Introduction to Psychology: Stress and Health

Introduction to Psychology: Stress and Health

•  Psychology's role in establishing and maintaining health, and preventing/treating illness is emphasized by the subfield of Health Psychology.
•  Biomedical Medicine is an interdisciplinary field focusing on integrating behavioral and biomedical knowledge to promote health and reduce illness, which overlaps with health psychology.
•  Psychoneuroimmunology explores connections between psychological factors (like attitudes and emotions), the nervous system, and the immune system scientifically.

What is Stress?

•  Stress is a negative emotional discomfort accompanied by predictable biochemical, physiological, and behavioral changes, directed towards altering the stressful event or accommodating its effects.

Stress and the Immune System

•  Stressful experiences lower the efficacy of the immune system, making individuals more susceptible to disease.
•  Stress directly promotes disease-producing processes.
•  Stressful events can activate dormant viruses, diminishing the individual's ability to cope with disease.

Stress vs. Stressor

•  Stress is an uncomfortable emotional experience accompanied by predictable biochemical, physiological, and behavioral changes.
•  A stressor is any event, experience or environmental stimulus that causes stress in an individual.

Types of Stress

•  Acute Stress: A short-term stress reaction (also called acute stress disorder). Characterized by severe anxiety, dissociation, and other symptoms within one month, as a result of a traumatic event.
•  Chronic Stress: A prolonged emotional response to pressure, where the individual perceives a lack of control. This involves the endocrine system releasing corticosteroids. Examples include serious life events like the death of a loved one, loss of a job, loneliness, or on-going marital problems.

Why is Our Stress Level So High?

•  Factors influencing high stress levels include urbanization, globalization, technology, and social/economic burdens.
•  Behavioral risk factors such as unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, and tobacco or alcohol use also contribute.

Four Major Factors Leading to Stress:

• Change: All stressful events are caused by change; the more change involved, the more stressful the situation.
• Pressure: Feeling forced to speed-up, intensify, or shift direction in our behavior, or feeling compelled to meet higher performance standards.
• Frustration: Occurs when a person is prevented from reaching a goal because something or someone stands in the way.
• Conflict: Facing two or more incompatible demands, opportunities, needs, or goals (e.g., approach/approach, avoidance/avoidance, approach/avoidance).

Four Major Factors Leading to Stress: Conflict (continued)

•  Conflict is the simultaneous arousal of two or more incompatible motives.
•  Situations producing stable or unstable equilibrium are distinguished. Easily resolved conflicts are in unstable equilibrium. Conversely, unresolved conflicts remain in stable equilibrium.
•  Common conflict patterns include approach-approach, avoidance-avoidance, and approach-avoidance.

Approach-Approach Conflict

•  Involves the necessity of choosing between two or more desirable goals.
•  The desirability of the chosen goal increases as one moves closer to it.

Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict

•  Involves choosing between two undesirable goals.
•  The individual is "caught between a rock and a hard place."
•  Equilibrium is stable, and the individual is likely to remain balanced between the two negative possibilities as long as possible.

Approach-Avoidance Conflict

•  Involves a single goal with both appealing and unappealing aspects.
•  The closer one gets to the goal, the more intense the avoidance tendency becomes.
•  This pattern also produces a stable equilibrium.

Other Major Factors Causing Stress

•  Work-related stress: Unhappiness in a job, heavy workloads, too much responsibility, long hours, poor management, unclear expectations, dangerous working conditions, insecure career prospects, giving speeches, discrimination/harassment
•  Social stressors: Death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job, financial difficulties, getting married, moving, chronic illness, emotional problems, caring for elderly/ill family members

Other Major Factors Causing Stress: Variables We Cannot Control

•  Major life changes (even happy events like weddings/promotions), unpleasant events (divorce, major financial setbacks), and conflicts (e.g., disagreements with neighbors) can be significant sources of stress.
•  Traumatic stressors: Natural disasters, theft, rape, violence.

Attitudes and Perceptions

•  How you view the world/a situation influences the experience of stress.
•  Fear and uncertainty due to global threats/problems can increase stress.

Other Factors Causing Stress (continued)

•  Unrealistic Expectations: Stress stems from expecting perfection; when things don't go as planned.
•  Personality: Different personality types have varying stress levels and coping responses.

Physiological Responses to Stress

•  Stress has various impacts on the body including: Headaches, despair, lack of energy, problems with skin, muscles, joints, heart, stomach, pancreas, intestines, reproductive system, lowered immune system's ability.

Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)

•  GAS describes the common effects on the body to stressful demands.
•  It consists of three stages: Alarm (fight or flight), Resistance (fight and stay), and Exhaustion (giving up).
•  The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis plays a critical role during stress response.

Coping with Stress

•  Direct Coping: Confrontation (attacking the problem directly), Compromise (settling for less than initially desired), Withdrawal
•  Stress Management Program: Identifying stressors, monitoring stress levels, understanding stress antecedents, avoiding negative self-talk, and setting goals
•  Defense Mechanisms (from Selye): Repression (pushing unwanted thoughts into unconscious), Rationalization (replacing objectionable motives with acceptable ones), Displacement (redirecting feelings towards a different target), Sublimation (replacing socially unacceptable motives with acceptable ones), Projection (attribute personal faults/shortcomings onto others), Reaction Formation (transforming unacceptable motives into opposite ones).

The 5 R's of Coping with Stress

•  Rethink: Changing perceptions to lessen the impacts of stressors
•  Reduce: Decrementing the amount of stressors in life
•  Reorganize: Placing health as a higher priority.
•  Release: Reducing stress via physical activity
•  Relax: Finding time for self-care to reduce stress