Coping with Stress
Exercise enhances mood and blunts the stress-response only for a few hours to a day after the exercise session. Exercise is stress reducing so long as it is something you actually want to do. Let rats voluntarily run in a running wheel and their health improves in all sorts of ways. Force them to, even while playing great dance music, and their health worsens. You need to exercise a minimum of twenty or thirty minutes at a time, a few times a week. (Location 6559)
⇒ Predictability and Control
Was tried with cancer patients and postsurgical patients: they self-medicated with painkillers. The total amount of painkillers consumed decreased. Reinstitute control and predictability, give the patient the knowledge that the medication is there for the instant that the pain becomes too severe, and the pain often becomes far more manageable. (Location 6468)
Residents of a nursing home given more responsibility for everyday decision making — choosing meals, signing up for social activities, picking out and caring for a plant. People became more active and described themselves as happier. Their health improved. Most remarkable: the death rate in the former group was half that of the latter. (Location 6482)
Residents being involuntarily moved to a different nursing home — the experimental group was given extensive lectures on the new home and given control of a wide variety of issues connected with the move. When the move occurred, there were far fewer medical complications for the latter group. When the staff present encouraged them, performance improved; when the staff present helped them, performance declined. (Location 6490)
Control and predictability help, even in settings where you think it won’t make a dent in someone’s unhappiness. (Location 6497)
It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. (Location 6543)
Physiological studies: take a rodent or primate that has been housed alone and put it into a social group. The typical result is a massive stress-response. But only if those animals are strangers — if they are friends, the stress-response is decreased. (Location 6645)
⇒ Chronic Stress and Disease Risk
Infant monkeys separated from their mothers: the glucocorticoid elevation could be prevented if the infant was placed in a group of monkeys — but only if the infant already knew those animals. (Location 6649)
For women, being in a bad marriage is associated with immune suppression. (Location 6657)
⇒ How Does Stress Inhibit Immune Function
Regular attendance at religious services is reasonably predictive of a decreased mortality rate and of a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and depression. However, religiosity doesn’t predict much about cancer progression, cancer mortality rates, or speed of recovery. Deeply religious people derive no more of what health benefits there are than the less deeply religious. (Location 6710)
People obviously vary as to which style they gravitate toward. Women, on average, tend toward emotion- or relationship-based coping styles, whereas men tend toward problem-solving approaches. (Location 6744)
When something good happens, you want to believe that this outcome arose from your efforts, and has broad, long-lasting implications for you. When the outcome is bad, you want to believe that it was due to something out of your control, and is just a transient event with very local, limited implications. (Location 6755)
During times of stress, finding the resources to try something new is really hard and is often just what’s needed. (Location 6761)
see also
Tags: neurobiology science psychology
Superlink: 051 ☣Neurobiology 050 🧠Neuroscience
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Erstellt: 05-04-26 10:00