URI provides many outlets for students to help manage stress. PHOTO CREDIT: Cedars-Sinai.org
The University of Rhode Island held a virtual event on March 31 titled “A Holistic Approach to Stress” about different ways to understand and tackle stress using different techniques.
Thupten Tendhar, the director of the URI International Nonviolence Summer Institute, opened up the discussion and introduced the event’s speaker, Tenzin Namdul.
Namdul is a Tibetan medical doctor and medical anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersection of biology and social-cultural factors in the study of aging and end-of-life care.
Namdul started his talk with a brief description of different things that could cause stress, like physical or mental problems, danger, challenges, deadlines, uncertainty, insecurity, scarcity, threat, loss and change. He also explained the different reactions people have to stress.
“The primitive way of responding or reacting to stress at the unconscious level is fight or flight response,” Namdul said.
He said that people either thrive or fail with stress and used an academic setting as an example. When students are stressed about an assignment, he said the sympathetic nervous system releases adrenaline that either pushes the student to either do well or struggle with their work.
Namdul also mentioned the concept of eustress, proposed by an endocrinologist, Hans Selye, who studied the idea of beneficial stress in the 1970s. Eustress is the “fight” in Namdul’s analogy, the opposite of stress in that it is beneficial for the person experiencing it.
Too much stress, however, even good stress, could cause different body parts like our brain or digestive system to shut down, according to Namdul.
“The problem is the fight and flight response that we saw earlier is that if we keep on producing that same level of stress, cortisone in our system, it might not be beneficial to our body,” Namdul said. “What it does is certain parts of our body have to compromise its functions.”
Namdul stressed the importance of understanding different cultures’ ideas and remedies involving stress. For part of his dissertation work, Namdul went to Southern India and did an end-of-life study among Tibetan refugees where he learned about what was important in their ways of preventing stress.
“One of the things that came out is really the importance of protecting one’s consciousness or one’s mind,” Namdul said. “Both at the individual and at the collective level.”
Namdul previously mentioned the physical impacts stress could have on someone relating to brain and digestive system problems but he also talked about mental and social impacts on relationships.
“The way we react to stress, if I react to a particular deadline with the notion of being angry, I get angry toward myself and toward people who are close to me could be my partner, my spouse, my friends, my family members and it can really cause a problem,” Namdul said.
Namdul asked members of the audience how they deal with stress and Paul Bueno de Mesquita, professor emeritus of URI’s department of psychology, brought up the idea of fight or flight again.
“I think with things that are negative influences and stressors in our life it is a good thing for us to remove ourselves from situations,” Bueno de Mesquita said. “We are taking flight. We are escaping and not in a bad way, but in a positive, removing myself from things that are stressful and toxic and negative.”
Tendhar also mentioned his personal practices for dealing with stress by focusing on the brighter side.
“You should not just focus on, you know, the fear or difficulties or that lack of things we are experiencing,” Tendhar said. “But on the opposite side, what we do have and this leads to gratitude.”