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COURSE

Coping With Stress: Practical Tools For Resilience & Well-Being

With Beth Kurland, Ph.D.

Many of us struggle with chronic stress and feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day challenges we face in our lives. This course will offer you practical tools to help cope with stress and cultivate greater well-being in your daily life. You will learn three specific tools that you can carry with you into your day that take only a few minutes, yet can have a big impact on reducing stress and enhancing your well-being. These evidence-based strategies are drawn from the research in the areas of mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral psychology, and positive psychology. DISCLAIMER: Please note that this class, the accompanying meditations, and any responses to questions in the classroom are strictly for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical or psychological diagnosis, intervention or treatment of any kind. If you are in need of such treatment, please seek the advice of your doctor or a licensed mental health professional. What people get out of this class will vary from person to person and there are no guarantees of what your personal experience will be. In using these recordings you understand that Beth Kurland does not have a professional relationship with you and you agree that Beth Kurland will not be liable or otherwise responsible for any decisions or actions taken due to your use of the information presented.

Learn practical, evidence-based tools to cope with stress and enhance your well-being.

10 Days

3.8k students

4.8 stars

12 min / day

English

About this course

Mindful Awareness

Inner Critic Reframing Practice

Gratitude Reflection

Meet your Teacher

Beth Kurland, Ph.D.

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Norwood, MA, USA

Beth Kurland, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, TedX speaker, and author of four award winning books: "Dancing on The Tightrope: Transcending the Habits of Your Mind and Awakening to Your Fullest Life"; "The Transformative Power of Ten Minutes: An Eight Week Guide to Reducing Stress and Cultivating Well-Being"; and "Gifts of the Rain Puddle: Poems, Meditations and Reflections for the Mindful Soul" and "You Don't Have to Change to Change Everything: Six Ways to Shift Your Vantage Point, Stop Striving For Happy and Find True Well-Being." Beth is passionate about teaching mindfulness informed practices and mind-body strategies to help people cultivate whole person health and well-being, as she has experienced firsthand the power of these practices in her own life and with her patients. She has been providing evidence-based clinical care to people across the lifespan for over 30 years. Through her meditations, courses, books and blogs, she offers others the opportunity to learn practical tools to move from stress to greater joy and ease, and to experience greater well-being.

View Profile

10 Days

3.8k students

4.8 stars

12 min / day

English

Lesson 1

An Introduction To Becoming "Stress Smart"

Lesson 1 provides a framework for this course and begins with a very short meditation and then, an invitation to observe how stress shows up in your life. We begin to explore the difference between short-term versus chronic stress. I offer a teaser into the three tools that you will be learning to use in your daily life, and I share why this topic of stress is near and dear to my heart. We end with another very short meditation that you can use anytime to help interrupt the stress response.

Lesson 2

Getting To Know Your Stress Response

Lesson 2 begins by distinguishing between stressors in your life and your stress response. We explore the physiology of the stress response and learn about why stress can be like a “false alarm.” By understanding what is happening in one’s body, this empowers you to have more choices available to you. We discuss the four components of the stress response, the importance of resetting, and the concept of learning how to listen to the “false alarm” in a helpful way.

Lesson 3

Using Your Flashlight To Alter Your Stress Response

In lesson 3 we learn how we are wired to operate on “automatic pilot” and how to use the flashlight to bring mindful awareness to our automatic, habitual patterns of stress. This awareness, so simple, yet not so easy, creates a choice for us to respond in new ways. We end with a discussion about how this simple tool can help rewire our brains to react to stress differently.

Lesson 4

Using The Flashlight (Part Two)

In lesson 4 we delve more deeply into how we can use the flashlight in our ordinary day to interrupt our stress response and to pay attention to what is most needed in the moment. We learn about how a mindful pause can have important, positive physiological consequences, and why it can be an effective antidote to chronic stress.

Lesson 5

Using Formal Practice & The 3-Minute Mindful Pause To Reset

In this lesson, we explore how you can bring informal moments of mindfulness practice into your day and why this can be so beneficial. We also explore how to hit the reset button through the use of the 3-Minute Mindful Pause. I invite you to come up with a plan for how you might begin to use both of these practices in your daily life.

Lesson 6

Working With The "Diet Of Thoughts" (Part One)

This lesson offers an introduction to using the tool of “the diet”. We discuss the power of our thoughts and how they play a key role in our experience of stress. We learn how we can co-create our stress, and how mental rehearsals and mental reruns contribute to stress. We end with a short thought experiment.

Lesson 7

The Diet Of Thoughts (Part Two)

We begin this lesson with another short thought experiment which many people find enlightening. We explore unhelpful thought patterns and common thought traps that contribute to stress. You will learn about strategies to begin to feed yourself a healthier diet of thoughts that can have a positive impact on your experience of stress.

Lesson 8

The Velcro Problem & The Magnifying Glass

In lesson 8 we learn about how the “magnifying glass” is an essential tool for cultivating positive experiences, and why our primitive brains make this difficult to do. We learn some simple ways to turn on the positivity circuitry in our brain, and I share some stories that will illustrate the Velcro problem and the Magnifying Glass in action.

Lesson 9

Using The Magnifying Glass (Part Two)

In this lesson we focus on the practical application of the “magnifying glass”. We learn how to “install” positive experiences as we go through our day. I offer a short experiential exercise to practice this. You are invited to reflect on how you might use this tool in your daily life. We end with a summary of the three tools learned in this course.

Lesson 10

Two Exercises To Become Stress Smart

This final lesson involves two meditations to help practice and integrate the strategies taught in this course. The first meditation is approximately 12 minutes long and will help you practice using all three tools in a visualization and mental rehearsal exercise. The second meditation is under three minutes and offers a short practice that you can use throughout the day to help interrupt the stress response.