SHS

Personal Development
Quarter 1 – Module 8:
Stress and Coping Strategies in
Middle and Late Adolescence
Personal Development – Grade 11/12
Quarter 1 – Module 7: Stress and Coping Strategies in Middle and Late Adolescence

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over them.

Regional Director: Gilbert T. Sadsad

Assistant Regional Director: Jessie L. Amin

Development Team of the Module

Writers: Judy T. Montas
Editors: Frankie T. Turalde, Randy P. Bacares, Gloria E. Fontelar
Reviewers: Sheila C. Bulawan
Illustrator:
Layout Artist: Jogene Alilly C. San Juan, Antonio L. Morada

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 Introduction

Welcome to this module on the Stress and Coping Strategies in Middle and
Late Adolescence. In this lesson you will learn understanding of mental health and
psychological well-being to identify ways to cope with stress during adolescence.
Stress is the way your body responds to challenges and gets you ready to face them
with attention, energy and strength. When you feel you can cope with these
challenges, stress gets you ready for action and gives you the motivation to get things
done.

One key relevance of this module is for you to learn ways

to ways to help you cope with stress and be mentally healthy.
All you have to do is to accomplish all the activities. Enjoy and
learn to be stress free adolescent.

Objectives

At the end of the module, you should be able to:

1. Discuss understanding of mental health and
psychological well-being to identify ways to cope with
stress during adolescence
2. Understand the ways on how to cope with stress during
adolescent.
3. Write his/her own plan on how to fight out stress.

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 Vocabulary List

The following terms used in this module are define as follows;

Stress - a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or

very demanding circumstances.

Mental Health - refers to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional well-being. It is all

about how people think, feel, and behave.

Psychological well-being - consists of positive relationships with others, personal

mastery, autonomy, a feeling of purpose and meaning in life, personal growth and
development.

Pre-Test

Are you ready to start the pre-test? Remember to write your answer in your journal.
Direction: Read the following statements. Write T if the statement is Correct and
write F if the statement is in-correct.

_____1. Stress is your body's reaction to a challenge or demand.

_____2. Stress causes the body to flood with hormones that

prepare its systems to evade or confront danger and it is commonly
refer to this as the fight-or-flight mechanism.

_____3. Some of the physical effect of stress is it slows down some

normal bodily functions, such as those that the digestive and
immune systems.

_____4. Mental health is determined by a range of

socioeconomic, biological and environmental factors.

_____5. When you are happy and contented you are not stress.

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 Congratulations!!!! You
completed the pre-test. Now let’s
start to understand stress and
how to cope with it!

Learning Activity 1

You are about to know your level of stress, simply open your
browser and input the link
https://www.cigna.com/takecontrol/tc/stress/quiz/ Take this stress
quiz to see your own stress “visualized.” Then take down your
stress PLAN tailored to help control your level of stress.
Go on do it now and know your stress level.

Guide Questions:

1. How did you find the activity?

_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________

2. Why do you need to know your stress level?

____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________

3. What are you going to do with the PLAN that comes with the result of your
stress quiz?
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________

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 If you do not have an internet access you may read and
answer the activity below. Write your answer in your journal.

Mark all items that have made you feel stressed, upset or worried
on a regular basis. There are no right or wrong responses.

__ Parental pressure
__ Teacher pressure
__ Not having friends
__ Friend conflict
__ Time management
__ Studying
__ Financial problems
__ Conflict with parents
__ Long-distance relationship
__ Academic performance
__ No time for extracurricular activity
__ Absences in class
__ Drug/alcohol concerns
__ Schoolwork overload
__ Family problems
__ Family illness
__ Being sick
__ Sibling conflict
__Peer Pressure
__Conflict with friends

Total Chronic Stresses: _________

Average student has 10 of these current stresses in their life. How do you
measure up? 0-5 = low, 6-10 average, 11-15 = high, 16-20 = extreme

Did you enjoy it? Well then, answer the questions below. Write
your response in your journal.

1. How did you find the activity?

______________________________________________________________

2. Why do you need to know your stress level?

______________________________________________________________

3. What are you going to do to lessen your stress?

______________________________________________________________

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Learning Activity 2
Now let us explore further! Let us have
another activity.

Answer the following question just for you. Write your answer in your journal.

1. How much stress you experience for the last 3 months?

2. Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health?

______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

3. Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? Why?
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________

Watch the Video of How to make stress your friend by Kelly

McGonigal by just following the video link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU&t=308s

If you have difficulty in your internet signal you may read the
transcript of the video below.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kelly McGonigal – Health psychologist

I have a confession to make, but first, I want you to make a little confession to
me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you’ve experienced relatively
little stress. Anyone?

How about a moderate amount of stress? Who has experienced a lot of

stress? Yeah. Me too.

But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist,

and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something
I’ve been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to
do with stress. For years I’ve been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases
the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I’ve
turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I
want to change yours.

Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to
stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they
started by asking people, “How much stress have you experienced in the last
year?” They also asked, “Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?” And
then they used public death records to find out who died.

Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the
previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people
who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. People who experienced a lot
of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had
the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little
stress.

Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking
deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that
stress is bad for you. That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct,
that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the
United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.

