Educational Survival Skills

Educational Survival Skills

Objectives

  • Discuss the causes and symptoms of stress.
  • Explain behaviors and thoughts that increase the fight-or-flight response.
  • Analyze interventions that can be used to reduce or buffer stressors.
  • Describe several survival techniques to reduce stress.
  • Enumerate steps to manage time through organization, setting limits, and self-evaluation.
  • Explain the benefit of uplifts in relation to hassles.
  • Identify foods that can be eaten to supply the body nutritionally with additional vitamin C, vitamin B complex, and magnesium.
  • Foster study techniques to enhance retention and to build information into complex concepts.
  • List the steps for successful test-taking.

Stress

  • Produced by life events that place a perceived demand on daily activities.
  • Causes emotional and biologic changes in the body.
  • A prolonged state of constant alert over time can result in serious physical or emotional illness.

Fight-or-Flight Response

  • Physiologic reaction to a real or imagined threat, arising from emotions of both fear and anger.
  • Physiologic responses include:
    • Increased metabolism and fats/sugars.
    • Release of hormones.
    • Increased blood flow and cardiac output.
    • Stimulated central nervous system.

Stress and Education

  • Education, such as radiologic sciences, offers a unique and completely new set of challenges.
  • Stressful events may come from many sources.

Strategies to Deal with Stress

  • Self-image is important.
  • Understand the environment around you that is adding to your stress.
  • Adopt a strategy of positive thoughts and emotions.
  • Learn to politely say “no” to those who want to place extraordinary demands on you.

Signs of Stress

  • Many signs of stress are physiologic.
  • Family and friends can often sense your stress.
  • Emotions may be noticeably altered.
  • Stressors vary from person to person.

Stressors

  • A stressor is any event that adds stress to your life.
  • Stressors are unique to the individual.
  • Stressors are best dealt with by using strategies to “buffer” the stress event.
  • Recognize that many stressors are outside of your control.

Strategies to Deal with Stressors

  • Know the difference between a stressor and a “hassle.”
  • Recognize your stressors.
  • Plan positive activities (uplifts) to balance the effects of hassles and stressors.
    • Develop interventions.
  • Avoid conversations that show out-of-control language and replace them with in-control language.
  • Take responsibility for yourself.
  • Understand the “worry” process, and that all stress can never be eliminated completely.

Worry Process

  • Recognize when the worry process is in your vocabulary and thought processes.
  • 95% of things you worry about never turn out the way you might expect them to.
    • Worry “robs” energy from the individual.
  • Many times, we worry about things out of our sphere of control.
  • Procrastination is a “worry contributor.”

Worry Survival Techniques

  • Avoid procrastination.
  • Take control of your “worry process.”
  • Identify those events over which you have some degree of control, and exercise it accordingly.
  • Understand that most worrisome events never turn out as you thought they would.
  • Don’t build “worry mountains.”

Time as a Stressor

  • We have little or no control over the amount of time available.
  • Practice time management.
  • Avoid indecisiveness when making choices.
  • Set realistic completion timelines.
  • Practice self-management.
    • Today’s social networking “gadgets” can be time thieves.

Self-Management

  • Know yourself.
  • Prioritize your responsibilities.
  • Prioritize your activities.
  • Plan for self-care.

Stress Buffers

  • Stress buffers can help reduce the harmful effects of stress.
  • Examples:
    • Exercise
    • Proper nutrition
    • Introspective visualization and meditation

Study Skills

  • Review the material soon after it is introduced.
  • Use as many senses as possible.
  • Plan a regular schedule of study.
  • Study in a group.
  • Attitude helps remembering.
    • Maintain a positive attitude.

Test-Taking Tips

  • Avoid last-minute cramming for exams.
  • Wear bright, colorful clothes the day of exams.
  • Avoid a heavy, high-carbohydrate meal before exams.
  • Get a good night’s sleep the night before an exam.
  • Arrive for a test early to prepare mentally.
  • Scan the entire test to develop a test strategy.
  • Review the test carefully and make corrections after additional thought.
  • After the test is done, put it behind you!