The Healthy Life

  • Most college students often experience insomnia

  • Depression symptoms or ADHD symptoms, both of which can contribute to insomnia

  • 7 hours a night isn’t enough

Health Psychology focuses on the role of psychology in maintaining health, and in preventing and treating illness, both mental and physical

Biopsychosocial Model of Health

  • Biology, psychology, and social factors are just as important to consider in the development of disease as factors like germs and viruses

  • This replaces an older view that focused primarily on pathogens

  • The biopsychosocial model of health accommodates findings that illustrate the mind-body connection—that is, that psychology can influence the body, and vice versa

  • Psychosomatic medicine: an interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on the biological, psychological, and social factors that contribute to physiological changes over time

  • Placebo effect: A beneficial psychological effect that results from the mental and emotional reaction to the feeling of being helped

Stress and Health

  • Ongoing theme in class: Chronic stress is BAD for health

  • How bad? = People under a lot of stress most likely got the cold virus injected into their nose. Notable risk factor in determining if people got sick

  • Stress suppresses the immune system

General Adaptation Syndrome (Selye, 1946)

  1. Mobilization of physiological resources

  • Body becomes temporarily vulnerable (shock) and then reacts by producing a fight-or-flight response

    2. Coping/Resistance '

  • Body spends resources to maintain energy during stressful events

    3.Exhaustion

  • Body runs out of resources, panic sets in, and health declines

Resilience

  • How we keep people from reaching exhaustion

  • We can work on understanding and improving patients’ resilience

Five main factors to influence peoples ability to bounce back after a negative or stressful event:

  1. Coping

  2. Control and self-efficacy

  3. Social relationship

  4. Dispositions and emotions

  5. Stress management

Coping

  • Problem-focused coping: Actively addressing the problem that is the source of stress in order to attempt to solve the issues (ex if stressed for test STUDY)

  • Emotion-focused coping:Working to regulate the emotions that come from stress (taking a break while studying for an exam)

  • Effective problem-focused coping tends to have a greater impact on mental wellness than emotion-focused coping does, but matching the strategy to the stressor is equally important

Control and Self-Efficacy

  • Control: Feelings as if you can change the environment or your behavior

  • Belief that you have control over a situation can help you cope with stress— even if you don’t actually have control

  • Even having control over something small in an otherwise low-control situation can improve health and increase lifespan

  • Feeling a sense of control in a threatening situation can lower stress hormone levels, relative to feeling like you are not in control

  • Feeling you can control your behavior leads to better implementation of healthy behaviors

Importance of Relationships

  • The health impact of social isolation is comparable to smoking cigarettes regularly

  • The tend-and-befriend response may have evolved specifically to motivate us to seek relationships in times of stress

  • social support is the perception and or actuality that we have a social network we can rely on in times of stress

  • Social integration: The size of a person’s social network

Dispositions

  • Type A and Type B—characterizations of one’s sense of urgency in life as determined by cardiologists looking for commonalities in their patients

  • Type A: competitive, hostile, impatient, time urgent

  • Type B: easy-going—less competitive, aggressive, and hostile

    -Responding with anger regularly to events exacerbates the stress reaction

    -In the Big Five, this is also an aspect of neuroticism or low agreeableness, which are related to less life satisfaction and more isolation

Interaction of Psychology and Medicine

  • People vary in their likelihood of going to the doctor, based on socioeconomic factors, age, and gender

  • People who are less likely to go to the doctor may search for info online instead and find inaccurate info that seems credible