You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I’ve been spending so much
energy telling people stress is bad for your health. So, this study got me
wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And
here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change
your body’s response to stress.

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 Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants
in a study designed to stress you out. It’s called the social stress test. You come into
the laboratory, and you’re told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on
your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you,
and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your
face, kind of like this. And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging,
non-verbal feedback like this.
Now that you’re sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And
unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now
we’re going to all do this together. It’s going to be fun. For me.

Okay. I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of

seven. You’re going to do this out loud as fast as you can, starting with
996. Go! Audience: (Counting) Go faster. Faster please. You’re going too
slow. Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start
all over again. You’re not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea.
Now, if you were actually in this study, you’d probably be a little stressed
out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out
into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs
that we aren’t coping very well with the pressure.

But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized,
was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were
told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social
stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding
heart is preparing you for action. If you’re breathing faster, it’s no problem. It’s getting
more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response
as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more
confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress
response changed.
Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood
vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is
sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It’s not really healthy to be in this
state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as
helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but
this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens
in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one
biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at
age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress
reveals, that how you think about stress matters.

So, my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid
of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If
you raised your hand and said you’d had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have

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saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress,
you’re going to remember this talk and you’re going to think to yourself, this is my body
helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body
believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.

Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from,
so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most
under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes
you social.

To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin,

and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even
has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it’s released when you hug
someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. Oxytocin is a
neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain’s social instincts. It primes you to do things
that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with
your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to
help and support the people you care about.

Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin to become more
compassionate and caring. But here’s what most people don’t understand about
oxytocin. It’s a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the
stress response. It’s as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that
makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is
motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell
someone how you feel instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make
sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support
each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by
people who care about you.
Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you
healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn’t only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and
one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the
effects of stress. It’s a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay
relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your
heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and
heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart,
and the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by
social contact and social support, so when you reach out to others under stress, either
to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your
stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find
this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience,
and that mechanism is human connection.

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 I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this
study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States,
and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, “How
much stress have you experienced in the last year?” They also asked, “How much
time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?” And
then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died.
Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like
financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But
— and I hope you are expecting a but by now — but that wasn’t true for
everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-
related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience. And so we see once again
that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and
how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your
stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose
to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.
Now I wouldn’t necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but
this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access
to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with
others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength
and energy, and when you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting
better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement. You’re saying that
you can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges, and you’re remembering that you
don’t have to face them alone.

Thank you.
Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you’re telling us. It seems amazing to
me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone’s life
expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle
choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way
they go? It’s equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can
handle it, in some sense?
Kelly McGonigal: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning
is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that’s really
the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life
and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.

Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Kelly. It’s pretty cool. KM: Thank you.

Pangambam, “How to Make Stress Your Friend by Kelly McGonigal (Transcript)”

9
 Did you enjoy watching the video
clip? Or reading the transcript? Now
you are ready to answer the
questions below. Write your answer
in your journal.

Guide Questions:

1. What is stress to you?

2. Do you still believe that stress is harmful
to your health? Why?
3. What are the things that you understand in
the video clip?

Deepening

Read Me!

Do you ever feel frustrated, angry, in a hurry to submit the

projects, nervous because of recitation or presentations? Your heart
beats fast, your hands feel cold and you say I am stress! Well stress
is normal, and it isn’t necessarily bad and it isn’t necessarily good.
Too much of anything is bad of course, who says no? Sometimes
stress make us motivated, it pushes us to do things which we can’t
do when we are not stressed. How can an adolescent like you cope
with stressful situation? So, it is time to read, understand and
discover coping strategies about stress.

Mental Health
The very common definition of mental health is a state of well-being, it is an
individual ability and how can someone cope with the normal stresses of life where
he/she can work productively. Everyone has some risk of developing a mental
health disorder no matter their age, gender, social status or nationality. There are
some factors that contribute to mental health issues these are; Social and financial
status, biological factors, and lifestyle of a person. Mental health conditions are
affected also by how a person cope up with stress, depression, and anxiety. To help
you boost your mental health and stay in good shape you can do the following ways.

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1. You take the first small step
Do not be too in a hurry, make a plan that you can accomplish without you being
pressured to finish it.
2. Share the love
Show love to your family and friends, do not hesitate to say it.
3. Take time to laugh
Laughter is a best medicine, smile it will not cost you even a cent.
4. Something bothering you? Let it out
Write it on a paper, make a poem or a novel or even a play script, it helps you to
let it out.
5. Practice forgiveness
Forgive and forget it will give your peace of mind and a clear heart.
6. Exercise regularly or take a walk
Exercising at least 30 minutes a day can help alleviate stress, tension, and boost
confidence Go with the nature, it will calm your mind
7. Get enough sleep
You should at least sleep 7 to 8 hours a day to make it easier for you to cope with
stressful situations
8. Have time to relax
Everyone needs free time to do things that make them happy. Listen to music,
dance or do your hobby.
9. Strengthen your faith with God
Make your relationship with God stronger than ever. Invite God into your life and
everything will be just fine

What is stress? Stress is a feeling of emotional or physical tension, it is your

body's reaction to a challenge or demand.
We all experience stress and we all know that it is normal for us to have it. As an
adolescent what stress, you? How do your body respond to stress?
So just keep on reading to widen your understanding about stress.

