National Stress Awareness Day

National Stress Awareness Day
5th November
(first Wednesday of November)

😥😰Stress vs. learning & memory🧠

Stress is a normal reaction to any situation that requires our response.
Mild stress improves your performance. Prolonged stress makes learning difficult or nearly impossible!
The symptoms of stress include:

💡 Physical symptoms: higher blood pressure, pain, digestion problems, difficulty falling asleep or waking up.
💡 Emotional symptoms
💡 Behavioural changes.

If a stress reaction is overwhelming and long-term, its consequences may lead to health problems, lower quality of life, problems at work, problems in all sorts of relationships (e.g. irritability), inability to focus on daily activities - being easily distracted, forgetfulness, using maladaptive ways of coping with problems (such as focusing on emotions and negative thoughts too much, not focusing on the task and solutions). 
Prolonged stress causes and/or underlies a variety of conditions, such as depression, anxiety, psychosomatic disorders, skin disorders (stress makes their symptoms more severe), impaired immunity (catching infections more easily due to compromised immune system).
The consequences of prolonged stress make learning (a foreign language) more difficult. Impaired memory (and generally, impaired brain function) makes memorizing information much harder than when we are not working/learning under pressure. People have difficulties focusing attention, processing information, finding motivation to learn. Afterall, it's tough to learn when you experience so many negative effects of stress.
On the 5th November, spend some time researching stress to understand how it influences your life and to find ways of relieving it. Here are a few links to check out:

➡ National Stress Awareness Day
➡ American Psychological Association
➡ National Stress Awareness Day

You may also use #StressAwarenessDay to post/find some ideas for observing the Stress Awareness Day.
To combat stress and observe the Day, why don’t you try out Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Autogenic Training, Mindfulness, or other relaxation techniques.
As you can see, stress affects our bodies & minds in various ways so start dealing with it now!


Photo by Gerd Altmann, Kei via Pixabay.