Stress Management: Developing Resilience in an Evolving World

Everyone experiences stress in their lives. While it is a natural response to challenges, stress can have debilitating effects on both physical and mental health. Stress Management offers a fresh look at, and effective strategies for, managing stress and building resilience across six dimensions of wellness: physical, emotional, intellectual, social, spiritual, and environmental. This foundational text takes a holistic approach to managing stress, detailing the effects of stress on the body and outlining techniques that examine root causes and proactive responses to stressors.

Stress Management offers a range of coping strategies that will help students formulate a well-rounded plan to tackle stress from multiple angles—before it occurs, while it is occurring, and after it occurs. That model is centered on four primary pillars:

• Source management—reducing or eliminating stress at its source
• Relaxation—employing techniques for breathing, meditation, and rest to focus the mind and relax the body
• Thought management—adopting a thought process to better manage the stressor
• Prevention—avoiding stress when possible

The book also offers practical tools to help students learn how to identify their triggers, practice self-care, and leverage support, including knowing when to seek professional help when necessary. To further aid in applying the strategies to their own lives, the text includes these features:

• Case studies with discussion questions that prompt students to consider real-world scenarios and contemplate ways to solve those stressors
• Research Spotlight elements that present current issues and hot topics related to stress
• Online learning tools, delivered through HKPropel, including audio mini lectures and short interviews, self-discovery activities, chapter quizzes that are automatically graded and provide immediate feedback, and vocabulary flash cards and quizzes

Stress Management is a timely and highly practical book that offers students a deeper understanding of stress and its effects on overall wellness. It guides them in putting together a stress management plan that will help them be healthy in all aspects of their lives.

Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is included with all new print books.

Pardess Mitchell, EdD, MCHES, is a professor at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, where she also serves as department chair. She teaches a variety of courses, including health, women’s health, community health, drugs in our culture, and public health, all of which cover the topic of stress management.

Pardess Mitchell recently coauthored Drugs Across the Spectrum, Ninth Edition (Cengage, 2024) and has contributed to other textbooks, including Access to Health and Health: The Basics (both from Pearson). She received her bachelor’s degree in health education from the University of Maryland, her master's degree in health education from Southern Illinois University, and her doctorate in education, curriculum and instruction from Northern Illinois University.