GL/PSYC 2510 - Understanding Stress and Mental Health

• Mental health is related to stress
• GL/PSYC 2510 - Winter 2025

What is Stress?

• Stress is used broadly to describe unpleasant feelings like frustration, anger, feeling conflicted, overwhelm, or fatigue
• Stress is a demanding or threatening event or situation
• This definition characterizes stress as a stimulus which causes certain reactions
• This definition fails to recognize that people differ in how they view and react to challenging situations
• Physiological responses occur in reaction to demanding or threatening situations
• This definition characterizes stress as a response to environmental conditions
• Neither provide a complete definition of stress

Cognitive Appraisal of Stress

• Stress is how individuals perceives and respond to events that are appraised as overwhelming or threatening to well-being
• Stress places importance on how events demanding or threatening (stressors) are appraised which influences reaction
• Primary appraisal is the judgement about the degree of potential harm or threat to well-being that a stressor might entail
• Threats could lead to harm, loss or negative consequences
• Challenges carry the potential for gain or personal growth
• Secondary appraisal is the judgement of options available to cope with a stressor, and perceptions of how effective options will be
• A threat is less stressful if you believe there is something you can do about it
• Stress is likely to result if a stressor is extremely threatening or threatening with few or no effective coping options available
• Eustress can be positive and motivate individuals do things in their best interest
• It is associated with positive feelings, optimal health, and performance
• Distress is negative, causing people to feel burned out, fatigued, and can lead to decline

Prevalence of Stress

• Stress is everywhere and plays a role in all lives up to some extent
• Stress evokes a variety of responses including:
• Accelerated heart rate, headaches, or gastrointestinal problems
• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Drinking alcohol, smoking, or taking actions directed at eliminating

Health Psychology and Stress

• Health psychology is a subfield devoted to understanding the importance of psychological influences on health, illness and how people respond
• The field investigates:
• Connection between stress and illness
• Why people make certain life choices
• Aim of interventions to change unhealthy behaviours
• Which groups of people are especially at risk for negative health outcomes, based on psychological or behavioral factors

Demographic Differences and Stress

• Stress is influenced by Sex, Age, Race, Education, Employment and Income

Physiological Reactions to Stress

• Walter Cannon (Early 20th Century) identified the body's physiological reactions to stress
• Cannon first articulated and named the fight-or-flight response
• He suggested the response is a built-in mechanism that stabilizes physiological variables at levels optimal for survival
• Fight-or-flight response includes physiological reactions that occur when an individual encounters a perceived threat
• This is produced by activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system
• The arousal prepares a person to either fight or flee from a perceived threat
• The response is adaptive and helpful for species survival

General Adaptation Syndrome

• The body's alarm reaction, resistance and exhaustion relating to stress resistance
• Normal stress resistance is a balance somewhere between resistance and exhaustion

The Physiological Basis of Stress

• Sympathetic nervous system triggers arousal in response to a stressor via release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands
• Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) Axis: stress leads to the hypothalamus releasing corticotrophin-releasing factor (hormone)
• Then pituitary gland releases ACTH, which activates adrenal glands to release hormones including cortisol
• Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps provide a boost of energy when first encountering a stressor, to help us flight or flee
• Continuous elevated levels of cortisol (chronic stress) weaken the immune system
• In moments of stress the above process can provide energy, improve immune system functioning temporarily, and decrease pain sensitivity

Types of Stressors

• Chronic stressors are events that persist over an extended period, like long term unemployment
• Acute stressors are brief events that sometimes continue to be experienced as overwhelming well after the event has ended include:
• Falling and breaking a leg
• Traumatic events involve exposure to actual or threatened death or serious injury
• Exposure to military combat
• Threatened or actual physical assaults, sexual assault, childhood abuse, robbery etc.
• Terrorist attacks
• Natural disasters
• Car accident
• These stressors can cause people to develop post-traumatic stress disorde (PTSD)r:
• A chronic stress reaction including intrusive or painful memories, jumpiness and persistent negative emotional states

Stressors and Life Changes

• Some fairly typical life events, such as moving, can be significant stressors
• Even when the move is: intentional, positive and the amount of resulting change
• Holmes and Rahe (1960s) hypothesized that life events requiring significant change are stressful, whether they are desirable or undesirable
• Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) consists of 43 life events that require varying degrees of personal readjustment
• Each life event has a score or life change unit (LCU)
  • Death of a spouse was ranked highest (100), and divorce was ranked second highest (73)
• Research demonstrates that accumulating a high number of LCUs within a brief time period is related to a range of physical illnesses/symptoms and mental health problems. The scale is used to assess amount of stress in people's lives.

