Stress , Health, and Human Flourishing Stress: Some Basic Concepts Stress Effects and Health

2. Stress, Health, and Human Flourishing • Stress: Some Basic Concepts • Stress Effects and Health • Coping With Stress • Managing Stress Effects • Happiness

3. Stress: Some Basic Concepts • Stressors—Things that push our buttons • Stress reactions—From alarm to exhaustion

4. Stress: Some Basic Concepts • Stress • Process of appraising an event as threatening or challenging and responding to • Stressors appraised as threats • Can lead to strong negative reactions • Extreme or prolonged stress • Can cause harm

5. Stress • Process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging

6. Stress: Some Basic Concepts • Stressors—Things that push our buttons • Catastrophes: Unpleasant, large-scale events • Significant life changes: Personal events • Daily hassles: Day-to-day challenges

7. Stress Appraisal Fuse/Getty Images The events of our lives flow through a psychological filter. How we appraise an event influences how much stress we experience and how effectively we respond.

8. Stress: Some Basic Concepts • Stress reactions—From alarm to exhaustion • Cannon • Sympathetic nervous system • Flight-or-fight response • Selye • General adaptation syndrome (GAS) • Taylor • Tend-and-befriend

9. Fight-or-flight response • Emergency response, including activity of sympathetic nervous system, that mobilizes energy and activity for attacking or escaping a threat • General adaptation syndrome (GAS) • Selye’sconcept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in three stages—alarm, resistance, exhaustion • Tend-and-befriend response • Under stress, people (especially women) often provide support to others (tend) and bond with and seek support from others (befriend)

10. Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome AP Photo/ Luis Hidalgo AP Photo/ Chile's Presidency

11. Stress response system: When alerted to a negative, uncontrollable event, our ________nervous system arouses us. Heart rate and respiration ________ (increase/decrease). Blood is diverted from digestion to the skeletal ________ . The body releases sugar and fat. All this prepares the body for the ________ response.

12. Stress Effects and Health

13. Stress Effects and Health • Immune system is affected by age, nutrition, genetics, body temperature, and stress. • Whenthe immune system does not function properly: • Responds too strongly • Underreacts

14. Lymphocytes • Two types of white blood cells that are part of the body’s immune system: B lymphocytes release antibodies that fightbacterial infections; T lymphocytes attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances. • Coronary heart disease • Cogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; the leading cause of death in North America and many other countries.

15. A Simplified View Of Immune Responses CNRI / Science Source Fuse/ Thinkstock NIBSC / Science Source Lennart Nilsson/ BoehringerIngelheim International GmbH Eye of Science / Science Source

16. Stress Effects and Health: Immune System Malfunctions

17. Stress Effects and Health • Stress hormones suppress immune system • Animal studies: Stress of adjustment in monkeys caused weakened immune systems • Human studies: Stress related to surgical wound healing and development of colds. Low stress may increase effectiveness of vaccinations. • And so…stress does not make people sick but it reduces immune system’s ability to function optimally.

18. Stress And Colds Laurent / Yakou / Science Source People with the highest life-stress scores were also most likely to develop colds when exposed to an experimentally delivered virus (Cohen et al., 1999).

19. ________ focuses on mind-body interactions, including the effects of psychological, neural, and endocrine functioning on the immune system and overall health. What general effect does stress have on our overall health?

20. Stress Effects and Health • Stress and AIDS • Stress and cancer • Stress and heart disease

21. Stress Effects and Health • Stress and AIDS • Stress cannot give people AIDS, but may speed transition from HIV infection to AIDS and the decline in those with AIDS. • Stress and cancer • Stress does not create cancer cells, but may affect growth by weakening natural defenses. • Stress-cancer research results mixed.

22. Stress Can Have A Variety Of Health - Related Consequences

23. Stress Effects and Health • Stress and heart disease • 600, 000 North American coronary heart disease-related deaths yearly • Stress related to generation of inflammation which is associated with heart and other health problems. • Meyer and colleagues • Stress predicted heart attack risk for tax accountants. • Type A men more likely to have heart attack. • Conley and colleagues • Stress related to everyday academic stressors in students. 10-4 How does stress increase coronary heart disease risk?

24. Type A • Friedman and Rosenman’s term for competitive, hard - driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger - prone people • Type B • Friedman and Rosenman’s term for easy going, relaxed people • Type D • Term for people who suppress negative emotion to avoid social disapproval (Grande et al., 2012)

25. Coping With Stress • Personal control, health, and well-being • Who controls your life? • Is the glass half full or half empty? • Social support • CLOSE-UP: Pets are friends, too • Finding meaning

26. Coping With Stress People deal with stress in a variety of ways. • Coping • Problem-focused coping • Emotion-focused coping

27. EXTREME STRESS Ben Carpenter experienced the wildest of rides after his wheelchair got stuck in a truck’s grille. AP Photo /Michigan State Police

28. To cope with stress, we tend to use ________ focused (emotion/problem) strategies when we feel in control of our world. When we believe we cannot change a situation, we may try to relieve stress with ________-focused (emotion/problem) strategies.

29. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • Success in coping depends on several factors • Personal control • Optimistic outlook • Social support • Finding meaning Let’s look at each of these.

30. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • Personal control • Involves to degree we perceive having control over our environment • Studying personal control • Correlation of feelings of control with behaviors and achievements • Experiments involving raising and lowering people’s sense of control and noting the effects

31. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • Learned helplessness • Involves dramatic form of loss of control • May result in negative health consequences • Fox and colleagues • Roberts and colleagues • Fleming and colleagues

32. LEARNED HELPLESSNESS • When animals and people experience no control over repeated bad events, they often learn helplessness.

33. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • People thrive when they live in conditions of personal freedom and empowerment. • Proposal to improve health and morale by control (Humphrey and others) • Allowing prisoners to have more control over physical space • Having worker participate in decision-making • Offering nursing home patients more choices about their environments

34. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • Who controls your life? • Those who have an external locus of control believe that chance or outside forces control their fate • They achieve more in school and work, act more independently, enjoy better health, and feel less depressed. • Those who have an internal locus of control believe they control their own destiny:

35. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • Half Full of Half Empty? • Pessimists • Expect things to go badly, blame others • Optimists/Optimism • Expect to have control, work well under stress, and enjoy good health • Run in families; genetic marker/oxytocin • Danner and colleagues: Optimism-long life correlation study

36. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being Which of these factors has the strongest association with poor health: smoking 15 cigarettes daily, being obese, being inactive, or lacking strong social connections?

37. Personal Control, Health, and Well-Being • Social support helps fight illness in two ways. • It calms cardiovascular system, which lowers blood pressure and stress hormone levels. • It fights illness by fostering stronger immune functioning.

38. Can pets help people handle stress? • Women experienced lower blood pressure spikes in presence of their dog during challenging test. • Pets increase the odds of survival after a heart attack. • They relieve depression among AIDS patients. • Pets lower the level of fatty acids in the blood that increase the risk of heart disease.

39. Social Support • Research findings • Uchino: People supported by close relationships are less likely to die early. • Kaplan and colleagues: People in low-conflict marriages live longer, healthier lives than unmarried. • Valliant: Healthy aging is better predicted by a good marriage than by a low cholesterol level

40. Some research finds that people with companionable pets are less likely than those without pets to visit their doctors after stressful events (Siegel, 1990). How can the health benefits from social support shed light on this finding?

41. Managing Stress Effects • Aerobic exercise • Relaxation and meditation • Faith communities and health

42. Managing Stress Effects • Aerobic exercise, relaxation, meditation, and active spiritual engagement may help us gather inner strength and lessen stress effects. Based on what we have learned so far, can you guess why?

43. Managing Stress Effects • Aerobic exercise • Involves sustained activity that increases heart and lung fitness; reduces stress, depression, and anxiety • Can weaken the influence of of genetic risk for obesity • Increases the quality and “quantity” of life (~two years)

44. Does aerobic exercise produce a change in stress, depression, anxiety, or other health outcomes? • 10 weeks into a experimental exercise program, the women in the aerobic exercise program reported the greatest decrease in depression. • Aerobic exercise counteracts depression: it increases arousal; it does naturally what some prescription drugs do chemically: OLJ Studio /Shutterstock AEROBIC EXERCISE REDUCED DEPRESSION (From McCann & Holmes, 1984.)

45. Managing Stress Effects • Relaxation and mediation • Relaxation: More than 60 studies found that relaxation procedures can provide relief from headaches, high blood pressure, anxiety, and insomnia • Relaxation training: Training has been used to help Type A heart attack survivors reduce risk of future heart attacks.

46. Recurrent Heart Attacks And Life-Style Modification David Madison/ Jupiterimages The San Francisco Recurrent Coronary Prevention Project offered counseling from a cardiologist to survivors of heart attacks. Those who were also guided in modifying their Type A lifestyle suffered fewer repeat heart attacks. (From Friedman & Ulmer, 1984.)

47. Managing Stress Effects • Learning to reflect and accept • Mindfulness meditation • Involves attending to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner • Improves many health measures

48. Managing Stress Effects • Learning to reflect and accept • How mindfulness contributes to positive changes • Connections among regions are strengthened. • Brain regions associated with more reflective awareness are activated. • Brain activation in emotional situations are calmed.

49. Managing Stress Effects • Faith communities and health: Faith Factor • Religious involvement predicts health and longevity.

50. What are some of the tactics that help people manage the stress they cannot avoid?