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.
 2
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.
 2

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
 3
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.
3
 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

4
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 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.

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.

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 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.
 Hi everybody and welcome to our second video for module 7. In our first video, I
covered a variety of personality characteristics that can contribute to events seeming
more stressful. Those personality characteristics were considered risk factors because
they exacerbate the effects of stress on the body. People with those characteristics
tend to experience more events as stressful.

In this video, we’re going to turn our attention to personality characteristics that act
as psychological resources that help to buffer the effects of stress, or that make
events seem less stressful. We can think of these personality characteristics as
adding to our ‘resource bucket’, or the pool of resources we can draw on when faced
with any stressful event. The first personality characteristic we’ll cover is one I
already brought up when we contrasted it with pessimism at the end of the previous
video: optimism.

Personality and Coping:

Psychological Resources

LO1: What is • Optimism

coping?
• Expectancy that good things will happen in the future
Just like pessimism, some people view optimism as a disposition, or as a part of one’s
personality, but others view it more as an explanatory style, like we covered in video
#1. I like the definition of an explanatory style because that gives some avenue for
modifying this particular characteristic. Even if we might have a type of explanatory
style that is our default, say that’s a pessimistic style, once we are made aware of our
explanatory style, and taught ways that we could look at events and situations
differently through the lens of a different explanatory style, we can start practicing
that different explanatory style until it becomes like any other health-related
behaviour: a habit.

There is an entire book called Learned Optimism that talks about this idea that people
can learn to change their explanatory styles. Changing your explanatory style can help
change your outlook on situations, which can then increase your resources for dealing
with stress. This is a much more optimistic way to think about optimism and
pessimism. If you think of them as dispositions, or innate personality characteristics,
and you tend to fall more on the pessimistic side, that can be kind of disheartening to
think you have this innate risk factor for stress and there is not much you can do to
change it. But research into optimism suggests that you can do things to move

2
yourself more towards an optimistic outlook. You can think of it as a health-related
behaviour, just like the other health-related behaviours we’ve covered, like healthy
eating and physical movement. It takes practice and discipline, like those other
behaviours, but our level of optimism does seem to be modifiable by training our
brains to think of and explain situations to ourselves differently.
 2

LOT-R
0 = strongly disagree; 4 = strongly agree

Assess Your
Optimism

There are some standard measures that are used to assess someone’s level of
optimism. I’ve provided one of the classic optimism measures on this slide for you.
This is the Life Orientation Test – Revised (LOT-R). You can also find this assessment
in your textbook. Take a couple minutes right now to actually answer these questions
to see where you fall on the continuum between more pessimistic and more
optimistic. For each item, give yourself a rating between 0 and 4.

0 = strongly disagree, 1 = disagree, 2 = neutral, 3 = agree, 4 = strongly agree. Pause the

video here and take a few minutes to score yourself on these items. Then unpause
the video and I’ll explain how to score the overall assessment.

Once you have given yourself a score for each item, then you have to reverse score some
of the items.
For questions 3, 7, and 9 take the score you gave yourself and subtract it from 4, and
that’s your new score for that item. So if you answered disagree for question 3, you
would have given yourself a 1. Now subtract that score from 4. So you now have 4-1
= 3. So 3 is your new score for that question. Do this for questions 3, 7, and 9.
 3
Items 2, 5, 6, and 8 are filler items, so they don’t actually contribute to your optimism score.

Ok, now add up your scores (the new ones you calculated) for questions, 3, 7, and 9,
and your regular scores for questions 1, 4, and 10. Add all 6 numbers together and
that is your score on the LOT-R.

The higher your number on this scale, the more optimistic you tend to be. I wonder if
any of you were surprised by your results or if you already had a pretty good idea of
how optimistic you tend to be. The more optimistic you tend the be, the more you
have that as a psychological resource for coping with stress.

