How to Make Stress Your Friend

Pre-Listening

What are some words that come to mind when you think about stress?

For example:  heart rate, anxiety, early death

What do you think (choose one):

Stress is . . .

_______a positive thing;

_______a negative thing;

_______it depends.

 

Hearing Content

This is a lecture from TED talks.  You may wish to listen to it at another time, so that you can spend time discussing the Talk with your tutor.  The transcript is linked below, so that you can have something to read and talk about immediately.

Read the text aloud to your tutor. Your tutor will listen and provide you with feedback.

Read and Pronounce

Read aloud this excerpt from the lecture to your tutor.  He / She will listen and correct your pronunciation.

“People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.

Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.”

For full transcript, click here.

Source:  TED Talks

Speaker:  Kelly McGonigal

 

Talk with your tutor about this topic.

Use the expressions and vocabulary you learned.

Use the related resources below to learn more.

Talk about It

Discuss the following with your tutor or partner:

What is the speaker, Kelly McGonigal’s, response to the question?

How did she find out her information?

What is the “social stress test”?

Why is social stress important?

What is oxytocin, and how does it help you physically, mentally, socially, emotionally?

What “lesson” does the speaker want us to learn from this talk?

Application:  How will you use this information in your own life?

 
Anti-inflammatory  
Cardiovascular  
Compassionate  
Confession  
Constrict    
Crave    
Cuddle    
Demonize(-ing)  
Demoralized  
Empathy    
Energized  
Enhance(d)  
Harass    
Hormone    
Hype    
Mechanism  
Neuro-    
Nudge(-ing)  
Oxytocin    
Pituitary gland  
Pound(ing)  
Prematurely  
Prime    
Regenerate  
Resilience  
Snort    
Unbeknownst  
Vessel(s)    
     

Expressions

Breaking out into a sweat
Freak (s) out  
More harm than good
Rise to (the) challenge

 

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