Stress and Stress Management | ISC Class 12 Psychology Notes

This note covers the meaning and basic nature of stress, strain and eustress, the three types of stress, stress as a process (stressors, overload/underload, cognitive appraisal), the General Adaptation Syndrome, the external and internal causes of stress including personality variables and the nature of men and women who handle stress differently, the effects of stress on health and on performance, the ineffective defence-mechanism strategies of coping, and the effective strategies of stress management and of promoting positive health and well-being.

What is stress and what is its basic nature?

Stress can be described as the pattern of responses an organism makes to a stimulus event that disturbs its equilibrium and exceeds a person's ability to cope.

Hans Selye, called the father of modern stress research, defined stress as "the non-specific response of the body to any demand", meaning that regardless of the cause of the threat, the individual responds with a similar physiological pattern of reactions.

Many researchers disagree with this view, arguing that the stress response is not as general as Selye suggests, since different stressors can produce different patterns of reaction and different individuals have different characteristic modes of response.

Stress is not simply a factor that resides in the individual or in the environment.

It is embedded in an ongoing transactional process involving individuals interacting with their social and cultural environment, appraising those encounters, and attempting to cope with the issues that arise.

Stress is therefore a dynamic mental and cognitive state, a disruption of homeostasis (the body's internal balance) that gives rise to a need to restore that balance.

The word "stress" comes from the Latin strictus (tight or narrow) and stringere (to tighten), reflecting the internal feelings of tightness many people report under stress.

Definition: Stress. "The non-specific response of the body to any demand" (Selye); more broadly, the pattern of responses an organism makes to a stimulus event that disturbs its equilibrium and exceeds its ability to cope.

What are strain, eustress and distress, and what are the types of stress?

A stressor is an event that causes the body to give the stress response, such as noise, crowding, a bad relationship or daily commuting. The individual's reaction to such an external stressor is called strain.

Stress is not inherently bad: eustress is the term used to describe the level of stress that is good for a person and is one of a person's best assets for achieving peak performance and managing minor crises.

Eustress, however, has the potential of turning into distress, the manifestation of stress that causes wear and tear on the body.

Three major, interrelated types of stress are usually distinguished: physical and environmental stress, psychological stress and social stress. Physical stresses are demands that change the state of the body, such as overexertion, a poor diet, injury or insufficient sleep.

Environmental stresses are unavoidable aspects of surroundings such as noise, crowding, heat or cold, as well as catastrophic events such as fire, earthquakes or floods.

Psychological stresses are generated within the mind itself, such as frustration, conflict, and internal or social pressures.

Social stresses are induced externally through interaction with other people, such as a death or illness in the family, strained relationships, or trouble with neighbours; these vary widely from person to person depending on temperament.

How does stress work as a process: stressors, overload/underload and cognitive appraisal?

Stress is best understood as a process rather than a single event. Too much stress can produce unpleasant effects and cause performance to deteriorate (overload), while too little stress may leave a person listless and low on motivation, performing slowly and less efficiently (underload).

Stressors can be negative events (threatening, harmful) or positive events (such as a planned house move), both of which can cause stress if several occur together.

Based on the cognitive theory of stress proposed by Lazarus, an individual's response to a stressful situation largely depends on how the event is perceived and appraised.

Lazarus distinguished two types of cognitive appraisal: primary appraisal, the perception of a new or changing event as positive, neutral or negative, with negative events further assessed for harm (damage already done), threat (possible future damage), or challenge (confident expectation of being able to cope); and secondary appraisal, the assessment of one's own coping abilities and resources (mental, physical, personal or social) to meet that harm, threat or challenge.

This two-level appraisal determines a person's cognitive, behavioural, emotional and physiological responses to the same external event, which is why the same event can be stressful for one person and not for another.

What are the stages of the General Adaptation Syndrome (Selye's model)?

Selye studied what happens to the body when stress is prolonged by subjecting animals to stressors such as high temperature, X-rays and insulin injections over a long period, and by observing hospital patients with various injuries and illnesses.

He noticed a similar pattern of bodily response in all of them, which he called the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). It has three stages.

