Welcome everyone

my name is Isabelle Mai and I am very happy that you are here in this

course.

In this short video we will take our first step into understanding stress

what it is

how it works and why it affects us the way it does.

We'll begin with a brief external video that gives you an intuitive introduction to what

the stress fields like in every day.

After that I'll share a few key findings from research on stress and then we'll take a look

at the theoretical model we'll be using throughout this course.

Finally I'll highlight some important concepts you should keep in mind as we continue.

So let's get started.

In our stood on site you can find a link to this YouTube video for the basics and then

we start with our working definition of stress.

So please stop this video now

go to the stood on site and watch this short one minute take

and we'll continue.

Okay

now you've seen this video and as you saw stress is a universal human experience

something everyone encounters at different points in life.

Yet understanding stress on a deeper psychological level has evolved significantly over the past

century and that's what we will do now.

Before we dive into the full transactional model I want to give you a brief overview

of how Richard Lazarus conceptualized stress.

Lazarus was one of the most influential psychologists in understanding why people react so differently

to the same situation.

His work shifted the perspective from stress as something automatic or purely physiological

to stress as a psychological process

a constant interaction between a person and their environment.

This idea forms the foundation of everything we'll discuss in this module.

One of the clearest demonstrations of Lazarus approach comes from a study by Folkman and

Lazarus from 1985.

They followed university students across three key stages of a stressful academic event,

a midterm exam.

The researchers identified three distinct phases.

T1 the anticipatory stage

two days before the exam

when students very prepared and

imagined possible outcomes.

T2 the waiting stage

five days after the exam

when students have no control left and

can only wait for their results.

And T3 the outcome stage

two days after grades are released

when emotions shift again depending

on how well students performed.

This structure allows us to see stress not as a single moment but as a process that unfolds

over time.

In the first study