PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley Emotions, Stress and Health PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley © 2013 Worth Publishers

Module 39: Coping with Stress and Promoting Health

How to go from coping to thriving Problem-focused and emotion-focused coping Perceived control and learned helplessness Benefits of Optimism, Social support Reducing stress effects with Aerobic Exercise The power of Faith communities Complementary and Alternative Medicine No animation.

Promoting Health Ways that help some people to reduce levels of stress, and to improve health: aerobic exercise relaxation and meditation participation in communities of faith alternative medicine Some ways to reduce the health effects of stress include: address the stressors. soothe emotions. increase one’s sense of control over stressors. exchange optimism for pessimism. get social support. Click to reveal bullets. Instructor: this can serve as an overview of the rest of the chapter, though the topics coming up won’t always tie this well to the theme of promoting health. One section, on optimism, does not have its own slide; this is because the section does not offer new material except for some correlational studies that don’t provide evidence that improving optimism causes improvements in health.

Coping with Stress Problem-focused coping means reducing the stressors, such as by working out a conflict, or tackling a difficult project. Emotion-focused coping means reducing the emotional impact of stress by getting support, comfort, and perspective from others. Risk: ignoring the problem. We might focus on this style of coping when we perceive the stressor as something we cannot change. Risk: magnifying emotional distress, especially if trying to change something that’s difficult to change (e.g. another person’s traits). Click to reveal bullets.

Stress factor: Perceived Level of Control Experiment: the left and middle rats below received shocks. The rat on the left was able to turn off the shocks for both rats. Which rat had the worst stress and health problems? Only the middle, subordinate rat had increased ulcers. It is not the level of shock, but the level of control over the shock, which created stress. Click to reveal bullets.

Promoting Health: Social Support Having close relationships is associated with improved health, immune functioning, and longevity. Social support, including from pets, provides a calming effect that reduces blood pressure and stress hormones. Confiding in others helps manage painful feelings. Laughter helps too. Click to reveal bullets. “Well, I think you’re wonderful.”

Aerobic Exercise and Health Aerobic exercise triggers certain genes to produce proteins which guard against more than 20 chronic diseases and conditions. Aerobic exercise reduces the risk of heart disease, cognitive decline and dementia, and early death. Aerobic exercise refers to sustained activity that raises heart rate and oxygen consumption. Ultimate (Frisbee): you must run often to “get open” for a pass, then run more to cover the other team and block their passes. Click to reveal bullets and text box. Instructor: if you are not familiar with the sport of “Ultimate,” here’s a two-sentence summary. You and up to six teammates make passes (with a disc, usually not a “Frisbee” brand) to each other down a field to score by catching the disc in an end zone. Any incomplete pass is a turnover and the defense instantly picks up the disc and becomes the offense, making passes to move the disc toward the other end zone. Another comment to make about aerobic exercise in Ultimate: you can’t run with the disc, so catching the disc and looking for a teammate to throw to gives you a running break of about two to ten seconds (the time limit for making the next pass).

Aerobic Exercise and Mental Health Aerobic exercise reduces depression and anxiety, and improves management of stress. How do we know? Aerobic exercise is correlated with high confidence, vitality, and energy, and good mood. Is there causation? Perhaps depression simply reduces exercise. One study establishing causation: mildly depressed young women randomly assigned to an exercise group showed reduced depression caused by exercise alone. Click to reveal bullets.

Lifestyle Modification In one study, a control group was given diet, medication, and exercise advice. An experimental group practiced lifestyle modification, a plan to slow down the pace of one’s life, accept imperfection, and renew faith. Click to reveal bullets and graph. Result: modifying lifestyle led to reduced heart attack rates.

Relaxation and Meditation Use of relaxation techniques can reduce headaches, high blood pressure, anxiety, and insomnia, and improve immune functioning. People who meditate can learn to create a relaxation response: relaxed muscles, lower blood pressure, and slowed heart rate and breathing. Meditation also increases brain activity associated with positive emotions. Steps to get the relaxation response: focus attention on breathing, a focus word, and relaxing muscles from toes upward. Click to reveal bullets. Instructor: before clicking to make any bullets appear, you might make an introductory comment to connect to the previous slide, such as “One component of healthy lifestyle modification is spending more time in relaxation.”

Religious Involvement and Health While attendance at religious services may not directly save lives, it may make other healthy practices more likely. Religious attendance seems to have results, especially for men, comparable to the benefit of physically healthy lifestyle choices. No animation.

Religious Involvement and Health: Intervening Factors The health impact of religious involvement may be indirect. Health may improve because of the lifestyle and emotional factors associated with religious involvement, and not [just] the faith. No animation.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine These various types of medicine are “alternative” as they wait for broader acceptance and more empirical support. Some, like acupuncture and hypnosis, seem effective but may be based on a strong placebo effect. Click to reveal all rows of the table.

Behavioral Medicine Lesson As with other areas of psychology, a study of emotions, stress and health teaches us: the body constantly interacts with the mind. psychological phenomena have connections to physiological phenomena. More than 2000 years ago, in a Sanskrit text called the Santi Parva, it was written, “There are two kinds of diseases, physical and mental. Each springs from the other. None of them can be seen existing independently.” No animation. This quote is from the first complete English translation of the Mahabharata by Kisari Mohan Ganguli in the late 1800s; the wording is slightly different than in the text. Myers refers to the Santi Parva as a “sage” but it is actually a philosophical chapter in a larger text called the Mahabharata, composed between approximately the sixth and first centuries B.C.E. in present-day India and Pakistan. The Mahabharata is one of the longest poetic works in the world; it has about 100,000 verses and many long prose passages, about 1.8 million total words.