Hi everybody and welcome to our first video for module 7.

Now I know I left you off in

our last video for module 6 saying that it’s kind of a bummer to leave you at the end
of a chapter all about the ways that stress can negatively impact us. But now it’s time
for the optimistic part – that there are many ways that we can cope with the
stressors that life and the world throw our way. However you currently feel about
your ability to cope with stress, I want you to know that stress coping is a skill set.
You have all learned skills before. That’s basically what you spend a large chunk of
your time in school doing. Stress coping is just another toolbox of skills that everyone
can learn, practice, and get better at throughout their lives.

Sometimes people have this mistaken notion that people are either born being good
at handling stress, or not. So I want to bust that myth right off the bat. Sure, we
learned in module 6 that some people are going to be more reactive to stressors for a
variety of reasons, so they might feel the impact of those stressors more strongly
than someone that is less reactive. But no matter how reactive you are to stress, you
can learn skills to help manage your reaction to stress, and by doing so, really
mitigate a lot of the negative effects that stress can have on our overall health. That’s
going to be the focus of this module – the many ways that we can moderate our

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experience with stress.

In this first video, we are going to talk about some factors related to personality that
contribute to how we tend to respond to the stressors that come up in our lives.
Granted, personality variables are factors that are harder to change than situational
variables. However, knowing some of these personality variables can at least give us
some insight into why we may respond to some things the way that we do. Just like
the appraisal process we talked about in module 6, or even self-monitoring that we
talked about back in module 3, sometimes just bringing conscious awareness to
things can help us feel a stronger sense of control over them and help us to already
start changing some of those otherwise automatic responses.

I love talking about coping because it gives us some power over stress, which can
sometimes make us feel powerless and out of control (which is one of the things that
makes stress so stressful). But if you can develop a solid arsenal of stress coping tools
now, ones that you know you can rely on when life gets really tumultuous, that skill
set will perhaps be one of the most important skill sets you learn for your overall
health for your entire life. The return on investment is huge, so I really encourage
you to try to invest in building your stress coping skill set, just like you invest in your
University education to build your academic and job-related skill set. Investing in
your stress coping skills is building a skill set directly related to your overall health
and well-being. Having solid coping skills is so important because we can never
remove all the stressors from our lives; but, we can learn how to cope with them so
they don’t have such dramatic effects on our day to day functioning.

Ok, with all that said, let’s dive into our first topic for this module, personality
variables related to coping. In this video, I’m going to specifically focus on the
personality variables that are risk factors and tend to increase our stress responses.
Then, in the second video I’ll talk about personality variables that are protective and
provide us some internal resources for coping with stress.

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 Personality and Coping:
Risk Factors

LO1: What is
coping? • NegativeAffectivity: Anxiety, depression, hostility
• “Disease-prone” personality
• Associated with highercortisolsecretion/more health complaint
s

The personality that each individual brings to a stressful event influences how they
will cope with that event. Some personality characteristics can contribute to making
stressful events seem even more stressful, whereas other personality traits can
contribute to stressful events seeming less stressful. As I just mentioned, personality
traits that make stressful events seem less stressful can be thought of as internal
coping resources that increase resilience, whereas those personality traits that
contribute to situations seeming more stressful are often considered risk factors for
stress and can contribute to stress-related disease. So, if you have some of the
personality traits that contribute to stressful situations seeming even more stressful,
it can be that much more important to try to work on other skills that are learnable
to help mitigate the effects of stress on your health.

