Study sheet: Stress and Health

📋 Course Outline

1. Stress, Appraisal, and Stressors
2. Catastrophes and Major Life Changes
3. Everyday Hassles Across Life
4. General Adaptation Syndrome
5. Stress, Immunity, and Inflammation
6. Stress and Chronic Disease
7. Pressure, Control, and Frustration
8. Patterns of Psychological Conflict
9. Appraisal and Emotional Stress
10. Problem and Emotion Focused Coping
11. Meditation and Relaxation Techniques
12. Social Support and Health

📖 1. Stress, Appraisal, and Stressors

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Stress : Any physical, psychological, cognitive, or behavioural reaction an organism has to an event it perceives as demanding or difficult.
• Appraisal : The personal judgment or interpretation through which a person evaluates a situation as threatening, challenging, or otherwise meaningful.

★ Must-know

📌 Distress results from unpleasant events, whereas eustress is stress from positive events that still require substantial adjustment and can support health and wellbeing. — Hans Selye, 1936

Further detail

• Stress commonly appears physically, behaviourally, emotionally, and mentally, including tiredness, sleep problems, pacing, overeating, anxiety, irritability, poor concentration, memory problems, and difficulty making decisions.

💡 Memory Hook

The same event can be a threat for one person and an opportunity for another.

📖 2. Catastrophes and Major Life Changes

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Catastrophes : Large-scale, unpredictable stressors that create tremendous stress and a real sense of threat.
• Social Readjustment Rating Scale : The Social Readjustment Rating Scale, created by Holmes and Rahe in 1967 from 400 participants, estimates stress by adding life change units for major events during the previous twelve months.

★ Must-know

📌 A Social Readjustment Rating Scale score of 300 or higher signals a high risk of physical illness, mental illness, or an accident occurring soon.

Further detail

• After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, nearly 8% of nearby residents developed severe stress disorder and almost 10% showed depression symptoms two months later.

💡 Memory Hook

Large disruption → adjustment demands → elevated illness and accident risk.

📖 3. Everyday Hassles Across Life

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Daily Hassles : Small everyday annoyances such as frustrations, delays, irritations, minor disagreements, and small aggravations.

★ Must-know

📌 Major life events tend to predict long-term health effects, whereas daily hassles better predict short-term problems such as headaches, colds, and backaches.

Further detail

• Lazarus and Folkman's hassle scale rates each hassle from 0, meaning no hassle, to 3, meaning an extremely severe hassle.

• The biggest reported hassle at each life stage is:

  • being teased at ages 3–5
  • bad grades at ages 6–10
  • pressure to use drugs at ages 11–15
  • trouble at school or work at ages 16–22
  • family conflicts in adulthood
  • lack of money in old age

💡 Memory Hook

Teasing → grades → drugs → school/work → family → money.

📖 4. General Adaptation Syndrome

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• General Adaptation Syndrome : Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome describes the stress response as three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.

📝 Essential Points

• During the alarm stage, the sympathetic system activates and adrenal hormones raise heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar to provide rapid energy.

• During the resistance stage, continued stress hormones help the body resist the stressor while resources are gradually depleted and early alarm symptoms ease.

• The exhaustion stage begins when the body's resources are fully used, increasing the risk of high blood pressure, ulcers, weakened immunity, and extreme illness.

💡 Memory Hook

Alarm → resistance → exhaustion.

📖 5. Stress, Immunity, and Inflammation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Psychoneuroimmunology : The field that studies how psychological factors such as stress, emotion, learning, and behaviour affect the immune system.

★ Must-know

📌 Short-lived stress can temporarily activate immune responses, whereas chronic ongoing stress weakens the immune system.

• Psychological stress can make cortisol less effective at controlling inflammation, increasing inflammation and the risk of arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Further detail

• DHEA helps people tolerate stress and may regulate how stress affects the hippocampus.

💡 Memory Hook

Short-lived stress can activate immunity, whereas chronic stress weakens it.

📖 6. Stress and Chronic Disease

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Coronary Heart Disease : A condition in which waxy plaque builds up inside the heart's arteries.
• Type 2 Diabetes : A condition in which insulin becomes less effective as body size increases, with stress potentially worsening insulin resistance through increased cytokines.
• Cancer : A group of diseases in which cells divide uncontrollably, form tumours, damage organs, and can cause death.

📝 Essential Points

• After the 9/11 attacks, people who experienced severe stress had 53% more heart problems during the following three years.

