Dealing with stress: A web-based educational series
What exactly is stress and how is it affecting you? What can you do to cope with stress and keep it at a manageable level? If you have ever asked yourself these questions, this free web-based educational series is for you.
About the workshops
This Dealing with stress series will help you:
- Understand what stress is.
- Identify areas of stress in your life and which ones are important for you to change.
- Build skills and discover tools to manage the physical, emotional, and attitudinal effects of stress.
- Develop skills to change what you do, how you think, and how you face conflict so that you have less stress in your life.
Start with the first workshop today and complete the others on your schedule. Each workshop will take 15-25 minutes to complete and builds on the concepts addressed in the previous ones.
The workshops are easy to use. Each workshop features:
- An overview of the workshop.
- Descriptions of the core concepts.
- Examples that pertain to agricultural life.
- Questionnaires and worksheets you can use to apply concepts and skills.
There are brief instructions at the beginning of each workshop for navigating through the narrated presentation. Most people find it self-explanatory once they begin.
Development of this series
While tailored to those in agriculture, the information contained in these workshops are applicable to anyone who feels stress on a regular basis.
This series was developed by the Minnesota Sowing the Seeds of Hope Coalition and various partners, including the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Family Development. The principle author of this series is Dr. Katherine (Kay) M. Slama with Slama Consulting.
Partners for this project include the following:
Sowing the Seeds of Hope Coalition — Provides behavioral health services to uninsured, underinsured, and other at-risk farm and ranch families and agricultural workers. The regional program includes seven states: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The Minnesota coalition was involved in development of this series.
University of Minnesota Extension — Connects community needs with University of Minnesota resources on a statewide, regional, and local level. Provides educational opportunities on family, youth, agriculture, garden, environment, and community-related issues.
AgriWellness — Works to address the behavioral health care needs of agricultural populations and communities and to provide education about these needs.
Slama Consulting — Contact Kay Slama — Consults organizations and individuals related to rural people and behavioral health. Dr. Slama is past president of the Minnesota Rural Health Association, has served in a number of other positions, and has published articles on making service appropriate for rural people.
Office of Rural Health & Primary Care — Minnesota Department of Health — Promotes access to quality health care for rural and underserved urban Minnesotans. Works as partners with communities, providers, policymakers and other organizations to develop innovative approaches and tailor tools and resources to diverse populations.
Crisis Connection — Call 1-866-379-6363 from Minnesota area codes — Provides 24-hour crisis counseling by telephone 365 days per year to anyone calling from a Minnesota area code. The call center has been trained to answer questions that specifically relate to this training and stress in general.
This series is funded in part by the Otto Bremer Foundation, which assists people in achieving full economic, civic and social participation in and for the betterment of their communities.
In the summer of 2008, the Minnesota Sowing the Seeds of Hope Coalition met to discuss which services rural Minnesotans could use most. Their past work and research indicated that rural Minnesotans:
- Are strong individuals with the ability to think/act according to where they live.
- Have developed a lot of ways to deal with problems and thrive.
- Experience a lot of day-to-day and long-term stress in their lives.
- Are self-reliant and often reluctant to let anyone see them using social services.
The coalition determined that there is a need to offer rural Minnesotans information about stress, tailored specifically for their experiences in agriculture. They furthermore decided that this information would be best received via the internet, in a format that could be completed on a person's own time.
Partial funding of this project was secured through the Otto Bremer Foundation.
Dr. Katherine (Kay) M. Slama (Slama Consulting), a clinical psychologist and therapist who has worked with rural people in Minnesota and other states on behavioral health issues, was asked to develop content to be used for a web-based workshop series on stress. AgriWellness, Inc. and the Office of Rural Health & Primary Care (Minnesota Department of Health) in addition to staff from the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Family Development (Karen Shirer, Associate Dean, and Minnell Tralle, Extension Educator) were consulted during the development of the content.
In the summer of 2009, staff at the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Family Development were asked to aid in the development of the workshop series. They worked with Dr. Slama to turn the content into web-based workshops which would then be hosted on the University of Minnesota website. The first workshop became available August 2009.
Staff at Crisis Connection, a 24/7 crisis line for Minnesotans, were trained to assist participants with the workshops as needed. They are able to provide general information and resources on stress as well as answer basic technical questions related to the workshop software/functionality.
This website and related educational resources are meant for educational purposes, not as a substitute for clinical diagnosis and/or treatment.
Crisis Connection — Crisis counseling hotline for anyone calling from a Minnesota area code. Call a counselor at 1-866-379-6363; services are free, confidential, and immediately accessible.