Stress and Health
- Behavioral Medicine- interdisciplinary field that integrates behavioral and medical knowledge and applies that knowledge to health and disease
- Health Psychology- subfield of psychology that provides psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine
What is Stress?
- Stress- the process by which we perceive and respond to events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging
- General Adaptation Syndrome- Selye's concept of the body's adaptive response to stress as composed of three stages
- Phase 1-Alarm reaction
- Phase 2-Resistance
- Phase 3-Exhaustion
Stressful Life Events
- Catastrophic Events- earthquakes, combat stress, floods
- Life Changes- death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job, promotion
- Daily Hassles- rush hour traffic, long lines, job stress, burnout
- Perceived Control- loss of control can increase stress hormones
What is Stress? (Part 2)
- Burnout- physical, emotional and mental exhaustion brought on by persistent job-related stress
- Coronary Hear Disease- clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; leading cause of death in the US
Stress and Coronary Heart Disease
- Type A- Friedman and Rosenman's term for people who are competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, anger-prone
- Type B- Friedman and Rosenman's term for easygoing, relaxed people
Stress and Disease
- Psychomatic Disease- psychologically caused physical symptoms
- Psychophysiological Illness
- "mind-body" illness
- any stress-related physical illness
- distinct from hypochondriasis- misinterpreting normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease
- Lymphocytes- two types of white blood cells that are part of the body's immune system
- B lymphocytes form in the bone marrow and release antibodies that fight bacterial infections
- T lymphocytes from the thymus and, among other duties, attack the cancer cells, viruses and foreign substances
Promoting Health
- Aerobic Exercise- sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; may also alleviate depression and anxiety
- Biofeedback- system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feeding back information regarding a subtle physiological state
- Blood pressure
- Muscle tension
Prevention
- 14% of US Gross Domestic Product is spent on health care
- 2/3 of organizations with less than 50 employees have health promoting programs
- health assessments
- fitness training
- smoking cessation
- stress management
Smoking
- Some estimations show smoking kills about 20 loaded jumbo jets per day
- Smoking is a pediatric disease
- Rebellious youth
- Modeling behavior, social rewards
- Targeted ad campaigns
- Why not quit? Nicotine delivery system
How to Quit
- Education
- Eliminate the social reinforcement
- Increase social support for quitting
- Cost
- Tax it to shorten the time between behavior and punishment
- Reduces smoking by 4% for every 10% increase cost
- Nicotine Replacement -Patch and Gum
- Reduce pharmacological addiction
- Then treat psychological addiction
Bibliography
Myers, David G., Psychology Fifth Edition. Worth Publishers, Inc. New York, NY ©1998
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