As a bit of comparison, data from one study that gave the LOT-R to 2000 undergrads
showed that the average score was 14.3 (out of a possible 24), but the standard
deviation was pretty high at 4.3, so there is a lot of variability in how optimistic people
tend to be. I’m personally pretty high in optimism, which is one of the resources that
helps me to cope with stress. I score a 22 (out of a possible 24) on the LOT-R. So here
it’s important to reiterate that if you didn’t score as high on the LOT-R as you maybe
would have liked, remember the idea that optimism can also be thought of as an
explanatory style and therefore is something that can be increased with practice.
3
 Personality and Coping:
Psychological Resources

LO1: What is • Optimism

coping?
• Expectancy that good things will happen in the future
• Positive mood
• Men undergoing bypass surgery
• Higheroptimism scores =betterhealth outcomes
• Prospectivelyfollow 1000 men for 10 years (avg. 60yrs)
• Higheroptimism scores =lowerincidence of heart disease
• Tend to useeffectivecoping strategies
• Planning, problem solving, social support

Now that you’ve had a chance to see where you fall on the LOT-R, and we’ve covered
how there are some ways to increase optimism, let’s talk about some of the health
benefits associated with high levels of optimism. People high in optimism generally
tend to experience a positive mood more often than people lower in optimism. This
can be somewhat explained by optimistic people being more likely to in general
expect that things will turn out pretty well for them and that when things don’t, they
are just temporary setbacks and there are things that can be done about those
situations.

A positive mood is a useful resource for coping with stress because being in a positive
mood can then make it more likely that you will interpret events that do happen to
you in a more positive way, or be better able to see the positive aspects of those
events. For example, research findings suggest that overall pessimists tend to
experience more subjective stress than optimists just because of the way they
interpret the events that happen to them. A person lower in optimism will generally
interpret the same event as more stressful than a person higher in optimism. A
robust finding from the Positive Psychology research is that positive emotional states
are associated with better mental and physical health in general. This is one way that
optimism is associated with better health outcomes than pessimism.

4
Now I’m going to talk about a couple of studies that show pretty clearly the dramatic
effect that a positive outlook can have on health. In the first study, 51 middle aged
men that were about to undergo coronary artery bypass surgery (so they already had
cardiovascular issues) filled out the LOT to assess their levels of optimism. These men
were then followed throughout the surgical recovery period to see how they
recovered. What the researchers found was that men that had higher optimism
scores achieved each milestone of recovery, things like sitting up in bed and walking
unassisted, earlier than men with lower optimism scores. At the 6-month check-up,
men with higher optimism scores were significantly more likely to have engaged in
vigorous exercise and to have returned to work full time. So these results suggest
that just the expectations that these men had, that generally things would go well for
them, like their recovery process, helped to create that self-fulfilling prophecy and
their recovery process went better. Now, this was a study of people that already had
cardiovascular issues. Can being higher in optimism actually help protect us from
developing these conditions in the first place? A second study will help us answer this
question.

In this second study, researchers recruited 1000 men that didn’t have any
cardiovascular problems at the start of the study. They gave the men the LOT to
assess their levels of optimism, then followed them for 10 years. This is called a
prospective study, because they are following people to see what happens to them
in the future, rather than recruiting people that already have differences between
them and measuring them right now. The researchers found that after controlling for
things like smoking, alcohol use, and other lifestyle habits that can affect health, the
men that scored higher on the LOT at the beginning of the study had lower
incidence of heart disease, including lower levels of both fatal and non-fatal heart
attacks, 10 years later. So, it seems that the positive effect of optimism on health
can’t be totally explained by people high in optimism perhaps having different
health-related lifestyle habits compared to people low in optimism, because the
researchers controlled for that variable. It seems that something about the outlook
on life that people higher in optimism have was actually protective against
developing cardiovascular problems, which we know are often intimately related to
stress.

One suggestion for how optimism might be viewed as a coping resources against
stress, in addition to the effects of interpreting events differently that I already talked
about, is how people high in optimism cope with events when they do find them
stressful. People higher in optimism tend to use more adaptive coping strategies,
such as seeking social support and positively reinterpreting stressful events, or trying
to see if there is any benefit to the event, similar to the challenge part of primary

4
appraisal, compared to people lower in optimism. People higher in optimism also
tend to use more active coping to deal with stressful events vs. just

hoping the problem will somehow go away, so they are more effectively able to
reduce stressors. This idea is illustrated by a study done with undergraduate students
that were given both the LOT and a measure of coping to see how they typically cope
with different stressors. The researchers found that optimism was associated with
more use of problem-focused coping, seeking social support, and emphasizing the
positive aspects of a stressful situation. Researchers have also found in older
populations that optimism was associated with quicker cortisol recovery after stress
exposure, which can help explain why people higher in optimism tend to experience
fewer stress-related health conditions. When they do get stressed, people higher in
optimism recover quicker, leading to less overall wear and tear on the body.

