Stress and Health

1. Stress and Health

2. Stress • Stress is the physiological and psychological responses tosituations or events that disturb the equilibrium ofan organism. • Stressresults when demands placed on an organism cause unusualphysical, psychological, or emotional responses. Inhumans, stress originates from a multitude of sourcesand causes a wide variety of responses, both positive andnegative. • Despite its negative connotation, many expertsbelieve some level of stress is essential for well-beingand mental health.

3. Stress and Illness • To study how stress and healthy and unhealthy behaviors influence health and illness, psychologists and physicians created the interdisciplinary field of behavioral medicine, integrating behavioral and medical knowledge. Health psychology provides psychology’s contribution to behavioral medicine. For psychologists, health is more than “merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die”. • Health psychologists ask: How do our emotions and personality influence our risk of disease? What attitudes and behaviors help prevent illness and promote health and wellbeing? How do our perceptions of a situation determine the stress we feel? How can we reduce or control stress?

4. Person’s needs

5. A momentary stress • A momentary stress can mobilize the immune system for fending off infections and healing wounds. Stress also arouses and motivates us to conquer problems. Championship athletes, successful entertainers, and great teachers and leaders all thrive and excel when aroused by a challenge. • Having conquered cancer or rebounded from a lost job, some people emerge with stronger self-esteem and a deepened spirituality and sense of purpose. Indeed, some stress early in life is conducive to later emotional resilience.

7. Stressors • Stressors—events or situations that cause stress—can range from everyday hassles such as traffic jams tochronic sources such as the threat of nuclear war or overpopulation. • Much research has studied how people respondto the stresses of major life changes. The LifeEvents Scale lists these events as the top ten stressors:death of spouse, divorce, marital separation, jail term,death of close family member, personal injury or illness,marriage, loss of job through firing, marital reconciliation,and retirement. • It is obvious from this list that evengood things—marriage, retirement, and marital reconciliation—can cause substantial stress.

8. Fazes of stress reaction

9. TOP TEN STRESSFUL EVENTS • Death of spouse • Divorce • Marital separation • Jail term or death of close family member • Personal injury or illness • Marriage • Loss of job due to termination • Marital reconciliation or retirement • Pregnancy • Change in financial state

11. The Stress Response System • Medical interest in stress dates back to Hippocrates. Walter Cannon confirmed that the stress response is part of a unified mind-body system. He observed that extreme cold, lack of oxygen, and emotion-arousing incidents all trigger an outpouring of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine from the central core of the adrenal glands. This is but one part of the sympathetic nervous system’s response. • When alerted by any of a number of brain pathways, the sympathetic nervous system, as we have seen, increases heart rate and respiration, diverts blood from digestion to the skeletal muscles, dulls pain, and releases sugar and fat from the body’s stores—all to prepare the body for the wonderfully adaptive response that Cannon called fight or flight.

12. The “fight or flight” response • The “fight or flight” response involves acomplex pattern of innate responses that occur in reactionto emergency situations. The body prepares to handlethe emergency by releasing extra sugar for quick energy;heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing increase;muscles tense; infection-preventing systems activate;and hormones are secreted to assist in garnering energy. • The hypothalamus, often called the stress center of thebrain, controls these emergency responses to perceivedlife-threatening situations.

13. Photographs of Hans Selye at work in 1951, at his International Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal

18. Resistance Arousal high as body tries to defend and adapt. Exhaustion Limited physical resources; resistance to disease collapses; Disease/death Alarm Reaction Fight or flight Three Views of Stress • Focus on the environment: stress as a stimulus (stressors) (The SRRS) • Reaction to stress: stress as a response (distress) (F/F) • Relationship between person and the environment: stress as an interaction (coping) • Fight or Flight Response and its physiological consequences: Increase in Epinephrine & Cortisol, Heart rate & blood pressure, Levels & mobilization of free fatty acids, cholesterol etc • Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (1956, 1976, 1985) Perceived Stressor

19. Cognitive Model of Stress (Lazarus & Folkma) • Potential stressor (external event) • Primary appraisal – is this event positive, neutral or negative; and if negative, how bad? • Secondary appraisal – do I have resources or skills to handle event? If No, then distress. • Primary appraisal – Is there a potential threat? • Outcome – Is it irrelevant, good, or stressful? • If stressful, evaluate further: • Harm-loss – amount of damage already caused. • Threat – expectation for future harm. • Challenge – opportunity to achieve growth, etc

20. Stress Causes • The following are risk factors for uncontrollable stress: • Social and financial problems • Medical illness • Lack of social support • Family history

21. Affecting the inner emotions • Stress usually first affects the inner emotions. Initial symptoms may include the following feelings: • Anxiousness • Nervousness • Distraction • Excessive worry • Internal pressure

22. Affecting a person's outward appearance • These emotional states can then begin to affect a person's outward appearance: • Unusually anxious or nervous • Distracted • Self-absorbed • Irritable

23. Emotional or physical effects • Excessive fatigue • Depression • Sometimes even think of hurting yourself or others • Headaches • Nausea and vomiting • Diarrhea • Chest pain or pressure • Heart racing • Dizziness or flushing • Tremulousness or restlessness • Hyperventilation or choking sensation • In most cases, these symptoms are very minor and don’t last very long. If they become more severe or increase in frequency and severity, seek medical help.

24. Reactions to stress • Reactions to stressvary by individual and theperceived threat presented by it. • Psychological responsesmay include cognitive impairment—as in test anxiety,feelings of anxiety, anger, apathy, depression, and aggression. • Behavioral responses may include a change ineating or drinking habits.

25. Stress and the Heart • Elevated blood pressure is just one of the factors that increase the risk of coronary heart disease, the closing of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle. • Although infrequent before 1900, this condition became by the 1950s North America’s leading cause of death, and it remains so today. In addition to hypertension and a family history of the disease, many behavioral and physiological factors—smoking, obesity, a high-fat diet, physical inactivity, and an elevated cholesterol level—increase the risk of heart disease. The psychological factors of stress and personality also play a big role.

26. Stress and pathology • A relatively new areaof behavioral medicine, psychoimmunology, has beendeveloped to study how the body’s immune system is affectedby psychological causes like stress. • While it iswidely recognized that heart disease and ulcers may resultfrom excess stress, psychoimmunologists believemany other types of illness also result from impaired immunecapabilities due to stress. Cancer, allergies, andarthritis all may result from the body’s weakened abilityto defend itself because of stress.

28. Coping with stress • Coping with stress is a subject of great interest andis the subject of many popular books and media coverage. • One method focuses on eliminating or mitigatingthe effects of the stressor itself. For example, people whoexperience extreme stress when they encounter dailytraffic jams along their route to work may decide tochange their route to avoid the traffic, or change theirschedule to less busy hours. • Instead of trying to modifytheir response to the stressor, they attempt to alleviate theproblem itself. Generally, this problem-focused strategyis considered the most effective way to battle stress.

29. Biological feedback for coping stress

30. Emotion-focused methods • Anothermethod, dealing with the effects of the stressor, isused most often in cases in which the stress is seriousand difficult to change. • Major illnesses, deaths, and catastropheslike hurricanes or airplane crashes cannot bechanged, so people use emotion-focused methods intheir attempts to cope. Examples of emotion-focusedcoping include exercise, drinking, and seeking supportfrom emotional confidants.

31. Defense mechanisms • Defense mechanisms areunconscious coping methods that help to bury, but notcure, the stress. • Sigmund Freud considered repression—pushing the source of stress to the unconscious—one way of coping with stress. Rationalization and denialare other common emotional responses to stress.

33. Discovering of stress in experiment