Gym Class Project

Gym Class Project

Self-awareness— the ability to be conscious of your emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide your decisions.

Social awareness— the ability to sense, understand, and react to others’ emotions and feel comfortable socially.

Self-Awareness

-Recognizing Emotions – The ability to feel an emotion and understand its full impact on your mental state.

-Harnessing Emotions – After understanding the full impact of said emotion, you must learn how to not let it affect your decision-making. It is perfectly natural to experience anger and have that feeling linger for some time, but the key to an emotionally healthy person is to not let it affect your decision-making.

Social Awareness

-Sensing others emotions – The ability to sense the emotions of those people around you. This can be very important to understanding their mental state.

-Understanding those emotions – How you interpret the emotions of those people. Not only understanding what they are experiencing, but also how it affects them. For instance, someone may be insulted and walk away angry, but another person may be insulted and assault you if they are angry enough.

-Reacting to those emotions – Once you understand those emotions, what do you do to harness them? How do you control those emotions in other people? It is much harder than self-awareness, where you control your own emotions. Now you have to corral the emotions someone else is experiencing. This tends to be one of the hardest characteristics to master.

Enhancing Own Health – Stress

-Many different types of enhancing emotional health (could be grief-wise, dealing with depression, etc.), but we will focus on how to cope with stress.

-Different Methods of coping with stress

-Exercise -- Physical exercise not only promotes overall fitness, but it helps you to manage emotional stress and tension as well.

-Relaxation -- There are many ways to use structured relaxation techniques to help control stress and improve your physical and mental well being.

-Time Management -- Good time-management skills are critical for effective stress control. In particular, learning to prioritize tasks and avoid over-commitment are critical measures to make sure that you're not overscheduled.

-Organizational Skills – This one is very simple; if your physical surroundings (office, desk, kitchen, closet, car) are well-organized, you won't be faced with the stress of misplaced objects and clutter.

-Support System -- People with strong social support systems experience fewer physical and emotional symptoms of stress than their less-connected counterparts.

Unhealthy ways of coping with stress

These coping strategies may temporarily reduce stress, but they cause more damage in the long run:
Smoking
Drinking too much
Overeating or undereating
Zoning out for hours in front of the TV or computer
Withdrawing from friends, family, and activities / Using pills or drugs to relax
Sleeping too much
Procrastinating
Filling up every minute of the day to avoid facing problems
Taking out your stress on others (lashing out, angry outbursts, physical violence)

Avoid, Alter, Adapt, Accept

Avoid

Avoid people who stress you out: If someone consistently causes stress in your life and you can’t turn the relationship around, limit the amount of time you spend with that person or end the relationship entirely.

Take control of your environment: If the evening news makes you anxious, turn the TV off. If traffics got you tense, take a longer but less-traveled route. If going to the market is an unpleasant chore, do your grocery shopping online.

Alter

Be willing to compromise. When you ask someone to change their behavior, be willing to do the same. If you both are willing to bend at least a little, you’ll have a good chance of finding a happy middle ground.

Be more assertive. Don’t take a backseat in your own life. Deal with problems head on, doing your best to anticipate and prevent them. If you’ve got an exam to study for and your chatty roommate just got home, say up front that you only have five minutes to talk.

Adapt

Reframe problems. Try to view stressful situations from a more positive perspective. Rather than fuming about a traffic jam, look at it as an opportunity to pause and regroup, listen to your favorite radio station, or enjoy some alone time.

Accept

Don’t try to control the uncontrollable. Many things in life are beyond our control, particularly the behavior of other people. Rather than stressing out over them, focus on the things you can control such as the way you choose to react to problems.

Look for the upside. As the saying goes, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. When facing major challenges, try to look at them as opportunities for personal growth. If your own poor choices contributed to a stressful situation, reflect on them and learn from your mistakes.

Generalized anxiety disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common chronic disorder characterized by long-lasting anxiety that is not focused on any one object or situation. Those suffering from generalized anxiety experience non-specific persistent fear and worry and become overly concerned with everyday matters.

Panic disorder

In panic disorder, a person suffers from brief attacks of intense terror and apprehension, often marked by trembling, shaking, confusion, dizziness, nausea, difficulty breathing. These panic attacks, defined by the APA as fear or discomfort that abruptly arises and peaks in less than ten minutes, can last for several hours and can be triggered by stress, fear, or even exercise; although the specific cause is not always apparent.

Phobias

The single largest category of anxiety disorders is that of phobic disorders, which include all cases in which fear and anxiety is triggered by a specific stimulus or situation. Sufferers typically anticipate terrifying consequences from encountering the object of their fear, which can be anything from an animal to a location to a bodily fluid.