The first personality characteristic that is considered a risk factor, or contributes to

events seeming even more stressful, is negative affectivity. This is basically a
personality characterized by having a pervasive negative mood marked by feelings
such as anxiety, depression, and hostility. People with negative affectivity can also be
thought of as being high in neuroticism: being more prone to negative mood states.
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People with a personality high in negative affectivity tend to express distress,
discomfort, and dissatisfaction across a wide range of situations. So for example,
imagine two people that experience the exact same situation and have the exact
same external resources to cope with it, like money, time, energy, social support,
etc. The person with a more negative personality has fewer internal resources to
cope with that stressor, so that stressor will affect them more, if everything else is
equal. This is why having a particularly negative personality is often called a ‘disease
prone’ personality, because aspects of your personality put your body at higher risk
for poor health, again illustrating this strong connection between the mind and the
body. For example, your textbook describes a longitudinal study of twins that found
that levels of negative affectivity (as assessed by neuroticism scores) in 1973
predicted greater risk for one of 13 different chronic health conditions over 25 years
later. Negative affectivity has also been directly linked to a higher risk for mortality in
old age. So, if a person generally approaches each day and the situations that
happen in a particularly negative way, that can lead to more risk factors for poor
physical health, primarily through the effects that stress has on the body.
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Do you think you procrastinat

e too much?
A) Absolutely– I have to get this habi
t under
Self- control!
Reflection B) No, I think I procrastinate the perf
ect amount
Question C) No, I don’t put off until tomorrow
what I can get
done today
D) Yes, and I am totally fine with that
– everybody
does it!

To introduce our next personality characteristic, I want you to take a minute and think
about your procrastination behaviour. Do you think you procrastinate too much? This
topic might be particularly relevant these days when we’re all more responsible for
creating our own schedules as we do most of our work independently at home. If you
are a person that tends to procrastinate, that can easily lead to a lot of problems
pretty quickly.

I wonder what you all had to say about this question. When I ask this type of question
in person in class, I tend to get a lot of A responses – many students think they
procrastinate too much. I also tend to get a fair amount of D responses, suggesting
that people do procrastinate, but they don’t really view it as an issue. This is perhaps
because procrastination can often seem normalized in a University environment,
where there are often so many things going on that it’s not uncommon to start
assignments the day before they are due.

If I were to answer this question, I used to be a solid D in undergrad (though I

probably should have said A but I had normalized my procrastination). The worst
scenario of procrastination I can remember is I once STARTED studying for an 8:30am
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exam at 10pm the night before. That one was bad. But sadly, starting studying the
night before an exam was not uncommon for me as an undergrad. I would then have
to stay up all night studying and I would fall into this pattern EVERY finals season.
Every. Single. One. As I was pulling these all nighters, I would loathe myself for getting
into this predicament yet again. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t exhilarating. It was terrible. I
would have given anything to go back in time, lecture my early semester self, and put
a stop to the torture before it even began. But I could never figure it out. Right
through until the last final exam period of my 4th year I did the same damn thing. But
part of the problem was that I would still do decently on my exams (regardless of the
fact that I would immediately forget all the information two days later). So I never
suffered consequences severe enough to get me to change my procrastination
behaviour because after a few days of sleeping for 13 hours after exams were over, I
would feel fine again.

In the years since I graduated undergrad, I have worked pretty diligently to get my
procrastination under control. I still want to improve, but even the improvements
I've made so far have made my life so much less stressful now than it used to be as
an undergrad. My life is less stressful now even though my workload is heavier as a
professor than it used to be as an undergrad, and the things I do are more stressful
to me because there are many demands of my career to balance. But, because I now
have much better work habits, I have the buffer of time if something goes wrong, so
things seem exponentially less stressful than they used to. Getting my
procrastination under control was one of the best coping skills I learned to help
manage my work-related stress.

This whole story was all to say, if I can get this procrastination demon somewhat
under control, there is hope for anyone. ANYONE. Because I was a serious
procrastinator.
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 Personality and Coping: Risk Factors

LO1: What is • NegativeAffectivity: Anxiety, depression, hostility

coping?
• “Disease-prone” personality
• Associated with highercortisolsecretion/more health
complaints
• Procrastination
• Arousalprocrastination (Pleasurable “rush”)
• Avoidanceprocrastination
• Unpleasant/aversive tasks
• Tasks reflectself-worth
• Lack self-confidencein abilities
Telling someone who is a serious procrastinatorJUST
to DO ITis
like telling someone with depression JUST
to CHEER UP

So, procrastination is another obvious risk factor for coping with stress as it depletes
some of the resources that can be valuable for helping us cope, like time and
energy. And procrastination, like I alluded to on the last slide, is fairly common,
particularly in the student population. Current estimates suggest that 80 to 95
percent of students procrastinate, and 50 percent do so consistently. So, let’s talk
about procrastination. Many people mistakenly assume that the main reason people
procrastinate is poor time management (or laziness); but, there are actually some
deep underlying reasons for why people procrastination that often have nothing to
do with time management or laziness.

