Devise a questionnaire for your students that determines their responses to stress. First discuss the types of situations most people find stressful. Stressful situations include marriage, personal relationships, divorce, birth of a child, exams, final exam week, performance in a sport, moving, a new job, a new school, learning a new skill, travel, illness, relationships with family, and so forth. The questionnaire might go something like this:
Stress Questionnaire
Circle your responses to the following questions regarding your responses to stress.
Sleeping Habits
When you are under stress, do you:
Is your sleep:
Eating Habits
When you are under stress, do you:
Under stress, I tend to:
Exercise Routine
When you are under stress, do you:
Frequency of Illness
During or after you are under stress, are you:
Note of Explanation: You will probably find that when your students are under stress, they definitely sleep less, and when they do sleep, it's deep and dreamless. They may also eat more, but less nutritiously. They tend to snack on junk food during long hours of study just to keep awake rather than stopping for nutritious meals. Exercise ceases unless a person dashes out for a quick run around the block. And last, the frequency of illness increases.
Stress can be due to a wide variety of psychological and physical factors, and what is stressful to one person is not necessarily stressful to the next. When under stress, the body releases more of a hormone called cortisol, which helps mobilize energy sources within the body. But, for reasons scientists have yet to determine, increased cortisol is also associated with a decrease in the functioning of the immune system. Thus, a person who is under stress often has a lowered resistance to infectious diseases.
Excessive cortisol, from excess stress, is also associated with ulcers, high blood pressure, and atherosclerosis.
Ask your students to think of ways they can reduce levels of stress. (Studying ahead of time is an obvious one.) Discussing what causes stress is one way to ameliorate stress. Stress can be reduced by curbing some of the activities determined by the questionnaire. In other words, get plenty of sleep, eat well, and exercise.
Hold a discussion with your students regarding Lyme disease. Show them photographs of the characteristic red halo that surrounds a tick bite when Lyme disease has been transmitted. Discuss methods to help avoid tick bites in the outdoors. Lyme disease is an extremely important, debilitating disease that has been overshadowed by the advent of AIDS, which occurred at about the same time.
Lyme disease is so named because it was first observed in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975. A bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, is carried normally by deer and field mice. This bacterium can be picked up by the deer tick and transferred to other hosts, such as humans. The first symptom is an expanding, ring-shaped red rash around the site of the tick bite. Flu-like symptoms are noticed, along with headache, fever, and chills. Antibiotic therapy is very effective if given at this point, but sometimes the red ring goes unnoticed if it is located on a person's back or in their hair.
Several weeks or even months after the first symptoms have subsided, the second, and much more serious stage of Lyme disease sets in. Inflammation of the heart, neurological disorders, and arthritis can occur. Organ damage can also take place when the immune system attacks the bacterium.
The third stage of Lyme disease can set in years later. Changes in behavior are noticed, and the myelin covering of neurons degenerates. Symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's disease occur.
At present, this disease predominates in the northeastern United States, but it can also be found in many other states. A number of precautions can be taken to avoid getting bitten by ticks when spending time outside. First, and most important, remove any ticks from your skin as quickly as possible. Ticks must be attached to your body for 24 hours for the bacterium to be transferred to you. If you remove a tick before that time, you should not contract Lyme disease. Wear long pants in the woods, and tuck them into your socks. Wear a hat. Use tick repellant, and spray it on your clothing as well. People sensitive to tick repellant sometimes do well to wear tick-repelling dog collars around their ankles over their pants. Last, after walking in the woods, take a shower and scrub well, paying special attention to your hair. With Lyme disease, as with many other diseases, prevention is best.