Health and Wellbeing - Social Psychology

What is stress?

When the demand of the situation is perceived to exceed our capabilities

• This is a subjected appraisal of the situation

1.) Catstrophes (COVID)

2.) Major life events

3.) Daily hassels

What is the stress and coping process?

Background

Stressful event

Appraisal

Coping

Health outcome

How do we measure stress?

Self reports

• Daily diaries

• Interviews

Physiological measures

• Levels of cortisol

• Stress hormone levels

What makes PTSD different than colloquial “PTSD”?

It is enduring

(The trauma doesn’t have to happen directly to you. You can witness it.)

Is change per se necessarily harmful?

NO. The impact of change depends on who the person is and how change is interpreted.

• It depends on how you react to the change.

  • A part of the coping process is determining if the situation is good or bad. You need to have an awareness of your situation.

Positive stressors still elicit a stress response. This is usually accompanied with positive emotions.

What is the three-stage process?

Alarm

Resistance (how do we fight this?)

Exhaustion

• This is for short physical emergencies

Fight (for women, this can look different. When they are helping someone, they are fighting against the thing causing harm to the other person), flight, freeze, fawn (befriend)

The primary toxic ingredient in coronary heart disease is..

• CHD-narrowing of the blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to the heart

HOSTILITY

• angry

• resentful

• cynical

• suspicious

• mistrustful

Hostility - being tense.. sooo, this is tensing your blood vessels. **Visuals to help you remember this?**

A part of coping process is…

Recognition of the emotions and awareness of the situation

Can brief stressors enhance the immune system? Where does this go wrong?

YES

Chronic stress is bad for the immune system

Autoimmune disease research is usually about..

WOMEN

Negative emotional states cause both…

1.) Unhealthy behaviors (this can lead directly to illness)

• Biting nails, eating, speeding.

AND

2.) Stress hormones

Both of these lead to a weakened immune system —> illness

What is broken heart syndrome?

A stress response

Where your body gets into a heightened response, your body can’t sustain that level of arousal. This usually happens with elderly folks that have weakened immune systems and heart functions anyway.

What is a resistant to sickness?

Being sociable.

The longer the stress goes on, the more higher your risk of getting a cold.

Depressive explanatory style.

A tendency to attribute bad events to internal factors rather than external,

Stable rather than unstable, (unlikely to change)

And global rather than specific (no matter where I go, this will always happen. That this event will bleed into other aspects of their lives)

Resilient people share three characteristics. What are they?

How do people get resilient? Going through some shit. They are more resilient because they have been exposed to it more and have overcome it.

1.) commitment

2.) challenge

3.) control

Why doesn’t Dr. B like the word resilience? She thinks that this isn’t something people have. We shouldn’t look at looking at a bad thing as a good thing and ignore what caused the pain in the first place.

The person that went through the trauma shouldn’t have to bear the burden of being resistant. By why did they have to go through it?

YOU ARE SO STRONG BECAUSE OF YOUR TRAUMA! That is terrible. You are only as good as the shit you went through. You are only strong because you went through hard stuff.

What is self-efficacy?

Feelings of competence.

• Persistence, trying again

What is the difference between competency and confidence?

Optimists tend to be __ than pessimists.

HEALTHIER

This is expecting good instead of bad

What is the difference between dispositional optimism and resiliency?

Alex makes this a mind game.. “Hear me out…!!” Let’s go to the drawing board. Making their own story. “Well, what if this happens.. and then this happens!!” Alex makes it a thought experiment that is fun.

What is Pollyanna’s Health?

Positive thinking offers potential benefits to a patient’s health, quality of life, and emotional well-being.

This does NOT mean that those who are sick have a bad attitude. Positive thinking maintains good health and helps you bounce back. Not necessarily getting sick.

Hopelessness increases…

Mortality rates.

What does adaptive coping mechanisms?

Good coping mechanisms.

What is problem-focused coping?

