Optimal Performance and Stress Management

Link to Assignments

Offered in the fall semester, this three-credit course is the first in the series of biofeedback-related courses.  The activities and assignments will vary depending on whether the course is framed as a Writing Intensive course or an Information Literacy/Writing Intensive course in that particular semester. 

Premise: Optimal performance education seeks to develop and employ methods for enhancing performance, dissolving barriers, and fostering abilities.  Each of those spheres touches physical, mental, spiritual, social and environmental aspects of the individual.  These aspects are mutually influential; they cannot be analyzed separately.  When there is flow in these aspects, a person is in health.  Optimal Performance is a state of maximum flow.

Goal: It is the goal of this course to enable participants to make choices about being in a state of optimal performance.  To that end, the curriculum will include both theoretical and personal encounter with techniques of achieving flow.

Objectives

• Establish that enhancing performance involves two tasks: dissolving barriers and fostering abilities
• Identify the significance in performance that attention, arousal, cognitive and affective issues play
• Identify and explore a variety of techniques for achieving and maintaining homeostasis
• Introduce the basic principles of biofeedback and achieve familiarity with peripheral techniques for autonomic regulation

The course is listed as HWP LSIC 179 when offered as a Writing Intensive course.  See Sample Syllabus here.

The course is listed as HWP LSIC 379 when offered as an Information Literacy/Writing Intensive course.  Fall 06 Syllabus