Meeting Life Challenges

About this unit

Everyone faces challenges such as examinations, conflicts, illness and loss. This unit explains the nature of stress, its sources and signs, how stress affects the body and mind, and the ways people cope with it. It ends with positive health, well-being and life skills, showing how people can not only survive stress but grow through it.

Key ideas

• Stress is the pattern of responses to a stimulus event (stressor) that disturbs equilibrium and taxes coping ability.
• Eustress (healthy, motivating stress) versus distress (harmful stress).
• Lazarus's primary and secondary appraisal.
• Types of stress (physical and environmental, psychological, social) and sources (life events, hassles, traumatic events).
• Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome and the link between stress and immunity.
• Coping strategies and stress management techniques; hardiness.
• Life skills and positive health factors such as diet, exercise, optimism and social support.

How to prepare

• Memorise the three stages of GAS in order and the three Cs of hardiness.
• Learn the classification of coping styles (Endler and Parker; Lazarus and Folkman).
• Practise applying terms to everyday situations described in case-based questions.