Selye's model has been criticised for assigning only a limited role to psychological factors in stress, since the psychological appraisal of events is important in determining how stressed a person feels.

Draw a graph with "level of resistance" on the vertical axis and "time/duration of stressor" on the horizontal axis.

Show resistance dipping briefly at the alarm reaction, rising above normal through the resistance stage, and then falling sharply below normal at exhaustion, with a horizontal dashed "normal level of resistance" line running across all three stages.

What are the common causes of stress: external and situational?

External or situational sources of stress include major life events, both planned (such as moving house) and unpredicted (such as the break-up of a long-term relationship); when several such events occur within a short period, they are harder to cope with and make a person more prone to symptoms of stress.

Minor hassles of everyday life are the personal stresses endured daily, such as noisy surroundings, commuting, quarrelsome neighbours, or shortages of electricity and water; the more stress people report from daily hassles, the poorer their psychological well-being tends to be.

Work-related causes arise from the demands and pressures of a job, including frequent hassles in certain occupations.

The physical environment contributes unavoidable stresses such as air pollution, crowding, noise, and seasonal heat or cold, as well as catastrophic or traumatic events such as fire, train or road accidents, earthquakes and tsunamis, the effects of which may appear only after some lapse of time and persist as anxiety, flashbacks or intrusive thoughts.

Research using life-event scales shows that the mean number of stressful life events experienced over a year without producing overt illness is approximately two, though the correlation between life events and susceptibility to a particular illness is low, indicating only a weak association.

What are the common causes of stress: internal and dispositional?

Internal or dispositional sources of stress lie within the person's own personality and attitudes. Frustration results from the blocking of needs and motives by something or someone that hinders a person from reaching a desired goal, caused for instance by social discrimination, interpersonal hurt or low grades.

Conflicts occur between two or more incompatible needs or motives, such as a conflict between continuing studies and taking up a job, or a conflict of values when pressured to act against one's own beliefs.

Internal pressures stem from self-imposed, often unrealistic, expectations such as "I must do everything perfectly". Social pressures arise from people who make excessive demands, or with whom there is a personality clash.

Personality variables also shape how differently people handle stress. Optimism is the inclination to expect favourable life outcomes, while pessimism is the tendency to anticipate disasters; optimists tend to assume that adversity can be handled successfully and use more problem-focused coping, seeking advice and help from others, whereas pessimists tend to ignore the source of stress and use strategies such as giving up the goal or denying that stress exists.

A person's sense of locus of control, whether they believe outcomes are controlled internally (by their own effort) or externally (by luck, fate or others), and their broader personality type, also determine how threatening a given situation feels.

What are Type A and Type B personalities?

The cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman, while studying heart disease, classified people into Type A and Type B personalities. People with a Type A personality are highly motivated and competitive, lack patience, feel short of time, are always in a hurry and feel burdened with work; they find it hard to slow down and relax, and they are easily angered and hostile.

Because they keep themselves under constant pressure, Type A people are more susceptible to hypertension and coronary heart disease; hostility is the component of Type A behaviour most closely linked to heart disease. A Type B personality is best understood as the absence of these traits: such people are relaxed, easy-going and patient, and handle the same demands with less strain.

Later researchers added further types: a Type C personality, described as co-operative and unassertive, has been linked to a higher risk of cancer, and a Type D personality is characterised by a proneness to depression.

Note: Type A and Type B personality. Type A individuals are typically competitive, time-urgent, impatient and easily angered, and are considered more vulnerable to stress-related heart disease; Type B individuals are typically relaxed, easy-going and less hurried, and are considered less prone to such stress effects.

How do men and women handle stress differently?

Men and women often differ in the kinds of stress they report and in the ways they respond to it. Women more often describe stress arising from the demands of managing several roles at once, such as home, family and work, and they are more likely to seek out and use social support, talking over a problem with friends and family.

Men more often report stress tied to work, performance and achievement, and are somewhat more likely to use problem-focused action or, at times, avoidance and distraction rather than talking about feelings.

These are general tendencies rather than fixed rules: many men seek support and many women act directly on the problem. Personality, upbringing, culture and the particular situation shape an individual's response more than sex alone.

