I started teaching in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas over twenty years ago. I taught required foundation-level courses in human behavior and research. Since then I have also taught courses in the use of personal computers and courses in statistics at both the MSW and doctoral level, among others. Most recently, I have created a course in stress management for KU undergraduates.
I became interested in the area of stress management shortly after attending an intensive two-week retreat. As part of this retreat, I experienced for the first time such techniques as meditation, deep-muscle relaxation, and yoga (a regimen of physical stretching exercises). I integrated these and other techniques into my daily activities, in varying degrees. While doing so, I became aware of the profound change they could make in the way I experienced my life. Over the next six years or so, I gradually started incorporating these techniques in the human behavior courses I taught. My other classes also became a "laboratory" to refine some of these ideas further.
Then my wife Lynn Osterkamp and I were commissioned by the School of Social Welfare to conduct two-day stress-management workshops for social workers across the state. We developed more handouts and exercises and finally combined them into a pamphlet—the very first Stress? Find Your Balance. We later published this as a paperback book, and then more recently expanded it into the edition you will be using in this course. After writing the book, we became interested in looking at ways of helping people assess different areas of their lives so that they could figure out which areas were contributing an undue amount of stress and which were making a positive contribution to their well-being. From this work, we developed several stress assessments, including the Brief Computerized Brief Stress Inventory, a stress-assessment instrument used internationally.
While I still occasionally conduct stress-management workshops and seminars, more of my time is going into research and development in the area of stress management. This Independent Study course is based on the undergraduate class I developed in this area.
What still fascinates me about these ideas and practices is that I continually find new ways to apply them to my life. As you progress through this course, I hope and trust that you will experience the same excitement and this sense of wonder and change that I have.
July 1, 2002
It's been ten years since I wrote and started teaching this course for Independent Study. About six years later I created a Web version of the course. And around that time we moved to Boulder, Colorado, to live full-time. I still continue to work at Kansas University, and commute back on a regular basis. Back in 1992 I built this course around a very exciting book on health and wellness that had just been published. The book is now out of print, necessitating a course revision. I have strived to merge the best of the old verson with the new. Much has changed over these last ten years. Since almost everyone now has access to the Internet I recommend using the Web to supplement the information provided in the course texts. Each lesson has a "Recommended Internet Link" section; the main text has relevant Web resources at the end of each chapter as well. I continue to be impressed by the benefits people report they have received when they finish this course. I wish each of you the same success.
June 15, 2007
It's been another 5 years since I wrote and started teaching this course for Independent Study. We still live in Boulder and I still continue to work full-time at Kansas University. I am no longer commuting to Lawrence, however, as I retired as a faculty member. I am now a full-time research associate working on contracts in the area of child welfare. You can see some of my more recent work at http://www.rom.ku.edu. This is a web-based training site on Results Oriented Management in Child Welfare. It includes sections on child welfare legislation, managing child welfare caseloads from an outcomes-oriented perspective, and evidence-based practice for achieving desirable foster care outcomes. Some of the site is available without registration; you have to register to see the modules in the first two sections. Registration is free.
You can see my most recent and ongong work at http://research.socwel.ku.edu/wrdemo. This is a very sophisticated report tool to help child welfare supervisors, managers, and workers better track the progress of worker's foster care caseloads and investigative caseloads of reports of abuse/neglect. The site is password protected; contact me if you are interested in taking a look.
SW 310 Stress Management