There are a couple different types of procrastination. Some people say they like or
need that feeling of pressure really close to a deadline to get something done. That
it is motivating to them. This is called arousal procrastination. If it works out and you
get everything done and do it well, then you get a rush, or a pleasurable sense of
accomplishment. This type of procrastination can be related to thrill-seeking. But
that feeling isn’t really motivation. That feeling is panic. That panic can especially set
in when the task doesn’t end up getting done to your standards, or done at all,
because you didn’t leave yourself enough time.

There is another type of procrastination that is related to the type of task that a
person should be doing. In this type of procrastination, the person just really dislikes

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the task they have to do. For example, I really dislike responding to reviewer
comments on manuscripts, so I tend to do everything else on my list before I finally
sit down to do that task. This is called avoidance procrastination. My house is never
cleaner than when I should be responding to reviewer comments because all of a
sudden it becomes REALLY important to me to scrub the bathroom tile, or clean the
vent above the oven, when I should be responding to reviewer comments. I bet
some of you are like that too with whatever task it is that you really just dislike
doing.

People engage in avoidance procrastination for a few other reasons aside from just
not liking the task they have to do. This is where we see the deeper side of
procrastination. Sometimes people will avoid a task because of reasons related to
their self-worth. For example, if you have a task to do, and the task is important in
some way, but you don’t feel like you will be able to do well on the task, you can
perceive that poor performance on that task would be a reflection of your worth as
an individual. For example, some students can fall into the mindset that if they don’t
get straight As, then they aren’t a worthwhile person. Now, please listen to me –
THIS IS NOT TRUE. There is so much more to the world than grades and every person
is a person of worth just by virtue of being a unique person with your unique
collection of traits. But in our high-pressure and work-glorifying society, it can
sometimes be easy to feel like if we’re not the best at something, then we have no
worth.

So, how does this feeling of a threat to self-worth relate to procrastination? Well,
sometimes people can start to think that if you do the task and don’t do it well, then
people will know you aren’t that great at that skill, and if you aren’t great at it, then
you aren’t a person of worth. So essentially, trying to tackle the task becomes a huge
endeavour because it’s no longer just a task to complete, it feels like an assessment
of your worth as a person, which can be very stressful. So then the task gets avoided
because it’s too stressful to even think about, let alone start to work on. I sometimes
get this feeling when I have an important talk to give. For example, when I used to
teach at the UofA, I was nominated as the Last Lecturer. It was a pretty prestigious
nomination because students nominated me out of all the professors at the UofA,
which is a pretty big school, to give this Last Lecture talk. I had only been teaching at
the UofA for about 5 years, so I didn’t really feel like I had the skills or life experience
to deliver some profound talk that was supposed to encompass great life lessons for
the student body. So this task became pretty wrapped up with my self-worth. I
thought, if I deliver a crappy talk, then people will know that I’m not that great at
this job, and that I’m basically worthless as a professor, and who will want to take a
class with me then? So I procrastinated on putting this talk together for awhile

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because it became this task that was no longer just about putting together a talk, but
I made it a huge reflection of my self-worth. So it wasn’t that I didn’t budget my time
well to work on the talk, but every time I did have time to work on it, it was too
stressful, so I’d find something less stressful to do instead, like clean the kitchen.

So, self-worth reasons for procrastination basically come down to a fear of failure on
a task that you think reflects your worth as a person.