One well-known finding is that women exposed to stressful life events who had a close friend were less likely to be depressed and had fewer medical complications during pregnancy, which shows how strongly social support buffers stress for women.

How does stress affect health?

Emotional, physiological, cognitive and behavioural effects

Stress produces four major kinds of effects: emotional, physiological, cognitive and behavioural. Emotional effects include mood swings, erratic behaviour that can alienate family and friends, anxiety, depression and increased psychological tension; examination anxiety is one common example, where high test anxiety produces tense, apprehensive and emotionally aroused reactions that interfere with concentration and performance.

Physiological effects occur because stress increases the production of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, producing changes in heart rate, blood pressure, metabolism and physical activity; useful for short bursts, but damaging to the body in the long term.

Cognitive effects include poor concentration and reduced short-term memory, leading to faulty decisions. Behavioural effects include eating less nutritious food, increased use of caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol or tranquillisers, disrupted sleep, increased absenteeism and reduced work performance.

Effects on physical illness and the immune system

When stress is prolonged, it affects the internal mechanism and balance of the body. It has been implicated in hypertension (high blood pressure), heart problems (cardiovascular disorders), ulcers, and psychosomatic conditions such as asthma, allergies and headaches; researchers estimate that stress plays a role in fifty to seventy per cent of all physical illnesses, and that sixty per cent of medical visits are primarily for stress-related symptoms.

Diabetes is another illness linked to stress. Under prolonged stress the body releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which raise the level of sugar in the blood so that extra energy is ready for action. When this raised blood sugar is repeated or lasts a long time, the body's handling of sugar is disturbed, and stress is therefore counted among the factors linked to diabetes, along with lifestyle changes such as poor diet and inactivity.

Asthma is a psychosomatic condition in which stress can trigger or worsen attacks. Stress increases arousal and rapid breathing, and the emotional tension that comes with it can tighten the air passages and make breathing harder in a person already prone to asthma.

Stress can also impair the immune system: the field of psychoneuroimmunology studies the links between the mind, brain and immune system.

White blood cells (leucocytes), including T cells, B cells and natural killer cells, identify and destroy antigens such as viruses; reduced natural killer cell activity has been found in highly stressed people, including students facing important examinations and bereaved or depressed persons, weakening defence against infection and even cancer.

How does stress affect performance, and what is burnout?

Stress and performance are related in a curved, not a straight-line, fashion: a moderate, eustress-like level of arousal tends to support peak performance, while stress that is distracting, mild but prolonged, or set against tasks of increasing difficulty tends to reduce performance.

Chronic daily stress diverts a person's attention away from self-care, and when demands from the environment and constraints are high while support from family and friends is low, people experience exhaustion and attitudinal problems.

This state of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion, often work-related, is known as burnout, seen in signs such as chronic fatigue, weakness, low energy, irritability, and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

Lifestyle also shapes the link between stress and performance. Stressed individuals are more likely to expose themselves to pathogens, eat poorly, sleep less and engage in smoking or alcohol misuse, behaviours whose long-term damaging effects are often underestimated because of their short-term, pleasant relief.

By contrast, a balanced diet, regular exercise and family support, combined with positive thinking, enhance both health and sustained performance under pressure.

Plot "performance" on the vertical axis against "level of stress/arousal" on the horizontal axis as an inverted-U shaped curve: performance is low at very low arousal, rises to a peak at a moderate (eustress) level, and then falls away as arousal becomes excessive (distress), especially for difficult tasks.

Ineffective versus effective strategies of coping with stress

Coping is a dynamic, situation-specific reaction to stress: a set of concrete responses intended to resolve the problem and reduce stress. People who cope poorly tend to show an impaired immune response and diminished natural killer cell activity.

Some strategies are largely ineffective because they distort or avoid reality rather than resolving the underlying problem, while others are effective because they directly reduce the physiological and psychological impact of stress or change the situation itself.

