Adaptive Coping With Stress

Stress is difficult to define because it is approached in different ways. Some use the term stress referring to circumstances that threaten someone’s well-being or referring to the response people have to threatening circumstances. Others think of stress as the process of evaluating and coping with threatening situations. Yet some use the term to refer to the experience of being threatened by difficult circumstances. Researchers agree that stress is subjective. People don’t have the same response to the same situations. Instead, stress depends on how people consider or evaluate environmental events. If people believe that a challenge will severely exceed their resources, they experience stress.
Stressors are psychologically or physically demanding …show more content…
Rather, stress occurs when people experience frustration, conflict, or pressure. The experience of stress is accompanied by many physiological changes. Hans Selye, a pioneer in the field of stress research, proposed that stressors of many different kinds result in a nonspecific bodily response. He said the body’s stress response consists of a general adaptation syndrome, which has three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. The alarm stage gives rise to the fight or flight response, the resistance stage occurs when stress continues at a higher than normal rate and the exhaustion stage is when stress is prolonged and the body’s resources run out.
Coping refers to efforts of managing stress, coping can be adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive coping strategies generally involve confronting problems directly, making reasonably realistic judgments of problems, recognizing and changing unhealthy emotional reactions, and trying to prevent opposing effects on the body. Maladaptive coping includes using alcohol or drugs to escape problems. It is believed that people have characteristic ways of coping, even in different types of …show more content…
Some important factors that influence coping are social support and optimism: Social support, which correlates with better physical and mental health, and optimism which is a tendency to expect positive outcomes. Stress affects the functioning of the immune system, along with age, nutrition, and genetic factors. The immune system is the body’s defense against harmful agents like bacteria, viruses, and other foreign substances. It communicates constantly with the brain and the endocrine system. Stress affects the immune system in many ways. For example, hormones that are released in response to stress can obstruct the activity of