F2F Class Notes (Andy) [R]

Tell me about time that you felt trepidation.

Pronunciation and made sentences

• I made my dance performance debut when I was seven years old.
• Yao Ming made his debut for the Shanghai Sharks in 1997.
• Apple debuted the first iPhone in 2007

Discussion: Stress Management

• What does stress mean?
• What does management mean?
• What does stress management mean?

1. What do you think of when you hear the word “stress”?
2. What stresses you out?
3. What do you do to relieve stress?
4. Who stresses you out the most?
5. Is life becoming more or less stressful?
6. How dangerous do you think stress is?
7. What is the best stress reliever for you?
8. Is learning English stressful? Why or why not?
9. Can stress be a positive thing?
10. Have you ever snapped after being under a lot of stress?

Expressions

• “time is not our friend”
• “time waits for no man”

Vocabulary

therapeutic.

• having a good effect on the body or mind; contributing to a sense of well-being:
  • a therapeutic silence.
  • For me, cleaning my home is very therapeutic

If you aren’t already paralyzed with stress from reading the financial news, here’s a sure way to achieve that grim state: read a medical-journal article that examines what stress can do to your brain. Stress, you’ll learn, is crippling your neurons so that, a few years or decades from now, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will have an easy time destroying what’s left. That’s assuming you haven’t already died by then of some other stress-related ailment such as heart disease. As we enter what is sure to be a long period of uncertainty—a gantlet of lost jobs, dwindling assets, home foreclosures and two continuing wars—the downside of stress is certainly worth exploring. But what about the upside? It’s not something we hear much about.

In the past several years, a lot of us have convinced ourselves that stress is unequivocally negative for everyone, all the time. We’ve blamed stress for a wide variety of problems, from slight memory lapses to full-on dementia—and that’s just in the brain. We’ve even come up with a derisive nickname for people who voluntarily plunge into stressful situations: they’re “adrenaline junkies.”

Sure, stress can be bad for you, especially if you react to it with anger or depression or by downing five glasses of Scotch. But what’s often overlooked is a common-sense counterpoint: in some circumstances, it can be good for you, too. It’s right there in basic- psychology textbooks. As Spencer Rathus puts it in “Psychology: Concepts and Connections,” “some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied.” Yet that’s not the theme that’s been coming out of science for the past few years. “The public has gotten such a uniform message that stress is always harmful,” says Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.