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 You can say that you are experiencing Stress if you have these signs:

• Low self-esteem

• Low energy
• Frequent Headaches

• Aches, pains, and tense muscles

• Chest pain and rapid heartbeat

• Nervousness cold or sweaty hands and feet

• Forgetfulness and Inability to focus
• Changes in appetite

Common cause of teen or adolescent stress

• Family problems
• Beating the deadline for projects, assignments and other activities
• Schedule Examination
• Failing Grades
• difficulty in organizing work
• poor time management
• difficulties with personal relationships and peer pressure
• balancing the demands of a family with studying

How to cope up with stress

1. Eat a well-balanced diet eat healthy food, go for vegetables and fruits
What concept have you learned from
2. Avoid excessive amounts ofmodule?
caffeine limit your coffee, black/red tea and
soft drinks. What have you discovered

3. Exercise every day at least 30 minutes it a day, it is one of the best ways to
reduce stress

4. Go outdoors whenever possible say hello to sunshine stay a little while.

5. Think positive always think I can do it!

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6. Set realistic goals for yourself
7. Learn to manage your time well
8. Make time for yourself have a “Me” day once in a while, love yourself
9. Adopt good sleep habits do it in daily routine, getting sleep 7 to 8 hours
brings a lot of change to you.
10. Take a deep breath and count to ten or even more if you face a difficult
situation especially with peers before arguing or doing anything.
11. Learn to Meditate there are a lot of self-learning video on how to do it.
12. Laugh out load for it is true that laughter is the best medicine
13. Say a little prayer upon waking up or any time of the day, make it a habit to
ask for guidance and protection and everything will go well.
14. Talk to a friend or somebody you trust, let it out.

Now that you have read about the kind of

things that you can do to reduce stress
and cope with it, answer the questions.
Write your answer in your journal.

1. What concept have you learned from

module?

2. What have you discovered to yourself

in relation to the module?

13
 Application
Now that you have read and
understand mental health and
psychological well-being and ways
to cope with stress during
adolescence you are now ready to
do the next task!

Write your own susceptibilities and plan on how to stay mentally healthy while
coping with stress. Copy and Write your response in your journal

My Stress Can
Fill-in the box of what is being ask from you

Academic Stress- related to Environmental stress-

studies related to family

Personal stress- includes Other stressor-includes

health, personal issues relationship with peers/friends

Stress Level Zone

Too much stress will cause your

Stress Can to overflow. By using
your coping skills, you can keep
your stress levels down

Problem focus coping skills Emotion focus coping skills

Refers to strategies that you use Refers to those strategies that

to change the source of the you use to decrease the
problem negative emotions

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 Post-Test

True or False: Read the statements, write your answer in your notebook. Write T if
the statement is correct and F if the statement is in correct. Write your answer in
your journal.
_____1. Stress is your body's reaction to a challenge or demand.
_____2. Stress causes the body to flood with hormones that prepare its systems to
evade or confront danger and it is commonly refer to this as the fight-or-flight
mechanism.
_____3. Some of the physical effect of stress is it slows down some normal bodily
functions, such as those that the digestive and immune systems.
_____4. Mental health is determined by a range of socioeconomic, biological and
environmental factors.
_____5. When you are happy and contented you are not stress.
_____6. Everyone has some risk of developing a mental health disorder no matter
their age, gender, social status or nationality.
_____7. In coping with stress, I need to eat a well-balanced diet eat healthy food,
go for vegetables and fruits.
_____8. There are some factors that contribute to mental health issues these are;
Social and financial status, biological factors, and lifestyle of a person.
_____9. Prayer helps me to cope with any stressful situations.
_____10. I can manage my stress by eating sugary food to boost my energy level

Assignment

Write your own inspirational quote in fighting stress and put it as cover page of your
journal.

15
 Key to Correction

Pre-Test
1. T
2. T
3. T
4. T
5. T
Post -Test
1. T
2. T
3. T
4. T
5. T
6. T
7. T
8. T
9. T
10. F

16
 References

Pangambam, S. “How to Make Stress Your Friend by Kelly McGonigal” (Transcript)

September 2014 at Health & Wellness 12:01 pm
https://singjupost.com/make-stress-friend-kelly-mcgonigal-transcript/

McGonigal, Kelly.How to make stress your friend” Ted Global 2019

https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend
?language=en
Dictionary, Retrieve from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/154543
Dictionary.Retrievehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixfactor_Model_of_Psychological_
Well-being
Design,file:///C:/Users/admin/Desktop/per%20dev%20REGION/Stress%20Bucket.pdf
Faucet. “Design.” filehttp://clipart-library.com/faucet-cliparts.html
Teacher. "Designed by macrovector / Freepik"
<a href="http://www.freepik.com">Designed by macrovector / Freepik</a>

Cover. “Design by pch.vector / Freepik" <a href="http://www.freepik.com">Designed

by pch.vector / Freepik</a>

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