Self-Care

This activity involved reading about aspects of personality such as flexibility, stress tolerance, and cognitive distortions, and then answering a series of prompts to apply our understanding. For example, using our understanding of cognitive distortions, we are asked to identify the strategies we use when we find ourselves experiencing such distortions.

The applications of this assignment to self-care are direct. Not only did this activity directly ask me to understand the strategies I currently use for coping with stress, but it also goes further to ask me to critically analyze these strategies. I also found the final question asking us to explain the applications of coping and adjustment to work and school settings to be particularly enlightening as I am still adjusting to the college lifestyle.

This assignment involved taking the Big Five Personality Test and addressing a number of prompts based on my results. In my case, I scored very highly in Agreeableness and Openness to Experience, and very low in Extroversion.

Prior to this assignment, I was highly skeptical of the Big Five trait theory, as I felt it's heavy incorporation into professional workplaces meant that it was more about driving profit for businesses than truly understanding personality. However, this assignment helped shape my understanding of the Big Five traits in the context of my own personality, helping me understand how my personality traits impact my environment, and how my environment interacts with my personality. Understanding these interactions can better enable me to shape my environment in a manner that reduces my stress and improves my chances of succeeding academically and professionally.