Personal Narrative: Chronic Stress

I fight for my health every day in ways most people do not understand I lay in bed struggling just to get up in the morning only to get faced with a new day of troubles. All I think about is the day that being a normal eighteen year old ended for me. I was responsible went to work every day, and was trying to figure out my first year of college until everything was flipped upside down.

Focus! The burden of destructive emotions constantly tarnishes my brain. It is essential that I isolate myself from the pessimistic chain of thoughts. I need to distort myself from the daily trauma and everlasting misery that I encounter. The turmoil has left me forever fatigued and has numbed my mind. My heart is grazed and broken with regret, my soul is haunted by fear and guilt along with my body diseased and rotten. The experience has been morbid and excruciating, I can’t tolerate this anymore.

That was the phrase that had been assaulting my ears for the last half an hour. Although it wasn’t odd that someone was telling me that specific phrase, this time it was different. My grandmother, whom I thought had understood my problems, had just proven to me that she actually didn’t. At the age of 12, I was heartbroken.

We also got a brother along with a mother and father. He was born with alcohol syndrome because his mother drank when she was pregnant with him. We all had our own bag of problems. I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for everything that happened to me. When I was a year old, one of my foster families didn't strap me into my car seat, and they got into a wreck. The car accident started my PTSD, but after that, everything bad that happened made my PTSD worse. My sister had mental health issues, to the point where the doctors said her mindset would remain at 15 until she's 35.

My whole life, I had always thought that people reacted the same way I did in stressful situations, and the people around me experienced emotions and thoughts the same way. The realization that I overreacted and suffered immensely because of it made me feel isolated and seemed daunting, as if I would never understand or be able to fight the feeling of hopelessness that overwhelmed my system.

When you told the class about our assignment and how apart of it was going to be not using our phones for 6 hours, I felt a rush of anxiety jolt through my body as you said those words. I know that sounds terrible that I physically could feel anxiety in my body after hearing that, but it’s true, I was anxious and honestly a little annoyed. My phone is my lifeline, basically it’s like a baby to me. I have it with me for almost twenty-four hours a day and have it right beside me when I sleep.

Everyone gets nervous every once in a while. Whether they have to present in front of a certain amount of people, or going out with someone you just met. I, on the other hand, get nervous over the smallest of daily tasks. I was in denial that I was nervous about such tasks until I had been diagnosed with anxiety about a year ago.

I have plenty of sources of stress in my life, but to narrow it down to just a few, I would have to say, my responsibility in my position at work as well as being a mother. Trying to balance both of the two can sometimes be difficult. I have a required amount of hours I have to work each week which does take away time from being a mother. I spend a lot of my time at work and not being at home as much as I would like, stresses me out. Some techniques I do use are visualization, and knowing I am not alone. Visualizing the outcome of the work I am putting in. Knowing the outcome is something that is beneficial to both he and I. I am able to provide for my family. This goes along with knowing I am not alone. I know I have people around who support

Anxiety and overwhelm took over me, as I began to ponder what college I would like to attend as the first semester of my senior year is coming to an end. As I began to look through what college best suits me, I knew that UNT was the perfect candidate for me. As I finalized the application, I knew that once I got into this college my whole world will drastically change as a new chapter in my life begins. Growing up in a Hispanic family wasn’t easy as I constantly had to modify my lifestyle to fit in with “my people”. My diverse culture and poor background are truly a blessing as I got the opportunity to obtain various scholarships.

It is deathly quiet in my apartment, just like always. Every night I come home to silence, no one to greet me ‘hello’ or a ‘how was your day’. My father left my family when I was only a baby, and my mother was a bad influence, so my aunt decided to take custody of me and my little sister. Living with my aunt was a blast, my little sister and I always had fun there. Only a couple years of living with her, my aunt and little sister passed away because of a car accident.

Stress has always been an extremely interesting and complicated part of my life. I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, which also results in anxiety and depression at times. During my teenage years, I self medicated frequently. I didn't want to put in the work and the time to figure out what was wrong with me and how to make it better. Drinking and experimenting with drugs was my way of processing any conflict that arose in my life. Over the past five years, I've been attending therapy, I've started hiking and camping and the birth of my child had since changed my enthusiasm for getting better. I've been baby carrying him since he was born. We've summited mountains, visited hidden, cascading waterfalls and hiked for miles into old growth forests to visit hot springs and lakes. My OCD will never be cured, but I truly work as hard as I possibly can now for myself and for my family to be strong and present and level-headed. I have a bag of emotional tools that I've become accustomed to using now and I am able to process and deal with stress in healthy and productive ways.

I have used minute clinic a few times with my children getting sports physicals and once with strep throat. I was impressed by the time it took to get into the office, get the physical, and get out. I only paid half of what I did with their pediatrician of seventeen years. I did not like when I took one of my daughters in there with strep throat and had to sit over two hours! I think that was a little excess vive. However, it was the weekend and we had no other option but the emergency room and I did not want to go there and pay a $300 co pay.

In conclusion to assessment two, my anxiety levels have diminished. The assessment required several thinking processes and encouraged me to face a few formidable challenges. Overall I had no difficulties attaining the answers, the challenges I faced were predominantly communicating and explaining my thinking and recalling the ‘language of mathematics’. At school mathematics was not one of my preferred or illustrious subjects until I had a teacher in year seven with a passion for teaching, this changed my whole perspective on mathematics and schooling completely. Over time as a parent, teacher aide and an active citizen I have encountered many problem solving situations in a work place environment and everyday occurrences, some daunting,

In this competitive world, stress has become unavoidable (Marrill, Read, & LeCheminant, 2009). Stress is defined as the arousal of the body and mind in response to the physical or psychological demands placed upon an individual (Marril et al., 2009). Stress stems from situations that require mental, physical and emotional adjustments (Marril et al., 2009). Literature has shown that we all experience some level of stress in our lives (Paul & Saha, 2016). Keeping this in mind, the current essay reflects upon a stressful situation which I have encountered in my life. I will begin the essay by analysing and describing the origins of my stress experience. After which, I will discuss the positive and negative outcomes of my stress. Lastly, I will

Conclusively, this biggest impact from this class was the enlightenment on how my stress is going to kill me if I do not make immediate changes to my life. Moreover, week one was a reality check for me seeing just what the effects of stress can do to an individual was beneficial in recognizing I was exhibited some of the symptoms of stress-related illnesses. Through the reading material I remember thinking stress is doing unbelievable things physically and mentally to me and I was oblivious. Thankfully, from this course I have learned and implemented some valuable techniques that have been working for me thus far. First, from the Wisdom of the Ages section, this was one of my favorite sections in the text; I learned how to utilize the decompression chamber technique (Manning, Curtis, McMillen & Attenweiler, 2011). With my horrendous history of carrying work stress home and vice versa, this technique has allowed me to use the three R concepts, which are reviewing the previous events, rehearsing for impending activities and relaxing (Manning et al., 2011). Successfully, using my drive time in my vehicle to mentally unwind and relax between has helped me tremendously. In addition, being on the verge of burnout, taking time to escape for a while has been advantageous in my life (Manning et al., 2011). Since I started taking walks at break time at work or when I feel my stress rising and when I am overwhelmed at home I have been giving myself a cooling off period to regroup and