Description
Let’s face it; stress sucks, literally. It’s a vampirous emotion that is great at making things worse. It’s like
anxiety comes home to roost, but you are not entirely sure why. People often feel stress when deadlines
come about, or when they think they should be doing something but have trouble doing so. According to
the Stress Management Society, “stress is a physical response. When stressed, the body things it is under
attack and switches to ‘fight or flight’ mode, releasing a complex mix of hormones and chemicals such as
adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine to prepare the body for physical action.” This chain of internal
events causes your heart to pound and breath to quicken.
While this chain of events may have been well warranted in dangerous situations, such as someone
running into the road while you are driving, or you hear a loud and sudden noise that startles you, a
majority of people endure the stress response during events that aren’t nearly as dangerous. You may
have a project that is due, or you may have been given a task that seems insurmountable; a deadline
arrives, and you suddenly get that feeling. Your heart starts beating faster, and tunnel vision comes in and
it’s difficult to get your train of thought moving in a positive direction. This is when your body starts
kicking up hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol and you enter the “fight or flight” mode.
While this adaptation may have been applicable for our human ancestors, it has not place within our daily
life, especially within the world of IT. With constant deadlines and whole host of tasks to be addressed
going along at once, the fact that we get stressed out is no surprise. The biggest issue about that this
constant low level of stress is that it doesn’t go away. While human ancestors were able to recover from
the stressful event once it has passed, we are not as lucky; there is a constant flow of stressful events and
we cannot truly get out of the stressful pattern. “The long-term activation of the stress-response system —
and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones — can disrupt almost all your
body's processes. This puts you at increased risk of numerous health problems, including anxiety,
depression, and digestive problems.”
This thirty-minute session will dive deeper into the creation of stress and how it is managed. You will be
able to use techniques that both prevent stress and reduce it once experienced. While this discussion
mostly applies to IT Professionals, everyone is able to participate as the knowledge is useful for
everybody.
I am completing my Master’s degree in Health Informatics and have both a strong IT and Health-related
background. I’ve worked with stress and anxiety and have developed a certain method of handling the
stress and mitigating its effects. Everyone experiences stress at some point, so why not learn how to deal
with it first hand?
Ben Henig
Student @ University of Michigan School of InformationSecond-year Master's Candidate for Health Informatics at the University of Michigan