Stress and Health

1. Stress and Health Cherokee 2011

3. Refusal Skills Training: Program that teaches young people how to resist pressures to begin smoking • Life Skills Training: Teaches stress reduction, self-protection, decision making, self-control, and social skills • Wellness: Positive state of good health and well-being

5. Stress • Mental and physical condition that occurs when a person must adjust or adapt to the environment • Includes marital and financial problems • Eustress: Good stress (e.g., travel, dating) • Stress Reaction: Physical response to stress • Autonomic Nervous System is aroused • Stressor: Condition or event that challenges or threatens the person • Pressure: When a person must meet urgent external demands or expectations

6. Burnout: Job-related condition (usually in helping professions) of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Has three aspects: • Emotional Exhaustion: Feel “used up” and “empty” • Cynicism or detachment from others • Feeling of reduced personal accomplishment

7. Primary Appraisal: Deciding if a situation is relevant or irrelevant, positive or threatening • Secondary Appraisal: Deciding how to cope with a threat or challenge • Perceived lack of control is just as threatening as an actual lack of control

8. Problem-Focused Coping: Managing or altering the distressing situation • Emotion-Coping Focusing: Trying to control one’s emotional reactions to the situation • Frustration: Negative emotional state that occurs when one is prevented from reaching desired goals • External Frustration: Based on external conditions that impede progress toward a goal • Personal Frustration: Caused by personal characteristics that impede progress toward a goal

10. Aggression: Any response made with the intention of doing harm • Displaced Aggression: Redirecting aggression to a target other than the source of one’s frustration • Scapegoating: Blaming a person or group for conditions they did not create; the scapegoat is a habitual target of displaced aggression • Escape: May mean actually leaving a source of frustration (dropping out of school) or psychologically escaping (apathy)

11. Conflicts • A stressful condition that occurs when a person must choose between contradictory needs, desires, motives, or demands • Avoidance-Avoidance Conflicts: Being forced to choose between two negative or undesirable alternatives (e.g., choosing between going to the doctor or contracting cancer) • NOT choosing may be impossible or undesirable • Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: Being attracted (drawn to) and repelled by the same goal or activity; attraction keeps person in the situation, but negative aspects can cause distress • Ambivalence: Mixed positive and negative feelings; central characteristic of approach-avoidance conflicts

12. Double Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: Each alternative has both positive and negative qualities • Vacillation: When one is attracted to both choices; seeing the positives and negatives of both choices and going “back and forth” before deciding, if deciding at all! • Multiple Approach-Avoidance Conflicts: When several alternatives have positive and negative features

13. Health Psychology:What are some sources of Stress? 1. Approach-approach conflicts: • Both outcomes are positive and both are of approximately equal value. • We would like to approach both outcomes but only one is possible. • Example = choosing between two good job offers.

14. Health Psychology:What are some sources of Stress? 3. Approach-avoidance conflicts: • Achieving the positive outcome requires accepting a negative outcome as well. • People want the positive outcome but also want to avoid the negative outcome. • Example: marrying your girlfriend against your parents wishes means they will take you out of their will.

15. Health Psychology:What are some sources of Stress? 4.Multiple approach-avoidance conflicts: • Both outcomes have positive and negative consequences. • Example: one job pays poorly but your boss is easygoing; the other job pays extremely well but the boss is a taskmaster.

17. Learned Helplessness (Seligman) • Acquired (learned) inability to overcome obstacles and avoid aversive stimuli; learned passivity • Occurs when events appear to be uncontrollable • May feel helpless if failure is attributed to lasting, general factors

18. Cardiac Personalities • Type A Personality: Personality type with elevated risk of heart attack; characterized by time urgency and chronic anger or hostility • Anger and hostility may be the key factors of this behavior • Type B Personality: All types other than Type As; unlikely to have a heart attack

19. Hardy Personality • Personality type associated with superior stress resistance • Sense of personal commitment to self and family • Feel they have control over their lives • See life as a series of challenges,

20. General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) ) Series of bodily reactions to prolonged stress; occurs in three stages

21. Stage of Resistance: Body adjusts to stress but at a high physical cost; resistance to other stressors Is lowered

22. Stage of Exhaustion: Body’s resources are drained and stress hormones are depleted, possibly resulting in: • Psychosomatic disease • Loss of health • Complete collapse