• In a 35-year study of men, those with prolonged high stress were 45% more likely to develop diabetes than men without such prolonged stress.

💡 Memory Hook

Chronic stress → inflammation and metabolic disruption → heart disease, diabetes, and poorer cancer control.

📖 7. Pressure, Control, and Frustration

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Pressure : The feeling of being expected to behave in a certain way urgently or quickly because of an outside demand.
• Frustration : The psychological experience produced when a desired goal is blocked or a felt need remains unmet.

★ Must-know

📌 External frustration comes from losses, rejections, failures, or delays outside the person, whereas internal frustration occurs when a personal characteristic prevents goal attainment.

Further detail

📌 Persistence continues attempts to overcome frustration, whereas aggression is an act intended to cause harm and does not automatically follow frustration.

💡 Memory Hook

External frustration blocks a goal from outside; internal frustration blocks it through the person.

📖 8. Patterns of Psychological Conflict

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Conflict : A situation in which a person is caught between two or more goals, desires, or actions that cannot all be satisfied at once.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Approach–approach conflict involves two appealing goals and is usually relatively easy to resolve, whereas avoidance–avoidance conflict involves two unpleasant options and is highly stressful.

📌 Approach–avoidance conflict involves one goal with both attractive and unattractive qualities, whereas multiple approach–avoidance conflict involves several goals that each have positive and negative qualities.

💡 Memory Hook

Approach–approach → avoidance–avoidance → approach–avoidance → multiple approach–avoidance.

📖 9. Appraisal and Emotional Stress

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive-Mediation Theory : Richard Lazarus, cognitive-mediation theory of emotion — The view that a person's appraisal of a stressor determines how stressful it feels and which emotions follow.

★ Must-know

📌 Primary appraisal evaluates a stressor as a threat, challenge, or loss or harm, whereas secondary appraisal evaluates whether available resources can manage it.

Further detail

• Cognitive reappraisal can reinterpret a racing heartbeat as readiness for action rather than fear, reducing anxiety and speeding recovery after stress.

• Examples of negative emotions are:

  • fear
  • anger
  • sadness
  • guilt
  • anxiety

💡 Memory Hook

Primary appraisal → secondary appraisal → reappraisal.

📖 10. Problem and Emotion Focused Coping

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Problem-Focused Coping : Directly eliminating or changing the stressor through actions aimed at removing or reducing its source.
• Emotion-Focused Coping : Changing how a person feels or reacts emotionally to a stressor rather than changing the stressor itself, especially when the situation cannot be controlled.

📝 Essential Points

• Rumination about a possible future attack was associated with more severe stress symptoms, whereas humour can increase killer-cell activity after a humorous film, with some increase lasting up to 12 hours.

💡 Memory Hook

Problem-focused coping changes the stressor; emotion-focused coping changes the response.

📖 11. Meditation and Relaxation Techniques

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Meditation : A series of mental exercises that refocus attention, produce deep relaxation, and counter physiological stress reactions.

★ Must-know

• Progressive muscle relaxation deliberately tenses and then releases each muscle group, usually beginning with the feet and moving upward.

Further detail

• Meditation shifts brain activity toward theta and alpha waves while showing few delta waves, which are associated with sleep.

• Visualisation involves mentally placing oneself in a peaceful setting and engaging senses such as sound, smell, and touch to strengthen the calming effect.

💡 Memory Hook

Focus attention → relax the body → imagine a peaceful setting.

📖 12. Social Support and Health

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social Support : Help from friends, family, neighbours, and coworkers that may provide physical help, emotional comfort, financial assistance, advice, love, affection, or companionship.

★ Must-know

• Strong social support is associated with lower mortality from illness or injury, better symptom and pain management in breast cancer, improved cognitive functioning, healthier ageing, and longer life.

Further detail

• Social support can improve mental health and physical functioning in people living with lupus, cancer, or HIV and can benefit immune functioning.

📌 Positive emotions may improve health directly and by helping people build stronger social connections, whereas isolation reduces access to relationship-based support.

💡 Memory Hook

Supportive relationships → better coping and functioning → improved mental and physical health.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Types of Psychological Conflict

Conflict type	Goals involved	Typical outcome
Approach–approach	Two appealing goals	Win–win; relatively low stress
Avoidance–avoidance	Two unpleasant options	Lose–lose; high stress
Approach–avoidance	One goal with positive and negative qualities	Repeated indecision; very stressful
Multiple approach–avoidance	Several goals, each with positive and negative qualities	Complex comparison of alternatives