Defence mechanisms are the classic ineffective strategies: rationalization is justifying an unacceptable action or failure with a more acceptable but false explanation; projection is attributing one's own unacceptable feelings or faults to someone else;

reaction formation is expressing the opposite of one's true, unacceptable feeling; regression is reverting to an earlier, less mature pattern of behaviour under stress; repression is unconsciously pushing a distressing thought or memory out of awareness;

displacement is redirecting an emotion, often anger, from its true source to a safer target; and sublimation is channelling an unacceptable impulse into a socially acceptable and often constructive activity.

These mechanisms can give short-term relief but do not resolve the original stressor and can become unhelpful habits if relied on repeatedly.

How do problem-focused and emotion-focused coping differ?

Coping is a dynamic, situation-specific reaction to stress: a set of concrete responses to stressful situations or events that are intended to resolve the problem and reduce stress. People who cope poorly with stress show an impaired immune response and diminished activity of natural killer cells.

Lazarus and Folkman conceptualised coping as a dynamic process rather than an individual trait. Coping refers to constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to master, reduce or tolerate the internal or external demands created by the stressful transaction.

Coping serves to allow the individual to manage or alter a problem and to regulate the emotional response to that problem. According to them, coping responses can be divided into two types, problem-focused and emotion-focused.

Both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping are necessary when facing stressful situations, but research suggests that people generally tend to use the former more often than the latter.

Which style a person leans on depends on the appraisal of the event and on the resources available, so the same person may use different styles for different stressors.

What effective relaxation and meditative techniques help manage stress?

Relaxation training is an active skill that reduces symptoms of stress and lowers the chance of illnesses such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

Relaxation typically begins in the lower part of the body and progresses upward to the facial muscles so that the whole body relaxes, with deep breathing used alongside muscle relaxation to calm the mind.

1. Sit or lie down in a quiet, comfortable position with eyes closed.
2. Begin tensing and then releasing each muscle group starting from the feet and lower body.
3. Use slow, deep breathing throughout to calm the mind while each muscle group relaxes.
4. Progress gradually upward, group by group, until the facial muscles are reached, so that the whole body is relaxed.

Biofeedback is a procedure to monitor and reduce the physiological aspects of stress by giving a person feedback about their current physiological activity, usually combined with relaxation training; it has three stages, developing awareness of a particular physiological response such as heart rate, learning to control that response in quiet conditions, and transferring that control to everyday life.

Massage relieves muscular tension built up under stress. Meditation, in brief, is a sequence of learned techniques for refocusing attention that brings about an altered state of consciousness, with such thorough concentration that the meditator becomes unaware of outside stimulation.

Yoga contributes several limbs to stress management, defined as follows: yama (ethical restraints or self-discipline in conduct towards others), niyama (personal observances of self-discipline towards oneself), asana (physical postures), pranayama (regulation and control of the breath) and pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses from external objects).

Stretching exercises such as yogic asanas have a calming effect, while aerobic exercises such as jogging, swimming and cycling increase the body's arousal level and work as a stress buffer.

How can positive health and well-being be promoted?

Exercise, diet and self-care

Positive health is more than the absence of disease; it includes a healthy body, high-quality personal relationships, a sense of purpose, self-regard, mastery of life's tasks, and resilience to stress, trauma and change.

Exercise provides an active outlet for the physiological arousal of stress, improving the efficiency of the heart and lungs, maintaining circulation, lowering blood pressure and strengthening the immune system; regular practice of at least four sessions a week of about thirty minutes, each with a warm-up, exercise and cool-down phase, is recommended.

A balanced diet eaten as three main meals a day can lift mood, give energy, improve circulation and strengthen the immune system, whereas stress often leads people to seek "comfort foods" high in fat, salt and sugar.

Self-care keeps a person physically and emotionally prepared for everyday stresses, including attention to breathing patterns, since stressed people tend towards rapid, shallow chest breathing while relaxed breathing is slow and diaphragm-centred.

Life skills, stress resistant personality, social support and positive thinking

Life skills such as assertiveness (communicating feelings, needs and opinions clearly and confidently), time management, rational thinking (challenging distorted thinking and irrational beliefs), improving relationships through listening, expressing and accepting, and overcoming unhelpful habits such as perfectionism and procrastination, can all be learned and improved.

