Another educational challenge is to develop ways to support risk taking that is necessary for developing self confidence while not supporting taking risks with drugs, sex, fast driving, or other health and life endangering activities. Thus nothing is more important than a child having good role models. How teachers deal with stressors and engage in risk taking in their own lives will have more impact than what they try to teach in the classroom. Now that contagious diseases and infections have been controlled, and people are learning the value of good nutrition, physical fitness, and safe living habits, an internal killer has emerged as the number one cause of early death. The killer is stress and the victims are often accomplices.
Many people are self-frazzling.
They either create their own chronic stress reactions through poor self-management and risk taking or from not coping well with externally induced stresses. Stress resistance can be learned. Many guidelines and programs exist on how to reduce and manage stress. The better approaches separate specific, unique, significant stressors in a person's life from the cumulative effect of many hassles. An effective plan of action includes problem solving and creative coping strategies for handling specific stressors while also developing life-style plans of action for resting and revitalizing.