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Lecture Notes

Because we know that stress can play such a big role in the health and wellness of our being, we want to be able to use different approaches to manage the stress in our daily lives, and so we're going to talk about three here that are included in your textbook. And these are kind of general approaches to stress management, but it's important to note that the goal of all three of these is to keep yourself at a healthy level of stimulation or stress, and so we want to have some stress—we're not trying to eliminate stress from our lives altogether—but the first of these approaches is called environmental engineering. Here we're really talking about controlling your stressors by avoiding them or, stating another way, changing your environment in ways that eliminate that stressor. So, for example, if you're stressed about your monthly finances and you feel that you're overspending, you could create a budget and give yourself a spending allowance each month to control that overspending, and ultimately to avoid the stress of not knowing whether you're overspending or not. So that's one example of changing your environment in order to avoid or eliminate that stressor.