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Stress, Health, and Human Flourishing

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For many students, the transition to college (or back to college) has not been easy. College is a happy time, but it presents challenges. Debt piles up. Deadlines loom. New relationships form, and sometimes fail. Family demands continue. Big exams or class presentations make you tense. Stuck in traffic, late to class or work, your mood may turn sour. It’s enough to give you a headache or disrupt your sleep. No wonder 85 percent of college students have reported occasional or frequent stress during the past three months (AP, 2009).

Stress often strikes without warning. Imagine being 21-year-old Ben Carpenter on the world’s wildest and fastest wheelchair ride. As he crossed an intersection on a sunny summer afternoon in 2007, the light changed. A large truck, whose driver didn’t see him, started moving into the intersection. As they bumped, Ben’s wheelchair turned to face forward, and its handles got stuck in the truck’s grille. Off they went, the driver unable to hear Ben’s cries for help.

As they sped down the highway about an hour from my [DM’s] home, passing motorists caught the bizarre sight of a truck pushing a wheelchair at 50 miles per hour and started calling 911. (The first caller: “You are not going to believe this. There is a semitruck pushing a guy in a wheelchair on Red Arrow highway!”) Lucky for Ben, one passerby was an undercover police officer. Pulling a quick U-turn, he followed the truck to its destination a couple of miles from where the wild ride had started, and informed the disbelieving driver that he had a passenger hooked in his grille. “It was very scary,” said Ben.

In this chapter we explore stress—what it is, how it affects us, and how we can reduce it. Then we’ll take a close look at happiness—an important measure of whether we are flourishing. Let’s begin with some basic terms.