motivator and develop a 'challenge response' to stress, they will learn how to manage stressful and challenging situations and feel empowered to overcome the problem.
Life is stressful in lots of ways, and we cannot erase stress from our own or our student's lives, but we can help them to build resilience and grit and ways to cope with stress.
Kelly McGonigal in her popular Ted Talk, suggests three interventions to help students change their approach to stress and build resiliency:

1. Encourage our students to care for and connect with others.
  
2. Help our students to develop a high sense of purpose. McGonigal suggests that teachers regularly get their students to self-reflect and ask them the following questions:

• What quality or strength do you value about yourself? (This is different than what a teacher or adult would value about you.)
• What activity, role or relationship brings you meaning, satisfaction or joy?  McGonigal says students often point out things like sports, art or being a sibling. The point is to get at something bigger than self.
• What mission, purpose or community do you serve? This question expands the sense of self and gets at what a student cares about.
• Why are these important to you?

3.   Focus on how stress can help our students grow.
“If you are able to look back on your life and tell yourself a story about your stress that includes how you learned from it, it continues to create a narrative of strength, learning and growth,” McGonigal said.
McGonigal suggests getting students to regularly get into small groups and how they have faced challenges and persevered to overcome them, reflect on who or what supported them, and think about what they learned and how they managed the stress or challenge.

“When we are anxious, stop interpreting it as a sign we are inadequate and start seeing it as a way we can rise to the challenge,” McGonigal said.

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