Psychology for Dummies (88 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
In This Chapter
Living under pressure
Keeping it together
Getting sick
Staying healthy
E very year around the same time I get sick. It never fails. Come October, I’ve got a cold. Is it the weather? Is it a cosmic curse? Somewhere along the line I made a connection between my getting sick and stress. When I was in school, it was the stress of midterms. Now, it’s the stress of the holidays. Something different stresses out each of us, and some of us can even get physically ill as a result.
Psychologists have worked hard over the years trying to figure out what stresses people out. Within the last 20 years or so, they’ve started to use their knowledge of human behavior and mental processes to learn more about what makes people sick and how people cope with illness. In this chapter, I introduce the concepts of stress and coping and the growing field of health psychology.
What is
stress?
When most people talk about stress, they talk about the things or events that stress them out — work, money, bills, kids, bosses, and so on. The western world is a pretty stressed out place. The strains and pace of modern life seem to get to all of us at one time or another. Sometimes, even the gadgets that we get to make our lives easier complicate things. Someone gave me a little hand-held computer to organize my life. I spent more time trying to figure out how to operate the thing than I did organizing my schedule. It seems quicker just to write things down on a calendar or in day planner than it is to mess with the computer. The problem is that even when I owned a day planner I never actually wrote anything in it.
We all have stress. Definitions of stress have ranged from descriptions of bodily reactions to our way of looking at stress. In 1997, Lavallo defined stress as a bodily or mental tension to something that knocks us off balance, either physically or mentally. When we have
equilibrium,
we’re maintaining a balance between our worlds and ourselves. Walter Cannon, in 1939, called this concept
homeostasis.
We feel stressed when we’re out of homeostatic balance. Basically, stress is change.
Hans Selye gave us one of the most famous theories of stress. His theory was based on something he called the
general adaptation syndrome (GAS).
The idea is that when we’re confronted with something that threatens either our physical or mental equilibrium we go through a series of changes:
Alarm stage:
Our initial reaction to whatever is stressing us out, called a
stressor.
Our brains and hormones are activated in order to provide our bodies with the energy we need to respond to the stressor.
Resistance stage:
The activation of the body system best suited to deal with the stressor. If the stressor requires that I run, like if I’m being chased by a pack of wild dogs, my nervous system and hormones make sure that I’ve got enough blood pumping to my legs to get the job done. Plus, extra energy is provided to my heart so that it can pump the blood faster. It’s a beautiful system — what a design!
Exhaustion:
The final stage. If the bodily system activated in the resistance stage gets the job done, our trip down GAS lane ends, but if the stressor continues, we enter this final stage. When we’re exhausted, our bodies are no longer able to resist the stress, and they become vulnerable to disease and breakdown.
Our bodies are not the only things at work when we’re stressed. Numerous cognitive (thinking) and emotional responses are also going on. Arnold Lazarus stated that during times of stress, we go through a process of emotional analysis. It’s kind of like having a little psychologist inside of our heads. We ask ourselves to determine the current significance of the problem and its importance for the future. How does this stress work? We make two important
appraisals,
or evaluations —
primary
and
secondary appraisals.
In most stressful situations, something important is at stake; otherwise, we wouldn’t be stressed about it. The evaluation of “what is at stake” is our primary appraisal of the situation. At this stage, situations are classified into one of three categories:
Threat:
An example of a threatening situation is a situation that requires a response. If I’m standing in line at the grocery store and someone cuts in front of me, I’m not forced to respond. But if a guy grabs me by the shirt and threatens to kick my butt if I don’t let him in front of me, I have to respond in one way or another. Like run!
Harm-loss:
A harm-loss situation might involve getting hurt in some way — physically, mentally, or emotionally. A blow to my pride may be seen as a harm-loss situation.
Challenge:
I could also look a threatening person straight in the eye and see her threat as a challenge. Instead of seeing the situation in dangerous terms, I might see it as an opportunity to try out those Judo lessons I’ve been taking.
After I figure out what’s at stake, I take stock of the resources that I have available to deal with the situation. This is secondary appraisal. I may take a look at my previous experience with this type of situation. What did I do when this happened before? I also take a look at how I feel about myself. If I see myself as a capable guy, I’m likely to get less stressed out.
Hamilton viewed stress as something more than the actual situation. Hamilton’s philosophy was that it all depends on how you look at it. Stress is not a situation. It’s a consequence of how a situation and a person’s response to that situation interact. If I’m called on to pitch for the final out in the bottom of the ninth inning in the World Series and I come through, I’ll likely be less stressed. But what if I blow it? If I give up the winning homerun, you can bet that I’ll be feeling some stress, not to mention dreading the unemployment line. If I’m deficient in my coping responses, I’m more likely to feel stressed out.
Stress can also be a product of how much control I think I have over events and situations. Sells proposed that stress arises when people lack an adequate response to a situation, and the consequences of failure are important. Seeing ourselves as having little or no control can have negative psychological and physical consequences.
Are you the “master of your domain?” I remember a cartoon from my childhood called
He-Man,
and He-Man had this phrase that he yelled out when he was getting ready to kick butt, “I have the power!” It would be nice if I could just yell that out and be ready to take on the world, and the bad guys too. In 1982, Mandler defined
mastery
as the thought or perception that things in an individual’s environment can be brought under his or her control. Sounds like He-Man to me.