The last reason for procrastination that I’ll talk about in this video is related to the
idea of self-worth that we just covered. This reason is self-confidence, or more
accurately, lack of self-confidence. Self-confidence affects how well you think you
can perform on a given task. Now, an interesting component of lack of
selfconfidence is that it can actually lead to some fear of success. For example, you
might have been successful at a task in the past, so now you’ve basically set the bar
high for yourself, so you (and potentially others) now have high expectations for you
regarding this type of task. If you have to do that type of task again in the future,
now the expectations are high, and you may lack the confidence that you can attain
that same high level of success again. So you essentially come to fear your past
success. Then, because you’re not sure if you can be as successful again, the task you
have to do again takes on all of this extra weight to you, which can contribute to
procrastination. For example, I gave a departmental seminar once and it went over
pretty well. Then I was asked to do another one the next year. I felt like because the
first one had gone so well, now people had all these expectations that the next one
should be just as good or better. However, I didn’t know if I could deliver a talk that
was just as good or better than the last one, because I put a ton of effort into that
first one. So again, I procrastinated on putting together that talk because the task
had taken on so much weight that it became stressful just to think about it.

To sum up, motives for avoidance procrastination include task aversiveness, fear of
failure (related to self-worth), and fear of success (related to lack of self-confidence).
You can see that these reasons for procrastinating run much deeper than just poor
time management skills or laziness.

Also, procrastination can sometimes be used as a protective mechanism. For some

avoidance procrastinators, they may prefer to be viewed as doing a less than a
stellar job because of lack of effort instead of lack of ability, because effort is viewed
as something that can be changed much more easily than ability, and ability might
be more tied to self-worth in people’s minds. So, if you didn’t leave yourself enough
time for a task, and the task turns out to not be that great, you can try to protect
your self-worth by saying you could have done a much better job if you only had the

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time to really devote to the task. If you put all your time and effort into the task and
still don't do as well as you wanted, that would be a much bigger threat to your
selfworth, because then it becomes a reflection of your abilities, and not your effort.

Another reason that procrastination leads to stress is that we don’t just now have
limited time to get a task done, but then we also tend to layer on a coat of blame
and shame for having procrastinated in the first place, which then leads to even
more increased feelings of stress. It becomes this vicious cycle of not doing what we
know we should be doing, then running out of time to do it, and beating ourselves
up for getting ourselves into that situation. All of those factors add on layers and
layers of stress.

To combat procrastination, it can be useful to know WHY you procrastinate so you

can actually work on the root issue. That’s one of the things that helped me. Now,
some of my procrastination was related to time management, so I worked on those
skills to. But doing other internal work, like working to remind myself that there are
so many other facets to my life other than my performance at work, and particularly
trying to embody the ideas of a growth mindset really helped me. Growth mindset is
essentially the idea that I am a person that is constantly learning and evolving and
growing. So, if I’m not perfect at a task just yet, that doesn’t reflect poorly on my
worth as a person, that just means that there are more things that I can learn and
get better at. Trying to embrace that idea of life-long learning, and that setbacks are
a part of learning and growing, has helped me a lot with my procrastination. In turn,
getting a handle on my procrastination has dramatically reduced the amount of
stress in my life.

I’ll leave the topic of procrastination by leaving you with this quote that I think sums
it up perfectly now that we’ve talked about these deeper reasons for
procrastination: "Telling someone who is a serious procrastinator to JUST DO IT is
like telling someone with depression to JUST CHEER UP." The roots of the issue go
far deeper than we often think.

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 Personality and Coping: Risk Factors

LO1: What is • Perfectionism

coping? • Excessively high standards coupled withself-criticism
• Strive forresilienceinstead… (e.g., growth mindset)

• Pessimism
• Dispositional or
explanatorystyle
• 3 Ps: Permanence (long time), Pervasiveness (all areas),
Personal (my fault)
• Can predict negative health outcomes
• Can reducesocialsupport resources

