Health and Stress in Society.

I think the topic and experience of stress is so common to us all and so very important to understand how it impacts us individually, as communities, and as a society. And most importantly, how we can reduce and manage the impact of stress on our health and well being.

The blog will look at stress through two lenses.

The first lens,is at the individual level - what stress does to our bodies and health and what we can do as individuals to reduce and manage our stress personally.

The second lens,is at the community & societal level - the impact of our environment, social and political structures on stress and how structural issues impact people, communities, and how society is organized or could be organized to increase stress or alternately, how to prevent or reduce the stress we experience.

If I start out with this quote from Victor Frankle, what do you think?

"In between the stimulus and the response, there is a space, and in that space lies freedom" 

• What does this mean to you?
• Do you know that space of freedom? Is it familiar to you?
• How do you access it?
• Do you have to "tune out" to have that freedom?

When it comes to stress, you may have heard it said that although we can not control what may happen to us, or the circumstances we are living in that cause stress……we can control our own individual response to it (that stress).

And on a individual level the class is about gaining the skills and resources to do just that - find the freedom in that space between the stimulus (what stresses us - also called the stressor) and our response to that stress in order to minimize its negative impact on our health and well being.

And the class is also about gaining the critical thinking skills to analyze the larger structural barriers and inequities in society that underlie the causes of much of our stress and resulting chronic disease. And with these skills we can develop and create stress reduction interventions that work on reducing these structural barriers and issues thus reducing stress back down on the individual level.

The Ecological Model is a way of looking at an issue from these multiple levels.

A little preview of whats to come - actually working together to create social connection in support of positive social change has the potential to reduce individual stress as well as reduce the structural stressors that are actually the main causes of stress in the first place…….. WOW - right?


I wanted to start with with this introduction to Mindfulness and with instructions for practicing Mindfulness so you can get started right away.

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One thing is for sure - if you don't practice stress reduction it does not work to reduce your stress. And it does take practice, like learning how to shoot hoops, drive a car, cook a meal, or write a paper for school.