Coping with stress

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Coping with stress
Worried Sick last section on coping
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Coping with stress

• Overview
• Psychosocial moderators of the stress response
• Ways of coping

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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

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The role of appraisal in stress
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Appraisal Attributional style

• Explanatory Style
• A persons propensity to attribute outcomes to
  positive causes or negative causes
• Negative Explanatory Style
• Pessimistic attributions that are global,
  stable, and internal

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The Negative Stress Cycle
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Social Support

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

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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

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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,
  200423(5)476-485.

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How Social Support Makes a Difference

• Ameliorate stress hormones
• Encourages healthier lifestyles
• Better relationships with doctors, nurses, etc.

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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

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Religious Attendance and Life Expectancy
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Possible Reasons for Correlation Between
Religious Involvement and Health
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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

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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

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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

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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

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Personality Optimism and Immune Functioning
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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

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Coping Strategies

• Problem-Focused Coping dealing directly with a
  stressor by reducing its demands or increasing
  ones 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

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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?

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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)

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Relaxation-based approaches

• Mindfulness
• Meditation
• Yoga
• Biofeedback
• Hypnosis
• Relaxation
• Guided imagery
• Systematic desensitization
• PMR

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Coping Psychotherapy

• Psychotherapies
• Cognitive-behavioral (e.g., cognitive
  restructuring)
• Psychodynamic