The next personality characteristic I want to talk about that can increase the effects
of stress is another one that is related to procrastination. This is the trait of
perfectionism. I wonder how many of you consider yourselves to be perfectionists.
Many University students do. Perfectionism is defined as the setting of and
preoccupation with excessively high standards accompanied by a tendency to
engage in self-criticism. People high in perfectionism tend to stress over every
detail, no matter how small, and are highly reactive to even the hint of perceived
criticism (even though they are very critical of themselves). They tend to think that
anything less than pure perfection is total failure and will berate themselves for each
perceived flaw that they will invariably find. In addition to a procrastinator, I also
used to be a fairly hardcore perfectionist, and I still do have some of these
tendencies. You can probably see how perfectionism can really increase stress. It will
cause a person to stress out about small details of a project or task and essentially
‘lose the forest for the trees’. Perfectionism can also paradoxically contribute to
procrastination because sometimes if you think the only options are perfection or
failure, and you think you might not be able to do the task perfectly, that contributes
to the ideas of fear of failure and self-worth leading to procrastination that we talked
about on the last slide.

As I previously mentioned, for me, embracing the idea of growth mindset, and that
mistakes are a part of learning, helped me combat my procrastination by combatting

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my perfectionistic tendencies. I had to try to realize that perfectionism isn’t the
point; but rather, the more important skills to learn were how to cope with and
bounce back from perceived failures or mistakes, or less than perfect attempts at
learning. This is developing the skill of resilience. You can never be perfect at
everything, and trying to be can really suck a lot of joy out of life, so what is the
point? Being high in perfectionism can also cause people to not try new things
because they don’t think they’ll be good at them right away. So people could miss
out on a lot of fun opportunities because they have the mistaken idea that the most
important thing is being perfect. Now again, we get a lot of messages about
perfection in our society these days, from body perfection to work-related
perfection, so in a way it’s easy to see why so many people come to internalize these
ideas that their worth is based on perfection. We also get a lot of these types of
messages growing up, when we tend to be praised for the outcome of something,
like getting perfect on a spelling test, rather than improvements that we’ve made, or
the effort we’ve put in to that improvement. The whole school system kind of
punishes us for trying things and failing instead of rewarding that bravery. But that
kind of spirit is what will be needed to develop jobs that don’t exist yet. If you never
learn how to fail, you will never be comfortable trying things that could lead to
failure. Then when you do inevitably experience failure (e.g., don’t get a job you
applied for) you won’t have the skills and practice to effectively deal with that set
back, pick yourself up, and try again. One of my friends once told me something that
I think really relates to this idea. He said that in martial arts one of the first things
they teach you is how to fall properly, because you are going to fall a lot as you learn
the skills of martial arts. I thought that was a great analogy. It would be really useful
to teach young children how to ‘fail’ properly, by looking at it as the ‘First Attempt In
Learning’, how to accept constructive feedback to improve, and then grow and
stretch their comfort zones. Building that skill of resilience in the face of setbacks can
be a huge resource that you can draw on for all kinds of stressful events in the
future.

Ok, the last personality characteristic that I’m going to cover that tends to make
events seem more stressful is pessimism, which some people define as a relatively
stable dispositional characteristic to expect negative outcomes in the future.
Pessimism can sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect negative things
to happen, that expectation may influence your behaviour in such a way that those
negative things are more likely to happen. For example, pessimistic students that
expect to get poor grades tend to get lower grades, compared to their SAT scores,
than optimistic students.

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Now, like I said, some people view pessimism as a disposition, or basically a part of
someone’s personality. But there is another view that pessimism is a type of
explanatory style that might be learned, which means that a different explanatory
style could be learned in its place. People with a pessimistic explanatory style
characteristically explain the negative events of their lives in terms of internal,
stable, global qualities of themselves. In so doing, they may lay the groundwork for
poor health.

For example, when a stressful or negative event happens, we all tell ourselves a
story about that event. Explanatory style is about what kind of story you tell yourself.
Pessimists tend to tell themselves that bad events:
1) Will last a long time, or forever. (“I’ll never get this task done.”). So they have
this element of Permanence.
2) Are universal. (“You can’t trust any of those people.”). So they have an
element of being Pervasive, or touching all areas of life.
3) Are their own fault. (“I’m terrible at this.”). So their explanations have a
Personal quality to them.