Also, people higher in optimism tend to be better able to attract social support and
have higher quality friendships because the quality of being optimistic about life
tends to draw more people to a person compared to being pessimistic about life, like
I briefly talked about in video #1. So people higher in optimism tend to have a richer
network of social support resources to draw on in times of stress. You’ll see in the
textbook just how important social support is for coping with stress.

So, we now see a couple ways that optimism can be a protective factor against stress.
First, people higher in optimism tend to perceive events as less stressful in the first
place, so they are already going to experience less stress. And second, when they do
perceive an event as stressful, they are more effective at mobilizing their resources
to cope with that event so that the stress, and the negative impacts it can have on
the body, does not last that long when it does happen.

4
 Personality and Coping:
Psychological Resources

LO1: What is • Self-Compassion

coping?
• Kindness, connection, awareness
• More positivecognitive restructuring
; less
avoidance/escape coping

• Gratitude
• Noticing andappreciatingthe positive in life
• Associated with positive coping styles (e.g., seeking
support, active coping)

To end this video, we’re going to talk about two more personality characteristics that are
protective factors, or resources, against stress. The first one is self-compassion. This
characteristic is essentially like the opposite of the self-criticism that we mentioned in video #1
as one of the aspects of perfectionism.

Self-compassion involves treating oneself with kindness, feeling connected with humanity, and
being mindfully aware of distressing experiences. It’s the idea of being kind and caring towards
yourself instead of being judgmental and critical. When you’re being self-compassionate, you
view your own imperfections and perceived short-comings in a gentle and accepting way,
rather than a critical and demeaning way as you might when experiencing perfectionism. The
idea of feeling connected with humanity entails recognizing one’s imperfections and suffering as
something everyone else also experiences. This idea challenges the feelings of isolation that can
come with the belief that one’s suffering is abnormal or a sign of weakness. Lastly, the idea of
being mindfully aware of distressing experiences is the idea of adopting a non-judgmental
approach to your own emotions. It includes being aware of present moments and emotions,
instead of perhaps trying to numb or ignore negative emotions. Being aware allows you to
recognize potential negative emotions and address them in a compassionate manner so they
can pass, instead of pretending they don’t exist in the first place, which usually leads to those
negative emotions persisting.

Self-compassion appears to be most beneficial particularly in response to personal failings

because it helps to defuse the negative self-evaluations, self-criticism, and self-blame that are
often experienced in these instances. Again these ideas relate back to procrastination and
perfectionism. In a 2012 study examining the relationship between stress, self-compassion, and
procrastination, researchers found that procrastinators tend to have high stress and low self-
compassion. That low selfcompassion then contributes to the blame and shame we often lay on
ourselves when we’ve procrastinated. Another study indicated that self-compassion was
negatively correlated with procrastination and perceived stress, so people higher in self-
compassion are less likely to procrastinate in the first place, and then if they do, they are more
likely to forgive themselves for doing it so they don’t add on that layer of self-blame and make
the procrastination even more stressful. So, both procrastination and perfectionism can be
combatted by cultivating self-compassion.

There is some evidence that the coping strategies that self-compassionate people use may
explain some of these benefits. Self-compassion is associated with a greater use of positive
cognitive restructuring and less use of avoidance and escape coping, because it involves
actually being aware of and acknowledging negative feelings, particularly negative feelings
about yourself, but then being kind to yourself about them. People high in self-compassion tend
to use more adaptive coping strategies, like actively dealing with the problem, positive
reframing (or looking for the benefits in the situation), and acceptance, and fewer maladaptive
coping strategies, like behavioural disengagement (for example, through substance use and
withdrawal) and self-blame. Research also shows that self-compassion lowers sympathetic
nervous system reactivity, which will help protect the body against the negative effects of
chronic stress.

So, it might sound so simple that a great way to help protect yourself again stress is to just be
nicer to yourself, but many people find it pretty hard to do. I wonder how many of you have said
‘I’m my own worst critic’ or how many of you have that almost constant stream of self-criticism
going through your mind all the time pointing out every little potential mistake you might make.
That can be a useful thing to try to think consciously about, because self-criticism often comes
to us so automatically, but we don’t often have an automatic self-compassion response. So,
trying to work on self-compassion, just like working on optimism, or any other health-related
habit, can be beneficial for our overall health. And this is a great coping strategy that doesn’t
take a lot of time, like doing a 30 minute yoga session every day, but is rather just a new way to
think about things and respond to your own thoughts and actions.

