How to Make Stress Your Friend

How to Make Stress Your Friend

Look at the picture

Read the questions

Think about the topic

Pre-Listening

What are some words that come to mind when you think about stress?

For example:  heart rate, anxiety, early death

What do you think (choose one):

Stress is . . .

_______a positive thing;

_______a negative thing;

_______it depends.

Hearing Content

This is a lecture from TED talks.  You may wish to listen to it at another time, so that you can spend time discussing the Talk with your tutor.  The transcript is linked below, so that you can have something to read and talk about immediately.

Read the text aloud to your tutor. Your tutor will listen and provide you with feedback.

Talk with your tutor about this topic.

Use the expressions and vocabulary you learned.

Use the related resources below to learn more.

Read and Pronounce

Read aloud this excerpt from the lecture to your tutor.  He / She will listen and correct your pronunciation.

“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.”

For full transcript, click here.

Source:  TED Talks

Speaker:  Kelly McGonigal

Talk About It

Discuss the following with your tutor or partner:

What is the speaker, Kelly McGonigal’s, response to the question?

How did she find out her information?

What is the “social stress test”?

Why is social stress important?

What is oxytocin, and how does it help you physically, mentally, socially, emotionally? What “lesson” does the speaker want us to learn from this talk?

Application:  How will you use this information in your own life?

Vocab

Anti-inflammatory

Cardiovascular

Compassionate

Confession

Constrict

Crave

Cuddle

Demonize(-ing)

Demoralized

Empathy

Energized

Enhance(d)

Harass

Hormone

Hype

Mechanism

Neuro-

Nudge(-ing)

Oxytocin

Pituitary gland

Pound(ing)

Prematurely

Prime

Regenerate

Resilience

Snort

Unbeknownst

Vessel(s)

Breaking out into a sweat

Freak (s) out

More harm than good

Rise to (the) challenge