Permanence, pervasive, and personal are called the three Ps of explanatory style.
Permanence relates to the idea of stable, Pervasive relates to the idea of global, and
Personal relates to the idea of internal that I just mentioned earlier.

Optimists, on the other hand, tend to tell themselves different stories about negative
or stressful events that happen.
1) Bad things are temporary. (“That happens occasionally but it’s no big deal.”).
So less permanence.
2) Bad things have a specific cause and aren’t universal. (“When the weather is
better that won’t be a problem.”). Less pervasive.
3) It’s not totally their fault. (“I’m good at this but today wasn’t my lucky day.”).
So it reduces the amount of personal blame for the event. Or, they recognize that if
there is personal blame to accept for an event, that they can improve and get better
in the future so that event doesn’t continue to happen.

Pessimistic and optimistic explanatory styles tend to work the opposite way for
positive events. Pessimists tend to explain those positive events as short-lived,
specific, and not resulting from their own actions, but instead maybe some sort of
luck or circumstance. Optimists tend to explain positive events as being more
longlived, global (or affecting more areas of their lives), and as more a result of their
own actions.

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Let’s look at a specific example of these two explanatory styles in action to see how
they can either increase the stress of a particular event, or decrease it. Let’s imagine
the event is a fight with a loved one.

Pessimistic explanatory style: We fight all the time (permanence), we fight about
everything (pervasive), the fights are because I am not good at communicating what
I want and I will never get better at it, so we will always be stuck in this cycle of
fighting about everything (personal). If you have that view of a fight with a loved
one, that is going to make that event seem a lot more stressful.

Optimistic explanatory style: We fought but we resolved the fight or I will go home
and resolve the fight tonight (not permanent). We fought about this specific thing,
but there are many things we don’t fight about (not pervasive). We fought because
of a misunderstanding in communication, but we can resolve this issue by both
better explaining our viewpoints (not personal blame that cannot be improved).

This type of thinking allows optimists to perceive a hardship as a challenge that can
be overcome with effort vs. something that they have no control over. Remember
back to primary appraisal and the difference between harm, threat, and challenge,
and the idea that lack of control makes events seem more stressful. Optimists tend
to explain things as being more within their control to change and viewing stressful
events more as challenges.

Pessimism is related to poorer health outcomes than optimism. Your textbook

describes a study involving interviews completed by graduates of Harvard University
classes of 1942 to 1944 when the participants were 25 years old. These students
were analyzed to find out how they habitually explained the negative events in their
lives. Their health was then assessed 20 to 30 years later. Those students who
explained bad events by referring to their own internal, stable, global negative
qualities had significantly poorer health between ages 45 and 60. This was true even
when physical and mental health at age 25 were taken into account, showing that
the personality characteristic of pessimism can be a risk factor increasing the
negative effects of stress on health.

Another indirect effect of pessimism that impacts how much stress will affect health
is that being high in pessimism can actually reduce the amount of social support
that someone has, which we know is an important resource for coping with stress. If
you think about it, you probably don’t want to be around people that are constantly
negative and always looking at the negative side of situations – that can really bring a
person down and be draining. For example, I have a friend that I don’t see nearly as

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much anymore because she is pretty negative all the time and I found that whenever
I came home from hanging out with her, I would feel totally drained, instead of
feeling invigorated from hanging out with a friend. So, to protect my own energy and
mental health, I started to limit the amount of time that I hung out with her. Here

we see compounding effects of pessimism increasing how stressful events are

perceived to be and then decreasing an important resource for coping with stress in
the form of social support.

In this video, I covered some of the personality characteristics that can make events
seem even more stressful. But, there is a bright side that for each of these
personality characteristics, there tends to be things we can try to do to mitigate the
effects of that characteristic. These things can include working on changing the way
we think about certain things, like cultivating a growth mindset, or consciously
changing our explanatory style. In our next video, I’ll focus on some aspects of
personality that can help events seem less stressful. You’ll see that those
characteristics of personality are things that we can work to cultivate as well to help
increase our internal resources for coping with stress. So I’ll see you back here for
module 7 video #2. Bye for now.