A Stress Resistant Personality is one that stays healthy even under high stress. Studies by Kobasa showed that people with high levels of stress but low levels of illness share three characteristics, referred to as the personality traits of hardiness, or "the three Cs": commitment, a sense of personal involvement in work, family, hobbies and social life; control, a sense of purpose and direction and the belief that one can influence events; and challenge, seeing changes in life as normal and positive rather than as a threat.

Social support, the availability of people who care about, value and love a person, is positively related to health and well-being, and reduces psychological distress such as depression or anxiety during stressful times; it can be tangible (material aid), informational, or emotional.

Positive thinking and a positive attitude, including accepting responsibility, tolerating different viewpoints and retaining a sense of humour, further buffer the effects of stress.

Going beyond the syllabus

These ideas extend the unit and are not needed for the questions on it. They are included to widen understanding of how people cope with stress.

What is resilience and how does it protect health?

Resilience is a dynamic developmental process referring to the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging life conditions; it has been described as the capacity to "bounce back" in the face of stress and adversity.

Resilience has been conceptualised as reflecting feelings of self-worth and self-confidence, autonomy and self-reliance, finding positive role models, seeking a confidant, cognitive skills such as problem solving, creativity, resourcefulness and flexibility, and a belief that one's life has purpose and meaning.

It has also been described in terms of three resources: "I HAVE" (social and interpersonal strengths, such as trusted people around oneself who love and support them no matter what), "I AM" (inner strengths, such as self-respect and respect for others), and "I CAN" (interpersonal and problem-solving skills, such as finding ways to solve problems faced).

A child needs more than one of these resources to be considered resilient; a child may have plenty of self-esteem ("I am") but lack anyone to turn to for support ("I have") and lack the capacity to solve problems ("I can"), and so would not be resilient.

Longitudinal studies show that despite extreme vulnerabilities related to poverty and other social disadvantages, many individuals still develop into capable and caring adults, and resilient individuals are able to overcome the effects of trauma, stress and adversity and learn to live psychologically healthy and meaningful lives.

How do task-oriented, emotion-oriented and avoidance-oriented coping differ?

Endler and Parker proposed three coping strategies. A task-oriented strategy involves obtaining information about the stressful situation and alternative courses of action, deciding priorities, and acting to deal directly with the problem, for example scheduling one's time better.

An emotion-oriented strategy involves efforts to maintain hope and control emotions, or venting feelings of anger and frustration, for example telling oneself the problem is not really happening.

An avoidance-oriented strategy involves denying or minimising the seriousness of a situation and suppressing stressful thoughts, for example watching television or phoning a friend to distract oneself.

A related distinction, from Lazarus and Folkman, separates problem-focused coping, which attacks the problem itself through gaining information and altering the event or one's commitments, from emotion-focused coping, which limits the degree of emotional disruption with minimal effort to change the event itself.

Both are necessary, but people generally use problem-focused coping more often than emotion-focused coping.