The last personality characteristic that I want to touch on in this video is gratitude. This one is
another of my favourites because again it is not something that takes a lot of time to do, but can
be a powerful way to help combat the negative effects of stress. Reminding yourself of what you
have in your life that you are grateful for can really help to put things in perspective. It’s so easy
to get caught up in complaining about the things we don’t have that we can often forget to look
at the things we do have and appreciate them. We have enough food, water, shelter, the world

1
at the tip of our fingers with the internet and smartphones and tablets. We have loved ones that
care about us, the opportunity to attend University and get an education in a safe and
supportive atmosphere. So even though we are living through some pretty extraordinary and
stressful times right now, there are still many things to be grateful for. I often think of what life
would be like if a pandemic happened a few decades ago, before the explosion of the internet
and video conferencing technology. Things would be much different than they are today. Even
though I haven’t been able to see my family since Christmas 2019, I am able to video chat with
them a couple times a month, so we’re still able to connect. If I didn’t have access to the magic
of the internet or telephone, I might have to rely on things like letters in the mail that could take
weeks to arrive. So taking a bit of time each day to focus some energy and thought on what we
have that we are grateful for can help to combat some of the stress we’re experiencing. Now,
this isn’t meant to minimize the situations that we are experiencing that are really difficult.
Rather, it's a reminder to acknowledge that likely everyone has some things in their life that
they are thankful for even during tough times.

Also, the expression of gratitude can be very powerful. You know how great it is when someone
comes up to you and expresses how thankful they are to have you in their life and it is a surprise
to you, like it’s not your birthday, or you’re not getting an award or something. That feeling can
be very powerful. Personally, I find it really powerful when I receive unsolicited emails or cards
of appreciation from students that let me know that they appreciated something I did during
class for them that semester, or that my class touched them in some way, or made them think
about things differently. I save all of those emails and cards. I have many of them in my office
and I often look back at them if I’m having a particularly tough or frustrating day and they
always lift my spirits. Expressing gratitude to others can be a very powerful thing. I often think
about things like living funerals. People always say such powerful expressions of gratitude for
people at funerals, but those people are no longer around to hear those words. Imagine if we
said those things more to people while they are around. That can be a really great gift.

Gratitude is also a way to combat things like general negativity if that tends to be more of your
personality style because what we focus on tends to grow in our minds. If you focus on the
negative things most often, those become the main things that you see. It makes sense to focus
on negative events, because that focus was evolutionarily important. We want to pay attention
to negative events because they could potentially harm us. But taking some time to intentionally
combat that automatic response to focus on the negative by intentionally focusing some energy
on the positive elements of life can be an important aspect of balance that we know is so crucial
to health.

Similar to optimism, in addition to gratitude helping us to think about situations differently so

we don’t experience as many things as stressful, being higher in gratitude is also associated
with a range of positive coping styles, including seeking social support, positive reinterpretation

2
of events, and active coping. Gratitude also tends to be negatively related to maladaptive coping
styles, such as behavioural disengagement, self-blame, substance use, and denial. So again we
see two ways that gratitude helps to protect us against stress: 1) We experience fewer things as
stressful, and 2) we are able to better cope with the stressors that do come up. Cultivating an
intentional sense of gratitude in your life can be another one of those coping resources that you
can add to your arsenal.

I hope you’ve seen throughout this video that there is essentially a counter to each of the
personality risk factors that we talked about in video #1. We can counter the effects of general
negativity by consciously practicing gratitude, we can counter the effects of procrastination and
perfectionism by consciously focusing on selfcompassion, and we can counter the effects of
pessimism by consciously focusing on an optimistic explanatory style. So even if you have some
automatic default risk factors in your personality, there are things you can do, by bringing some
conscious attention to your thoughts, to help mitigate those risk factors.

OK, this brings us to the end of module 7 video #2. I hope while watching this video you have
thought a bit more consciously about how you tend to view stressful events. I hope you also see
that even if your personality tends to have more of those risk factors for stress associated with
it, those factors are not your destiny. There are skills you can cultivate and practice that can
become part of your health habits and help protect you against the negative effects of stress,
thus increasing your overall physical, psychological, and social health.