Cognitive and behavioral efforts to reduce stress by overcoming the source of the problem.

• This states that you have to meet a problem head-on. Confront and control and not avoid.

How can this backfire?

Can cause problems if it leads us to develop an overcontrolling, stress-inducing, type A pattern of behavior.

Physiologically and psychologically taxing. Someone comes in very emotionally charged, and now you want them to dig deep? That is hard. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

• This is a really good approach when the person is not heightened. Fix the surface-level problems first and then tackle the main problem.

  • You can’t just identify what the problem is. You have to sit with it and understand why you feel like that.

What is emotion-focused coping?

Efforts to manage our emotional reactions to stressors rather than trying to change the stressors themselves. Control what you can control. You can only control (regulate) yourself.

• Dr. B likes the word regulate rather than control. To control you want to change the emotion rather than understand the emotion.

  • Dr. B doesn’t believe in positive or negative emotions. They are just emotions. We like some more than others, but emotions are just giving us information.

    • Sadness tells us we are missing something. Sadness tells you a story, the same as happiness.

      • Dr. B uses the analogy of shutting down and repressing emotions. You are locking the emotion in the box, put it in the closet, and lock the door. HOWEVER!! You are going to need to get into that closet for something else and the locked away emotion is going to fly and hit you on the head when you don’t expect it. You never truly deal with it.

What is proactive coping?

Consists of upfront efforts to ward off or modify the onset of a stressful event.

• When you feel something arising, you seek out coping mechanisms before it turns bad.

  • I know I am stressed and insecure about teaching.. I am going to call my friends or pray or do something that makes me feel better before it gets bad.

  • This is an alarm system.

What is the issue with the phrase, “all healers provide social support.”?

This puts an expectation on mental health providers.

If all therapy was about the silver lining…

You cannot see how it is affecting you. "The textbook states ‘All therapies offer a ray of hope.”

• Therapy gets harder before it gets better. There is not a lot of hope in this statement. Therapy is not always about happy (hope or sunlight). This is damaging because if people don’t come out of therapy happy with this phrase in mind, they think it isn’t working.

• Even if you don’t have hope, therapy can still be working for you.

__ are the most criminalized mental health disorders in our society.

Drug and alcohol abuse.

We believe that people with this disorder don’t have a choice in treatment.

• ACTUALLY! People do better when they get to choose their treatment plan when they have drug and alcohol disorder.

  • Relapse shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. You have to reframe your mind that this is the expectation. Relapse happens all the time. Is something missing?

There are more deaths from __ abuse withdrawals than any other drugs.

Alcohol.

• This has the hardest toll on the body.

We put these expectations onto …

People with mental illnesses. We are saying that they have to think and act a certain way.

• Dr. B was once in a psychiatric inpatient facility in the hospital. One lady, who was not a threat to themselves or others, was totally aware of what was happening in the unit and didn’t want to be there. She was just living her life. We were imposing our normalcy onto people who are fine living on the streets or being in their own world.

We have to be careful on applying a one size fits all solution to mental illnessess.

There is not a linear progression of how we treat illnesses. Some people do this better and some people respond better to this. We have to think about the culture.

• When someone says they want to let loose and have 15 drinks, but the people around them also drink a lot and the person has never had a blackout episode and they don’t drive. Is this really a problem?

• If other people are telling you it is a problem, is this an implication that there is a strain on their social relationships?

• Don’t always put your biases on your clients. You have to meet them where they are at. If they want to drop their drinks down to 7, it isn’t abstinence, but this is still helping the client minimize.

• Don’t problem solve in being shameful!!! Work with them and allow them to make decisions.

  • “Well, Dr. B, I don’t like 7 drinks, but I want to take it down to 5 drinks to avoid the hangover the next morning.” This isn’t abstinence, but this is a start and the client wants it.

People seem to plateau in happiness when they reach around $___(account for inflation now).

$77,000.