Week 13: Stress!!!!!!!

This week, we learned about stress and coping. The joke at school was that we needed to learn about this topic 13 weeks ago....

There are two different types of stress - eustress (good stress) and distress (bad stress). Eustress causes someone to get the job done and work hard. It brings about positive results. Distress causes someone to freak out and overload and have a melt down. It brings about negative results and eventually causes the person to crash and burn.

...this is what my nursing class looks like half the time.

So the question was asked: Is nursing school a eustress or a distress?

There were multiple opinions expressed about the stress of nursing school. Some people said it was distress since it was just too much and there were too many assignments and they couldn't pass tests and they were starting to get ulcers from the constant stress and they were working part time and trying to raise their family and they don't know how they're going to make it. Other people said that nursing school was eustress since it was stressful enough that we are constantly studying making us better students and eventually better nurses.

When someone is under stress, there's three phases. The first phase is the alarm reaction phase, where their body responds to the stress and the fight or flight response occurs. If it lasts long enough, it moves to the second stage, the resistance stage. In this stage, the body stabilizes and tries to adjust to the stresser. The stress is still there but the body is no longer responding to it. After a while, it moves into the third phase - exhaustion. At this point, the body is so worn down that it gives up. It doesn't have any more energy and becomes ill.

Of course, this week we had a really big skills check off and 31 out of the 39 students failed. It wasn't exactly our fault since there's a ton of miscommunication between students and teachers. Thankfully, the problems are starting to be resolved and everyone passed the re-check off!

...Until next week!