Health, Stress, and Coping

1. Health, Stress, and Coping Chapter 15 ©2002 Prentice Hall

2. Health, stress and coping • The physiology of stress. • The psychology of stress. • Coping with stress. ©2002 Prentice Hall

3. The Stress-Illness Mystery • Stressors can increase illness when they: • severely disrupt a person’s life. • are uncontrollable. • are chronic (i.e., lasting at least 6 months). ©2002 Prentice Hall

4. Stressors and the Body • Noise. • Bereavement and Loss. • Work-Related Problems. • Poverty, Powerlessness, and Racism. ©2002 Prentice Hall

5. Stress and the Common Cold ©2002 Prentice Hall

6. The Physiology of Stress • General adaptation syndrome. • There are three phases in responding to stressors: • Alarm. • Resistance. • Exhaustion. • Goal is to minimize wear and tear on the system. ©2002 Prentice Hall

7. Current Approaches • HPA (Hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal cortex axis) • A system activated to energize the body to respond to stressors. • The hypothalamus sends chemical messengers to the pituitary gland. • The pituitary gland prompts the adrenal cortex to produce cortisol and other hormones. ©2002 Prentice Hall

8. The Brain and the Body Under Stress ©2002 Prentice Hall

9. The Mind-Body Link • Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) • The study of the relationships among psychology, the nervous and endocrine systems and the immune system. • Psychological factors explain why not all people are stressed the same amount by the same things. ©2002 Prentice Hall

10. The Psychology of Stress • Emotions and illness. • Letting grievances go. • Explanatory styles. • The sense of control. • The benefits of control. • The limits of control. ©2002 Prentice Hall

11. Emotions and Illness • Hostility and heart disease. • Type A Personality: Determined to achieve, sense of time urgency, irritable, respond to threat or challenge very quickly, and impatient with obstacles. • Type B Personality: Calmer and less intense. • Personality type is less predictive of health problems than is hostility. • Proneness to anger is a major risk factor ©2002 Prentice Hall

12. Hostility and Heart Disease • Men with highest hostility scores as young medical students had higher rates of heart disease 25 years later. • Hostility is more hazardous than a heavy workload. ©2002 Prentice Hall

13. Depression and Disease • Two studies followed 1000 people for many years. • Those who had been clinically depressed at the outset were 2-4X more likely to have a heart attack than nondepressed people were. • Other research failed to find the link. ©2002 Prentice Hall

14. Emotional Inhibition • Emotional Inhibition: A personality trait involving a tendency to deny feelings of anger, anxiety, or fear; in stressful situations, physiological responses such as heart rate and blood pressure rise sharply. • People who display this trait are at greater risk of becoming ill than people who can acknowledge feelings. ©2002 Prentice Hall

15. Letting Grievances Go • Research on confession: divulging private thoughts and feelings that make you ashamed or depressed. • Freshman who wrote about their fears reported greater short term homesickness and anxiety. By end of year they had fewer bouts of flu visits to the infirmary. • Can also give up thoughts that produce grudges and replace them with different perspectives. • Forgiving thoughts. ©2002 Prentice Hall

16. Explanatory Styles • A study of Hall-of-Famer baseball stars showed that those with Optimistic explanatory styles: • Lived longer • They may have been in better health because optimists: • take better care of themselves when sick • cope better. • draw on friends in hard times. ©2002 Prentice Hall

17. The Sense of Control • Locus of Control • A general expectation about whether the results of your actions are under your own control (internal locus) or beyond your control (external locus). • Feelings of control can reduce or even eliminate the relationship between stressors and health. ©2002 Prentice Hall

18. The Limits of Control • Primary Control (Western Cultures) • An effort to modify reality by changing other people, the situation, or events; a “fighting back” philosophy. • Secondary Control (Eastern Cultures) • An effort to accept reality by changing your own attitudes, goals, or emotions; a “learn to live with it” philosophy. ©2002 Prentice Hall

19. Coping with Stress • Cooling Off. • Solving the problem. • Looking outward. ©2002 Prentice Hall

20. Cooling Off • Relaxation Training • Learning to alternately tense and relax muscles, lie or sit quietly, or meditate by clearing the mind; has beneficial effects by lowering stress hormones and enhancing immune function. • Massage therapy. • Exercise is also an excellent stress reliever. ©2002 Prentice Hall

21. Fitness and Health • Among those with low stress, fit and less-fit people had similar levels of health problems. • Among those with high stress, there were fewer health problems among people who were more fit. ©2002 Prentice Hall

22. Solving the Problem • Emotion-focused and problem-focused coping. • Effective Cognitive Coping Methods: • Reappraising the situation. • Learning from the experience. • Making social comparisons. • Cultivating a sense of humor. ©2002 Prentice Hall

23. Looking Outward • Friends can help with coping: • People with network of close connections live longer than those who do not. • After heart attack, those with no close contacts were twice as likely to die. • Relationships can also cause stress. • Giving support to others can be a valuable source of comfort. ©2002 Prentice Hall