How to Make Stress Work for You

Dr. Bonura leaves you with skills to learn from the stress in your life. Discover why it's important to feel a sense of purpose; how the frequency of positive experiences you have is more important than their intensity; and why it truly is important to appreciate the small things.

Relaxing is a mindset you carry with you. First, consider the physical and mental health benefits of taking a vacation.

Explore emerging techniques for stress management based upon up-to-date scientific understanding of how stress works. These include biofeedback to better understand and control your physiological response to stress), art therapy (for emotional healing), visualization of desired outcomes, and eye movement desensitization (to work through trauma).

Performance stress can help you perform at a higher level - if you know how to control it. First, learn how to repurpose this kind of stress as excitement.

There's a lot of misunderstanding about meditation out there. Learn how to leverage mindfulness as a tool and a practice.

Dr. Bonura introduces you to a range of alternative care strategies that have proven benefits for stress management.

Over half of Americans are stressed about their performance at work. Here, learn the importance of deliberate practice: perhaps the most effective strategy for cultivating competence at work.

Can stress be good for you? How does stress help us become healthier, happier, and more resilient? Why should we seek out mild discomfort? How does one researcher's "toughness model" explain how good stress works? Learn to use stress to strengthen your resilience.

Get a powerful toolkit for dealing with the stress of life-and-death situations while you're still cultivating a long-term approach to stress management. Exercises you'll learn including breathing strategies to stay centered, staying happy in order to regain a sense of self-control, and avoiding the dangerous cognitive distortion of catastrophizing.

Changing your perception of stressful situations isn't easy. Dr. Bonura teaches you the nuances of cognitive restructuring, including how to reframe your thoughts of self-punishment (and avoid self-punishing behaviors) and how to productively face and manage your fears (including setting aside a specific time each day to worry).

It's not just adults who are overstressed. A hectic modern lifestyle can create a negatively stressful impact on a child's psychological well-being as well.

For many people, social situations are stressful. But our social relationships can also promote physical and psychological health.

Choice and stress are fundamentally intertwined. What does learned helplessness tell us about our sense of control?

Arousal plus your value judgment equals your stress level. And what you respond to in life isn't the raw stimuli you experience (like a traffic jam) but your perceptions of these stimuli.

Suffering, pain, grief - how do we recover and rebuild in the wake of major trauma? Find out in this lecture on sorrow-related stress that explores our ever-shifting perceptions of trauma, the ways we make meaning out of trauma, and why simply acknowledging your vulnerability can be a vital aid.

Expressing anger is the best way to overcome it, right? Wrong. Learn how the cognitive neoassociation theory explains why acting out on anger actually makes you angrier and that there is no proof for the common myth of anger management via catharsis. Then, learn how to let go of anger through helpful counting exercises and detachment.

We place so much emphasis on pursuing happiness that it often makes us less likely to be happy. Here, examine the relationship between happiness and play, why gratitude lists make you more resilient to stress, and how to train your mind to pay attention to the right kind of happiness.

Start the course with a reversal of common perspective: that stress is actually correlated with having a sense of meaning in your life. Along the way, learn a more holistic definition of stress, explore the idea of a stress continuum, and learn the difference between major traumas and everyday irritants.