I’ll see you back here for our last video for this module, where I’ll talk about some specific coping
strategies that you can incorporate into your life for dealing with the stressors that do pop up to
further help you increase that ‘resources’ side of your stress equation. I’ll see you there.

3
Hi everybody and welcome to the third and final video for module 7. In our first and
second videos, I talked about some of the personality characteristics that can be risk
factors or protective factors against the effects of stress. I also talked about ways to
work on those traits to help nudge some personality characteristics in the direction of
being more protective if you don’t happen to naturally have those types of traits as
part of your disposition.

In this video, I want to focus on some more practical strategies for managing and
coping with stress. This is some of the information I love to share the most. It doesn’t
really do much to inform people about the effects that stress can have on their minds
and bodies if there is then nothing you can do to change those risk factors. This is
one of those ideas that I have been emphasizing from the beginning of this course.
Many of the aspects that affect our health are modifiable risk factors, so there are
things we can do about them. Sometimes those things aren’t easy and require
determination and commitment, like changing health-related habits, but there are
things we can do. The same is true with stress: we are not doomed to suffer the
negative consequences of stress, even in our over-stressed modern world. There are
things we can do to mitigate the impacts that stress has on all aspects of our health.

1
In this video, I’ve tried to focus on strategies that I think are useful for students,
which means that I’ve chosen many strategies that don’t often take too much time
or energy to implement, because we know that is one of the things that causes
students stress in the first place – too many demands and not enough resources of
time and energy. I don’t want thinking about stress management to contribute to the
demands side of the equation instead of the resources side.

Alright, let’s dive in to some practical strategies for coping with stress!

4
 Stress = Demand > Coping resources

There is HOPE
We can learn
to COPE

We already know that we can conceptualize stress with our equation of Stress =
Demand > Coping Resources. We also know that sometimes it can be difficult to
change the amount of demands that are placed on us. But what we can often do is
try to increase our resources bucket. If we can increase our resources enough, our
coping resources can outweigh those demands and help us calm our stress response.
When we have an arsenal of coping strategies at our disposal, we can be more
confident that we can handle whatever stressors life brings our way. And remember,
confidence can be one of our coping resources.

Also, knowing that we’re living in a modern world with modern stressors, but with a
stress response that hasn’t caught up yet in term of evolution, can help us give
ourselves some grace when we experience stress. We basically NEED to support our
stress response consciously with active coping because it hasn’t had a chance yet to
evolve to keep up with our rapidly changing world. That doesn’t mean you’re weak or
inadequate somehow if you feel stressed, that just means you’re a human with an
old system trying to live in a crazy new world.

5
 Interconnected
Thoughts

Behaviours Physiology

Feelings

Before we get into the coping strategies, I first want to point out these four main
areas, as they are all important in terms of how we experience and deal with stress.
When we experience stress, it can affect our thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and
physiology. All those areas are interconnected. For example, our thoughts can affect
our physiology, as I’ve mentioned quite a bit, our behaviours can affect our feelings,
etc.

Here is a good time to think about which of these areas may be most relevant to
you when you experience stress. For example, maybe you get really anxious and
start to think about the worst case scenario and can't focus and concentrate, or
maybe you engage in avoidant behaviours like procrastination when you’re
stressed, or maybe you start to feel sad or overwhelmed, or maybe you experience
physical effects like exhaustion, sluggishness, muscle tension, or illness. Think about
which of these areas seems most affected in you by stress. I’m going to cover some
coping strategies related to each of these four primary areas. You might get the
most bang for your coping buck by focusing on strategies that target the way stress
tends to impact you the most, which will then also help you deal with stress
affecting you in the other areas because they are all interconnected.

6
 Thoughts
Thoughts only have the power that we give them

Normalize
Natural/Not permanent
Refute Your Thinking
Look for concrete evidence
Refute Negative Labels
Confirmation bias

I’m going to start out by talking about a few strategies to help manage stressful
thoughts.

