Stress perception, lifestyle behaviors, and emotional intelligence in undergraduate nursing students

Abstract

Background: The ongoing curricular changes in nursing programs have resulted in a marked increase in the stress experience of nursing students. Lifestyle behaviors are recognized as essential components of stress reduction and wellbeing. These behaviors include consuming a healthy diet, engaging in exercise, and seeking social support. Emotional intelligence (EI) was also included because of its positive effects on subjective well-being and its mitigating effects on stress. The purpose of this study was to examine the link among stress perception, lifestyle behaviors, and EI. Methods: Sixty-three undergraduate nursing students with a mean age of 22 years, electronically completed tools that addressed stress perception, diet, exercise, social support, EI, and demographic characteristics. Descriptive statistics, correlational analysis, and ANOVA were used to analyze data. Results: Students reported a tendency toward perceiving a high level of stress, scored high on EI, sought social support, reported friends as the more frequent social support providers, tended to consume healthy diet, and were more likely to exercise. EI was correlated with the consumption of healthy diet, emotional and instrumental social support. Consumption of a healthy diet was also correlated with exercise participation. The social support constructs of emotional, instrumental, and venting of emotions were correlated with each other. Conclusion: The study results indicate this sample of nursing students participated in a healthy lifestyle and reported high EI. Assessing stress perception needs to be focused on nursing-related stress.

Distinct transcriptional and metabolic profiles associated with empathy in Buddhist priests: a pilot study

“…Lifestyle behaviors are considered essential components that influence well-being and health. Dietary habits, regular physical exercise, and religiosity/spirituality are major factors associated with these behaviors [ 29 ]. Therefore, we firstly compared the healthy lifestyle behaviors and dietary habits between the priests ( n = 10) and the age-matched non-priest controls ( n = 10).…”

Self-Care and Sense of Coherence: A Salutogenic Model for Health and Care in Nursing Education

“…In addition, we have also found that middle-aged women performing higher academic results develop better self-care levels, and these students also obtained more powerful scores in their SOC, as the findings of the major systematic review on the SOC in nurses suggest [ 74 ]. More investigations report that those students showing strong SOC values are more resistant to stress, keep healthier behaviours, show higher professional engagement, and, furthermore, theoretical assumptions determine that they do better academically [ 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 ].…”

Social Intelligence, Self-Efficacy, and Stress-Coping Styles as Predictors of Emotional Intelligence in Nursing Students: A Descriptive Study

“…Nurses/nursing students, who integrate EI and social intelligence into health care realize how they can cope with their own emotions, how these emotions are affected by the social environment, and how these emotions affect the social environment. A nurse with these qualifications not only provides emotional support to healthy/unhealthy individuals and their families in clinical and field environments, where learning is multidimensional, but also guides them on how to cope with their emotional burden (Ali and Ali 2016). Emotional intelligence, which strengthens nursing care, is equally important in improving an individual's skills and problem-solving abilities (Kaya et al, 2017;Lee and Noh 2017).…”