Coping with stress

1. Coping with stress “Worried Sick” – last section on coping

2. Coping with stress • Overview: • Psychosocial moderators of the stress response • Ways of coping

3. Moderators: Factors that influence impact of a “stressor” • Coping styles and strategies (including appraisal) • Social support • Control: unpredictable events; ambiguous tasks • Personality & current state of person

4. The role of appraisal in stress

5. Appraisal: Attributional style • Explanatory Style • A person’s propensity to attribute outcomes to positive causes or negative causes • Negative Explanatory Style • Pessimistic attributions that are global, stable, and internal

6. The Negative Stress Cycle

7. Social Support • Social Support • Companionship, emotional connection, material assistance, touch, and/or honest feedback, etc. • Handout: Bowling Alone

8. Social Support and Health • People who perceive strong social support experience: • faster recoveries • fewer medical complications • lower mortality rates at any age (Alameda County Study) • less distress in the face of terminal illness • Written exercise: Write about one of your close friends and the support he/she provides

9. Just thinking about support helps! • For this study, “undergraduates (41 men, 41 women) wrote about supportive ties or casual acquaintances. Supportive ties were rated as warmer and less controlling than acquaintances, and writing about them evoked reductions in negative affect, especially for low-hostile participants," the researchers said. • "Compared with the acquaintance condition, the supportive tie condition resulted in reduced heart rate and blood pressure response during a subsequent speech stressor” among low-hostile participants. Mental activation of supportive ties, hostility, and cardiovascular reactivity to laboratory stress in young men and women. Health Psychology, 2004;23(5):476-485.

10. How Social Support Makes a Difference • Ameliorate stress hormones • Encourages healthier lifestyles • Better relationships with doctors, nurses, etc.

11. Religious involvement as a form of social support Research studies • Better immune/endocrine function (3 of 3) • Lower mortality from cancer (4 of 6) • Lower blood pressure (14 of 23) • Less heart disease (7 of 11) • Less stroke (1 of 1) • Lower cholesterol (3 of 3) • Less cigarette smoking (23 of 25) • More likely to exercise (3 of 5) • Lower mortality (11 of 14) (1995-2000) • Clergy mortality (12 of 13) • However, multiple problems with the research • Numerous new studies now under review

12. Religious Attendance and Life Expectancy

13. Possible Reasons for Correlation Between Religious Involvement and Health

14. Moderators: Personal Control • Personal Control • self-efficacy (Albert Bandura) • Design an intervention for nursing home residents to increase their perceptions of personal control • Langer & Rodin (1976): Nursing home residents who were given more responsibility over their daily lives were more active, sociable, happier, and had lower mortality rates than other residents

15. Perceived Control and Biological Effects • Uncontrollable stressors trigger stronger corticosteroid response • Stress aroused in a person with a sense of mastery can actually enhance immune functioning

16. Who Copes Well? • Appraisal of a stressor is impacted by personal resources such as personality • Personality styles related to health • Type A • Optimism/Pessimism • Mastery/Locus of Control • Hardiness/Resilence

17. Moderators: Personality -- hardiness • Hardiness • Cluster of stress-buffering traits consisting of commitment, challenge, control • Linked to lower levels of anxiety, adaptive coping styles, and adjustment to cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and many other health problems • Hardy people are more likely to engage in positive reappraisal of stressful events

18. Personality: Optimism and Immune Functioning

19. Coping with stress • Coping • What is your most frequent and/or effective coping method? • Coping -- a dynamic process to reduce stress and/or restore balance • Involves cognitive, behavioral, emotional, social, spiritual aspects

20. Coping Strategies • Problem-Focused Coping — dealing directly with a stressor by reducing its demands or increasing one’s resources for meeting those demands • Proactive Coping — anticipate potential stressors and act to prevent them or to mute their impact • Health buffers – exercise, sleep, nutrition

21. Problem-focused: e.g., time management • Time stress! • Strategies: • Common time-consumers? • (identify and minimize) • Prioritizing • Avoiding procrastination • Assertiveness (e.g., saying no when necessary • Others?

22. Coping Strategies • Emotion-Focused Coping • person tries to control his or her emotional response to a stressor • escape-avoidance • reappraisal(e.g., “is this really that important?” “am I engaging in faulty thinking?) • only connect! • others? (see following slides)

23. Relaxation-based approaches • Mindfulness • Meditation • Yoga • Biofeedback • Hypnosis • Relaxation • Guided imagery • Systematic desensitization • PMR

24. Coping: Psychotherapy • Psychotherapies: • Cognitive-behavioral (e.g., cognitive restructuring) • Psychodynamic