I wonder how many of you can identify with this image. Sometimes our brains can get
away from us and we have to try to wrangle our thoughts back to reality. We already
talked about one facet of our amazing human brains that contributes to stress, which
is our ability to mentally project ourselves into the past and into the future. We can
worry about things that aren’t actually happening right now. Well, there are other
facets of our big fancy human brains that we can try to use to our advantage to help
us manage stress. We as humans have these amazingly plastic brains. This is why
when we’re born, we basically can’t do anything. Some other human has to take care
of us for years before we can do most things for ourselves. Other animals are born
and an hour later can run around. That’s because our brains are much more plastic
than the brains of most other animals, so we are very adaptable. Plastic brains take
more time to develop, but that plasticity means that we can CHANGE OUR
THOUGHTS. As we know, much of our stress comes from our thoughts, so this is great
news. In fact, one of the founding fathers of Psychology, William James, knew the
power of our thoughts to activate our stress response. In a famous quote, he said

7
“Our greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over
another.” That’s the idea I was talking about in video 2 with combating many of our
automatic negative or critical responses by consciously focusing on different thoughts.

One tip for managing stress is remembering that our thoughts are not necessarily
accurrate and don’t necessarily represent facts. And they only have the power that
we give them. It might seem like it’s impossible to control our thoughts, but try this
exercise: Image you’re holding a juicy red apple in your hand. Did you just do it? If so,
you just controlled your thoughts by thinking of a specific thought at a specific time.
So we do have the ability to consciously direct our thoughts, though it can seem
especially difficult to do this when we’re stressed and it feels like we not only can’t
control our thoughts, but that our thoughts are jumping around a million miles a
minute. In those instances, try to remember that you can gain some control over your
thoughts. Here we’re going to talk about a few specific ways to try to combat the
automatic thoughts that stress often brings up by using consciously generated
thoughts.

1a) The first technique is to normalize your thoughts about stress. What that means is
that it’s natural to have worried thoughts. Everyone does. Thinking that your thoughts
are outside the realm of normal worry will just make you stress out about them more,
just like the idea of getting stressed about our own stress response. Recognize that
everyone faces stressors and that everyone will, at some point, have worried
thoughts about those stressors. So again, having stressed thoughts doesn’t mean
you’re weak, or can’t handle whatever is causing you to have those thoughts, but
rather those thoughts are a natural response to a challenge.

1b) The next thing that can help is to recognize that the stressor, and your worried
thoughts about it, will not last forever. A phrase my Dad would repeat to me every
time we talked on the phone when I was frustrated about some aspect or other of my
PhD was “This too shall pass”. It basically became my mantra throughout grad school.
This relates to that optimistic idea of explaining negative events as not permanent.
Another favourite phrase that I like to remind myself of is one I picked up from Gail
vaz Oxlade, who used to host the show Til Debt Do Us Part. She would say “Where
you are now is not where you will always be”. This applies to both negative situations
and good situations. This phrase reminds me that when things are going poorly, they
won’t always be going poorly. I just have to get through this rough patch and things
will look up. The phrase also reminds me that, when things are going really well, they
may at some point change. So, I should try to be grateful for the times when things
are going well and make sure I’m prepared for if things change (e.g., by saving money,
by doing things when I have the time, etc.). This idea helps me maintain a sense of
gratitude in everyday life, which we talked about in the last video.

4
2) The next strategy to try to combat those automatic stressful thoughts can help
if your automatic stressful thoughts tend involve catastrophizing events, or basically
immediately thinking of the worst case scenario for any event. This strategy is to
analyze those automatic thoughts consciously and refute them by looking for
evidence. This is a classic type of Cognitive Behavioural strategy. Try to give yourself
concrete evidence for your thoughts being correct. A lot of times we catastrophize
with our thoughts. For example, our thoughts might tell us something like “If I do
poorly on this exam, I will never get into a grad program, then I'll never get a decent
job, and will end up living in a box forever”. When you find yourself in this mindset,
try to come up with concrete evidence to support that catastrophized idea. It will
likely be very difficult because that idea is by no stretch of the imagination true. In this
case, you would try to come up with concrete evidence that if you fail one exam, you
will never get a good job. Now here it’s important to remember that concrete
evidence isn’t vague statements like ‘the job market is really competitive’ or ‘only the
best applicants get jobs’. Concrete means you have some specific evidence, like you
know someone that failed one midterm and because of that midterm they are
currently jobless. It will likely be pretty difficult to come up with concrete evidence.

