The SMART Program
Stress Management and Resiliency Training (SMART):
A Relaxation Response Resiliency Program™
STRESS
Defined as the amount of pressure experienced at any given time, caused by a challenge or demand. Stress is neither good nor bad. These demands can be major challenges or small daily demands.
DISTRESS
The level to which we are bothered by our stress
RESILIENCE
The body’s ability to adapt to these challenging life situations, which results in decreased distress in response to stress.
SMART is an 8-week group workshop designed to teach you concrete skills that will increase your resilience, decrease your distress, and help you bounce back better from whatever life throws at you.
What We Do
Each of the 8 sessions is will have interactive group activities that will teach the three components of resilience:​
1
Eliciting the
Relaxation Response
Each session will teach a different technique to elicit the RR, which reverses our physiological stress response.
2
Stress
Awareness
Each session will contain exercises designed to explore how stress affects us mentally and physically.
3
Adaptive
Strategies
With a new foundation of stress awareness, we learn strategies to respond to potentially stressful situations. These can be methods of coping with an immediate stressor at the moment, as well as ways of improving our baseline coping skills so we are prepared in advance in the event of a stressor.
In addition, each participant will be invited to one-on-one consultations at the beginning, middle, and end of the program. During these times we will set goals, evaluate progress, and create strategies for maintaining a resilient lifestyle.