Stress and Hassles

• Daily hassles are minor irritations and annoyances that are a part of everyday lives
• Daily hassles leads to negative and distressed mood states, builds up and leaves one feeling stressed
• Frequency of daily hassles is a better predictor of physical and psychological health than life change units
• Ex: daily commutes contribute to the feelings of everyday stress

Types of Chronic Stress

• Bullying: physical, verbal, or social (direct or indirect) and cyberbullying
• Workplace stress can be from studies of occupational stress: which help identify common, everyday stressors and provide evidence for stress-illness relationship
• Some jobs have physical, chemical, or biological hazards
• Work overload includes when people work too long or hard, they feel more stressed, have poorer health habits, experience more accidents and more health problems
• Social status influences health and illness
• Followed over 18,000 British civil servants over 10 years via Whitehall studies
• British civil service is highly stratified and hierarchical
• Men in the lowest grade of the hierarchy had a mortality rate 3x higher
• Higher risk of mortality and coronary heart disease were maintained even after controlling smoking, high blood pressure, HBD, obesity, and lower rates of exercise
• People with concurrent low decision opportunity and high demands were at the highest risk for CHD
• Health risks occur with disparities of power and wealth

Stress and Illness

• Chronic stress and its sustained physiological reactions can lead to wear and tear on the body
• Sustained high blood pressure can lead to a heart attack or heart failure
• Continuous exposure to cortisol can weaken the immune system putting a person at risk for infection or disease
• Physical disorders/diseases whose symptoms are brought about or worsened by stress and emotional factors

Stressors and Immune Function

• Psychoneuroimmunology studies how that psychological factors influence the immune system and immune functioning
• Studies have shown that the immune system can be classically conditioned
• Many kinds of stressors are associated with poor/weakened immune functioning
• Stress weakens the immune system through the hormones released during stress
• These hormones inhibit the production of lymphocytes

Cohen et al., 1998

• Healthy volunteers were interviewed about stressful experiences
• Volunteers were given nasal drops containing thee cold virus
• The graph shows the % of participants who developed colds after receiving the cold virus after reporting chronic stressors
• Showed their stress lasting for different periods: a month, three months and six months

Stress and Cardiovascular Disease

• Cardiovascular System plays a central role in the stress response, key focus in studies of psychophysiological
• Heart disease can be considered a cardiovascular disorder
• Hypertension is high blood pressure:
• Is caused by stressors including job strain, marital conflict, and natural disasters
• Forces heart to pump harder.
• Can lead to stroke, heart failure, as well as kidney failure and blindness
• Heart disease and hypertension has also been linked to negative affectivity
• Negative affectivity is the tendency to experience distressed emotional states involving anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness
• An unhealthy lifestyle and therefore the chances of heart disease

Coping with Stress

• Problem-focused coping manages or alters the problem that is causing them to experience stress
• This involved identifying the problem and weighs the cost and benefits of each possible solution
• Emotion-focused Coping involves efforts to: change or reduce the negative emotions associated with stress
• Can include: avoiding, minimizing, or distancing oneself from the problem, or positive comparisons with others, or seeking something positive in a negative event
• Treats the symptoms of stress
  • More often used for stressors when you feels powerless to change

Learned Helplessness

• Learned helplessness is an acquired belief that one is powerless to do anything about a situation
• In Seligman's experiment, dogs were placed in a chamber where they received electric shocks from which they could not escape
• When they were later given the opportunity to escape the shocks, most seemed to give up and did not even try
• They had acquired learned helplessness.
• Seligman believed learned helplessness to be a possible cause of depression

Social Support and its Benefits

• Social support is the soothing impact of friends, family, and acquaintances including: advice, guidance, encouragement, acceptance, emotional comfort, and tangible assistance
• Provides comfort when faced with life stressors Individual strong social relationships have a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with weaker social relationships.
• Social support boosts the immune system and reduces blood pressure

Positive Psychology

• Seligman (1998) urged psychologists to focus more on understanding how to build human strength and psychological well-being including optimism and positive affect
• Positive psychology seeks to identify and promote those qualities that lead to greater fulfillment in lives

Qualities that Help Promote Psychological Well-Being

• Positive Affect entails pleasurable engagement with the environment, such as happiness, joy, enthusiasm, alertness, and excitement
• Is associated with greater social connectedness, emotional and practical support, adaptive coping efforts, lower depression, longevity and favorable physiological functioning
• Optimism is the general tendency to look on the bright side of things: expecting that good things will happen
• Is the tendency to view life's stressors and difficulties as temporary and external to oneself
• Is a significant predictor of positive health outcomes