Glossary

• Stress — the non-specific response of the body to any demand, or the pattern of responses to a stimulus event that disturbs equilibrium and exceeds coping ability.
• Stressor — an event, such as noise or a bad relationship, that causes the body to give the stress response.
• Strain — the individual's reaction to an external stressor.
• Eustress — the level of stress that is good for a person and helps peak performance and managing minor crises.
• Distress — the harmful manifestation of stress that causes wear and tear on the body.
• Homeostasis — the body's internal state of balance that stress disrupts and that coping tries to restore.
• Cognitive appraisal — the process of evaluating an event as a primary harm, threat or challenge, and secondarily assessing one's resources to cope with it.
• General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) — Selye's three-stage pattern of bodily response to prolonged stress: alarm, resistance and exhaustion.
• Burnout — a state of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion, often work-related, from prolonged stress.
• Defence mechanism — an unconscious, usually ineffective, strategy such as rationalization or repression that protects the self without resolving the stressor.
• Biofeedback — a procedure giving feedback on physiological activity to help a person learn to control and reduce stress responses.
• Stress Resistant Personality — a personality that stays healthy under high stress, marked by the hardiness traits of commitment, control and challenge.
• Locus of control — a person's belief that outcomes are controlled internally by their own effort or externally by luck, fate or others.
• Psychoneuroimmunology — the study of the links between the mind, the brain and the immune system.
• Social support — the existence and availability of people who care about, value and love a person, and on whom that person can rely.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: All stress is harmful and should be avoided entirely. Correct: Eustress, a moderate level of stress, can be a person's best asset for peak performance; only prolonged or excessive stress (distress) is harmful.
• Misconception: Stress is caused only by the environment, not by the person's own thinking. Correct: Stress arises from a transaction between the event and the person's cognitive appraisal of it; the same event can be stressful for one person and not for another.
• Misconception: The resistance stage of GAS means the body has successfully overcome the stressor. Correct: Resistance means the body is coping while using up resources; if the stressor continues, exhaustion follows.
• Misconception: Defence mechanisms and relaxation techniques are equally effective ways of handling stress. Correct: Defence mechanisms are considered ineffective strategies that give only temporary relief, while relaxation, biofeedback, meditation and yoga are effective strategies.
• Misconception: Social network size (number of contacts) is what protects health. Correct: The quality of perceived social support, not the quantity of a social network, is positively related to health and well-being.
• Misconception: Men and women handle stress in completely fixed and opposite ways. Correct: There are general tendencies, such as women seeking social support more often, but personality, upbringing, culture and the situation shape each person's response.
• Misconception: High stress always lowers performance. Correct: Performance rises with arousal up to a moderate point and only declines when stress becomes excessive, distracting or prolonged, particularly on difficult tasks.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. State the meaning of eustress. [1 mark]

1. Eustress is the level of stress that is good for a person and helps achieve peak performance and manage minor crises.

Q2. Define a stressor and give one example. [2 marks]

1. A stressor is an event that causes the body to give the stress response.
2. Examples include noise, crowding, a bad relationship, or the daily commute to school or office.

Q3. Distinguish between primary appraisal and secondary appraisal. [3 marks]

1. Primary appraisal is the perception of a new or changing environment as positive, neutral or negative in its consequences.
2. For negative events, primary appraisal assesses harm already done, threat of future damage, or challenge, the confident expectation of being able to cope.
3. Secondary appraisal is the assessment of one's coping abilities and resources, which may be mental, physical, personal or social, and whether they are sufficient to meet the harm, threat or challenge.

Q4. Explain the three stages of the General Adaptation Syndrome. [4 marks]

1. In the alarm reaction stage, a noxious stimulus activates the adrenal-pituitary-cortex system, triggering the release of hormones that produce the stress response, and the individual is ready for fight or flight.
2. In the resistance stage, if stress is prolonged, the parasympathetic nervous system calls for more cautious use of the body's resources, and the organism makes efforts to cope with the threat, as through confrontation.
3. In the exhaustion stage, continued exposure to the same or additional stressors drains the body of its resources.
4. The physiological systems involved in alarm reaction and resistance become ineffective, and susceptibility to stress-related diseases such as high blood pressure becomes more likely.

Q5. Explain briefly how stress affects the immune system. [4 marks]

1. Stress can cause illness by impairing the workings of the immune system, which guards the body against attackers from within and outside.
2. White blood cells (leucocytes), including T cells, B cells and natural killer cells, identify and destroy antigens such as viruses; T-helper cells increase immunological activity and B cells produce antibodies.
3. Reduced levels of natural killer cell cytotoxicity have been found in people who are highly stressed, including students facing important examinations, bereaved persons and those who are severely depressed.
4. Immune functioning is better in individuals receiving social support, and changes in the immune system have more effect on health among those whose immune systems are already weakened.

Q6. Explain rationalization, projection and displacement as ineffective strategies of coping with stress. [4 marks]

1. Rationalization is justifying an unacceptable action or failure with a more acceptable but false explanation.
2. Projection is attributing one's own unacceptable feelings or faults to someone else.
3. Displacement is redirecting an emotion, often anger, from its true source to a safer target.
4. These defence mechanisms give short-term relief but do not resolve the original stressor, so they are classed as ineffective strategies.

