Stress management training in medical school.

It has been widely noted that medical school can be stressful experience for many students and that on completion of their medical education students will enter a profession high in potential stressors. However, very few systematic efforts to teach medical students practical stress management skills have been undertaken. In the study reported here, a group of students volunteered to participate in a six-session program that taught them personal stress management techniques, including self-relaxation training, schedule-planning, priority-setting, leisure time-planning, and cognitive modification techniques. From pretraining to posttraining, the students showed improvement on a variety of measures that included knowledge about stress, self-report inventory scores assessing stress symptoms and life-style, personal ratings of stressful situations, and their daily activity schedules. A control group largely failed to show improvement relative to the stress management training group largely failed to show improvement relative to the stress management training group subjects. The importance of making available to students such specific, behavioral and preventive stress management training is discussed.