For our 2017-2018 Girls Build Los Angeles project, our team, the Zen Ten, had decided to confront the issue of stress among primarily students in our community.
Our familiarity with stress had drove us to conduct a project that can prevent it. Upon researching, we had discovered that in small doses, our bodies reaction to pressure is benign, even advantageous at times. However, chronic stress or the feeling of stress over a prolonged period of time can make harmful impacts on your body.
Unfortunately, students have been reported to have dangerously high stress levels, resulting in long-term effects on their mind, body, and even behavior. In fact, studies performed by the American Physiological Association show that teenagers, on a 10 point scale, have stress levels of 5.8, while adults only surveyed a 5.1.
During the initial phase of our project planning, we sent out a poll to students attending grades 6 through 12. According to our results, 160 out of our 173 survey recipients responded that they felt stressed at least once a day, 75% of which about school-related activities (tests, homework, projects, etc.). And yet, 33% of all recipients don’t practice any form of timed breathing, meditation, etc..
Our project hopes to address these problems by creating a video curriculum that teaches students stress relieving techniques, as well as hosting a Zen Fair at our school.