Q7. Evaluate relaxation training and yoga as effective strategies for managing stress. [6 marks]

1. Relaxation training is an active skill that reduces symptoms of stress and decreases the incidence of illnesses such as high blood pressure and heart disease.
2. Relaxation usually starts from the lower part of the body and progresses up to the facial muscles so that the whole body is relaxed, with deep breathing used alongside muscle relaxation to calm the mind.
3. Biofeedback, often accompanied by relaxation training, monitors physiological activity such as heart rate and teaches a person to control it, first in quiet conditions and then in everyday life.
4. Meditation is a sequence of learned techniques for refocusing attention that brings about an altered state of consciousness, with such thorough concentration that the meditator becomes unaware of outside stimulation.
5. Yoga adds ethical and mental discipline: yama (restraints in conduct towards others), niyama (personal observances), asana (postures), pranayama (control of the breath) and pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses).
6. These strategies are effective because they lower physiological arousal directly and can be practised regularly, unlike defence mechanisms, which only distort reality and leave the stressor unresolved.

Q8. Evaluate the factors that promote positive health and well-being. [6 marks]

1. Positive health is more than the absence of disease; it includes a healthy body, high-quality personal relationships, a sense of purpose in life, self-regard, mastery of life's tasks, and resilience to stress, trauma and change.
2. A balanced diet eaten as three main meals a day can lift mood, give energy, improve circulation and strengthen the immune system, whereas stress often leads people to seek comfort foods high in fat, salt and sugar.
3. Regular exercise provides an active outlet for physiological arousal, improves the efficiency of the heart and lungs, lowers blood pressure and strengthens the immune system, and works as a stress buffer.
4. Life skills such as assertiveness, time management, rational thinking, improving relationships, self-care and overcoming unhelpful habits can be learned and improved.
5. A Stress Resistant Personality, marked by the hardiness traits of commitment, control and challenge, stays healthy even under high stress.
6. Social support, the availability of people who care about, value and love a person, reduces psychological distress, and positive thinking and a positive attitude further buffer the effects of stress.

Key takeaways

• Stress is a dynamic transactional process, not simply a stimulus or a response, involving cognitive appraisal of events and resources.
• Eustress is helpful stress that can turn into harmful distress if prolonged or excessive.
• Selye's GAS describes three stages under prolonged stress: alarm reaction, resistance and exhaustion.
• Stress causes have external/situational sources (life events, hassles, work, environment) and internal/dispositional sources (personality, attitude, frustration, conflict).
• Men and women often differ in the stress they report and in their use of social support, but personality and situation matter more than sex alone.
• Stress affects health through hormonal changes, immune suppression, hypertension, ulcers, diabetes, asthma and other psychosomatic conditions.
• Stress and performance follow an inverted-U relationship; prolonged or excessive stress can cause burnout.
• Defence mechanisms are ineffective coping strategies that give temporary relief without resolving the stressor.
• Effective strategies include relaxation training, biofeedback, meditation and yoga, alongside exercise, diet, life skills, a Stress Resistant Personality and social support.

Test yourself

What is the difference between a stressor and strain?

A stressor is the external event causing the stress response, such as noise or crowding; strain is the individual's reaction to that stressor.

Name the three stages of the General Adaptation Syndrome.

Alarm reaction, resistance, and exhaustion.

What is a Stress Resistant Personality?

A personality that stays healthy under high stress, marked by hardiness, the three Cs of commitment, control and challenge identified by Kobasa.

Why is rationalization considered an ineffective coping strategy?

It justifies an unacceptable action or failure with a false but acceptable explanation, giving temporary comfort without resolving the real stressor.

How does stress contribute to diabetes?

Prolonged stress releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol that raise blood sugar; when repeated or lasting, this disturbs the body's handling of sugar and is linked to diabetes.

What is the difference between perceived support and social network, in relation to health?

Perceived support (quality of social support) is positively related to health and well-being, while social network (quantity of contacts) is unrelated to well-being.

How does optimism affect a person's choice of coping strategy?

Optimists tend to assume adversity can be handled successfully and use more problem-focused coping, seeking advice and help from others, unlike pessimists who tend to avoid or deny the problem.