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.
Read the text aloud to your tutor. Your tutor will listen and provide you with feedback.
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.
Talk with your tutor about this topic.
Use the expressions and vocabulary you learned.
Use the related resources below to learn more.
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
| 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 | ||
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?
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