Scottish
Disability
Team
This section is about stress and self-esteem. It is intended to help you reflect on and become more aware of your own response to stress.
Please click on one of the following links, or scroll down this page to find the relevant paragraph.
Stress is a word which is used in many different ways. It can be understood as a way of describing what can be quite complex physical, emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses to the demands made of us by our environment. This includes the demands made by people around us and by our own expectations.
Being 'stressed' is therefore a response to what is happening, or, just as importantly to what we think is happening or expect to happen. What is intensely stressful to one person may seem exciting and motivating to another.
A useful way of understanding stress is to think in terms of how we deal with challenge. Challenge is good for us and together with change is an inevitable part of life as a student. Both are essential to the process of learning. When challenge is at the right level for us we feel excited, stimulated, competent, creative and generally equipped, good enough to deal with what is being expected.
However, when the challenge feels too little or too much our experience can be very different and result in stress which if prolonged and unrelieved can commonly have the following effects.
If you think about these responses to challenge you can see that they happen when there is an imbalance between the demand made on you and your capacity, as you see it, to meet that demand. How stressed you become and how long you stay that way also depends on how you assess and make sense of the experience and how important it is to you. How you make sense of your world now has a direct relationship with your previous experiences and how others have understood you.
We get stressed when something matters and when we feel that what we care about is threatened. Feeling stressed is a sure indication that some sort of change is necessary either in the way we deal with our environment or in the way our environment deals with us.
The perception you have of your own value and competence is crucial to how you deal with challenge and your capacity to handle stress.
If you value yourself and have a realistic sense of your own abilities and competence you are likely to feel good about yourself. This will help you deal with stress in a confident way. It also means that you have had previous experience of other people valuing you and your abilities so that you have learned to do this for yourself.
If you feel worthless and incompetent you will have less confidence in your ability to deal with challenge in a productive way and have a tendency to stress. Unfortunately this probably also means that you have had experience of other people dismissing you and not recognising your abilities.
Learning always involves a period of feeling, and being aware of our incompetence. Not knowing is a necessary part of the learning process. Your capacity to tolerate not knowing and be confident enough to learn has connections with your previous experiences of learning and other peoples responses to you. This is an ongoing process in which we develop beliefs about our own value and competence in many different areas.
These beliefs about ourselves can be either enabling or disabling and most of us have a mixture of both.
Student life should be challenging and it is often stressful. However, the student who is also dyslexic can be particularly susceptible to stress. You have probably made some connections for yourself between the ideas about stress in the previous section and how these might relate to being dyslexic in Higher Education.
The challenge of meeting the demands of student life and learning may be harder in some areas because of the primary characteristics of dyslexia. (See also: Section 2: What is dyslexia?)
However, your way of responding to these very real challenges is usually based on what you have learned about yourself in other learning situations. It may be that you are reminded about the conclusions you came to about yourself as a result of situations at home, school or work which were humiliating, confusing or frightening. Where you were misunderstood or unfairly treated and as a result developed some disabling beliefs and ideas about yourself, these feelings may still operate in certain situations and effect your self-esteem and ability to deal with the challenge at hand.
For many dyslexic students learning and education is littered with difficult and painful memories.
"You feel isolated, you know what you're on about and what you're about, but I wonder how much of me is getting through to the outside world."
The ways we learned to deal with these kinds of situations is often the basis of our current learning strategies, such as:
These can be successful strategies which get you to where you want to be, however they are often accompanied by feelings of self-doubt or the sense of being in some way a fraud. This happens because these ways of coping don't help you understand the difficulties you have and therefore you continue to see yourself through the eyes of other people who have not understood or been able to support you.
"It was a feeling of relief - finding out I was dyslexic - in the sense that I wasn't mad or anything. I had been made to feel a bit stupid sometimes because it can be hard to take everything in - everything someone is saying. You are made to feel a bit stupid by others."
There is some evidence that students who were assessed and found to be dyslexic at school and whose difficulties were understood by others in that context are less prone to stress. It is also the experience of many students that understanding their difficulties is a very important step in the process of improving self-esteem and dealing with stress.
See also:
There are many ways of managing stress and most of them involve the sort of things which will help you deal with the challenges of dyslexia in Higher Education. Give yourself permission to try out some of the following ideas:
Learn more about how you can use stress to help you. Being stressed is information for you and the symptoms of your stress will often offer you clues about what you need to do, for example: if you feel overwhelmed you are probably trying to absorb too much or do too much at once. Break it down into smaller chunks so that you can regain some control.
"I write a lot more when I wouldn't have. Just even, sort of, materialising it on paper suddenly makes it real - I guess you don't forget about it then. I mean there's so many things that you can think, but then they'll be gone again and you might think about them two weeks later, but that's no good! So, I have to write things down in an organised manner, in a way to visually see what something is on a bit of paper and stuff. I think even just the way my brain thinks through things these days is different."
Stress can be devastating and will always make your dyslexic difficulties more pronounced. You can learn to manage both. If you need help with this make sure you get it (See also: Section 5: Telling other people).
Stress is not always a personal problem with personal solutions. Sometimes despite our very best efforts we can't change how we respond or make things different. This stress can be an individual response to what is a wider issue. There is a 'political' aspect to stress. Some demands are unrealistic and we need to ask the environment to change or alter its demands in some way. You can do this individually or as part of a group:
Next page - Section 9: Glossary