Coping with Stress

Social Support

  • Interpersonal relations with people, groups, or community

    • Can provide emotional comfort, financial assistance, and personal resources

Four Social Ties that Help Deal with Stress:

  1. Marriage

  2. Contact with friends

  3. Church membership

  4. Formal/informal group association

Gaining Control

  1. Behavioural Control: Using problem focused coping to gain an ability to do something to reduce the impact of a stressful situation/prevent reccurence

    • Better than Avoidance-oriented Coping: Avoidance

  2. Cognitive Control: Through emotion-focused coping we have the ability to cognitively restructure or think different about negative emotions

  3. Emotional Control: Emotional regulation gives us the ability to suppress and express emotions

    • Emotion-Focused Coping can be better for high stress scenarios instead fo problem-focused coping

  4. Decisional Control: Ability to choose among alternative course of actions

    1. Analysis Paralysis: Presented with decisions all at once can overwhelm a person and lead to not making a decision

  5. Informational Control (proactive coping): Ability to acquire information about a stressful event

Catharsis: Process of releasing negative emotions/painful feelings

  • Useful if it involves problem solving and constructive efforts

  • Not helpful if it reinforces a sense of helplessness

  • Cathartic release of anger is not helpful because it increases an individual's anger feeling and aggressive behavior

Individual Differences of Stress

  1. Hardiness:

    1. Sees changes as a challenges instead fo a threat

    2. Are committed to life and work

    3. Believe you can control event

  2. Optimistic: More productive, focuses, and handle frustration better

    • Shows lower level of mortality and better immune system response/health responses

Spirituality and Religious Involvement

Lower mortality rates, improved immune system, lower blood pressure, and greater ability to recover from illness

Provides:

  1. Self-Control

  2. Sense of Community

  3. Meaning or purpose

Ruminating: Focusing on negatives and endlessly analyzing what caused problems

Flexible Coping

Ability to adjust coping strategies in different situations

  • VmPFC is a key region of the adaptive behavioural coping circuit