COUNSELLING CONNECTIONS

Rethinking Stress

Are you - or your young people - stressed about being stressed? It turns out stress isn’t always a bad thing. It can also be our ally. 

When most of us think about stress, the association is that it’s bad and therefore needs to be eliminated. But, have you ever noticed that you perform better when you are a tad nervous? The stress response is a hard-wired biological mechanism designed to get you into action.

It turns out that you need a certain amount of stress to perform, whether that performance involves writing an email, running a race, sitting an exam or navigating through traffic. In psychology, this link between arousal (stress) and performance is known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

Optimising Stress

“The ultimate goal of those studying stress is not to ‘cure’ us of it, but to optimise it.” – Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University neurobiologist (2015)

The relationship between stress and performance was described more than a century ago by psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). They discovered that mild electrical shocks (stressors) could motivate rats to complete a maze, but that when the intensity of the shocks was increased, the rats would move about randomly trying to escape. What this means is that increased arousal can improve performance, but only up to a certain point. When arousal becomes excessive, performance diminishes.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law resembles an inverted U (Pietrangelo, 2020; Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). When stress is low, we feel tired, bored and unmotivated. Performance is, not surprisingly, weak. As stress increases, performance improves and peaks as inactivity gives way to energy, alertness and motivation. As arousal increases further, performance becomes impaired as we move into fatigue, overload and anxiety. Click here to read the full article.

HOPE is the universal antidote for Stress.

Two quick articles you might like to read to help your young person with better coping skills for stress:

Eating Disorders – its not a "girl thing"

Eating disorders are, sadly, more frequent than reported, and the incidence among boys and young men is increasing alarmingly. Once upon a time eating disorders, and these range more widely than anorexia, were considered aspects of females’ and elite sportspeople’s concerns. Today, there are growing numbers of boys and young men who suffer from Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder and Other Specified Feeding and Eating Disorders (OSFED) including Disordered Eating. The Butterfly organisation has some excellent information and resources for parents on eating disorders and body image concerns of young people. The different eating disorders are explained HERE.

As an aside, I am an accredited member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Eating Disorders (ANZAED). I undertook this additional study and professional supervision over the last couple of years due to my work here at Saints showing me that a couple of our boys each year presented with one or more eating disorders.

As part of ANZAED I strongly recommend the ABC’s Four Corners episode Fading Away as it has generated much discussion and highlighted the real concerns regarding incidence rates and treatment for eating disorders in Australia. I believe that it is important to reinforce the key messages from that story Fading Away; that hope is essential, and recovery is always possible.

ANZAED calls on the Australian Government to:

1. Review the current funding available for specialist eating disorder services across the stepped-care model 
2. Invest in improving accessibility and treatment options for all those living with eating disorders and their families
3. Support the implementation of ANZAED Clinical Practice Standards and ANZAED Training Standards

Seeking treatment can be difficult, it is therefore essential, support is provided by appropriately credentialed eating disorder clinicians. For more information, or to find a credentialed eating disorder clinician, visit connect·ed.

Marijke Keller mkeller@cns.catholic.edu.au   07 40529136

Br Roger  brroger@cns.catholic.edu.au   07 40529135