Then the next thing to do is come up with concrete evidence that refutes that
thought. Like, do you know someone that failed an exam before and went on to get a
good job? For example, I know a person that got an F in two classes in University and
is now a University professor with a PhD. So I could use that concrete evidence to
refute the idea that if I fail one exam, I will never get a good job. Often our thoughts
are automatic and because a thought pops into our head, we tend to accept it without
looking at it critically. But this is where that conscious control comes in. Look for
evidence to support the validity of your stressful thoughts before you accept them as
potentially being true. You will likely find that most of them aren’t actually true at all
and are fairly over-blown.

3) The third strategy I’ll give you for combatting your stressful thoughts is
refuting negative labels that your thoughts try to give you. For example, if you have
procrastinated on some project, now you may think of yourself as lazy. If you give
yourself the label of lazy, that label can start to pervade your thoughts. Then you may
start to believe you can only act in a certain way, like a lazy person. This thought may
spiral into something like "Why even bother to try, you’ll never be successful because
you’re lazy". Recognize that this label is not true of your behaviour 100% of the time
by reminding yourself of times when you definitely weren’t lazy. Sure, maybe you
behave in a lazy way sometimes (most of us do), but there are other times when you
definitely aren’t lazy. Recognizing that the label your thoughts are trying to give you is
not true of your behaviour 100% of the time can help you to refute the label and not

4
fall into the trap of accepting the negative label your thoughts are trying to give you.

It’s important to try to refute these negative labels from our thoughts. Something
that can happen if we don’t refute these labels is we may fall victim to confirmation
bias, where we start to take in information from the world that supports our label
and ignore information that refutes it. It can then be harder to get out of that rut of
having those negative stressful thoughts about ourselves because confirmation bias
contributes to only paying attention to negative aspects about ourselves.

Another important thing to remember about labels your thoughts try to give you is
what is influencing them. For example, sometimes you might start to think that
everyone else has it more together, or is smarter, or is more confident than you are.
In these instances, it can help to remember that we’re only seeing other people
from the outside. It can be very likely that that person is looking at you and thinking
you seem like you have it all together, are confident, are smart, etc. Facebook and
social media can make it seem like everyone else’s life is more together than yours.
Remember that people tend to only put the best aspects of their lives on social
media, which can skew our perceptions of others’ lives and make us feel bad about
our own. Try to remember to check your automatic assumptions and recognize
that’s what they are, assumptions – they’re not necessarily facts.
4
 Feelings
Social Support Facial Feedback Laughter
Brainstorm Coping Easier to access positive Endorphins
Hugs thoughts

The next of the 4 broad categories we’re going to talk about is feelings. Let’s talk
about some techniques that can be useful for coping with negative feelings that
stress brings up. Remember, all these systems are interconnected, so many of the
techniques related to thoughts can also help to combat negative feelings related to
stress, because often our feelings come from our thoughts. But then thoughts can
also come from our feelings. For example, people tend to think of more negative
thoughts when they’re already in a bad mood. So techniques to help manage
negative feelings from stress can then also help deal with negative stress-related
thoughts.

1) The first strategy for dealing with negative stress-related feelings is social support.
When you have strong relationships with people and can talk to them about your
stressors, you learn that the feelings you have about stressors are normal by realizing
that other people are feeling the same way you are. This is the idea behind support
groups. They help you realize you are not the only person that has ever dealt with a
particular stressor. They allow a space for you to talk to people that are dealing with
the same issue as you to see how they are coping, or people that have successfully
dealt with the stressor in the past to see what worked for them. This is the basic idea
behind student support groups on campuses: to help students deal with stress. This
idea was talked about in one of the optional videos from module 6. Social support
can be enormously beneficial for helping to manage stress.

This idea of talking to others that are dealing with similar stressors is the idea of
brainstorm coping. This is more than just venting about the stressors. It's rather
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talking about what you are doing to deal with the stressor and getting ideas from
others in similar situations. A good idea is something like an 80/20 rule. Vent 20% of
the time about the stressor(s) to just let out the negative emotions. That venting and
release of emotions can actually help you to get into a better head space to then get
down to problem-solving ways to deal with the stressor(s). So spend 20% of the time
venting and 80% of the time focusing on things you can do to address the issue that
is causing the venting.

Now, sometimes people can be totally resistant to any ideas about what they might
be able to do about the stressful situation because they don’t believe there is
anything they can do. In these circumstances, it can sometimes be helpful to institute
a rule for 5 or 10 minutes that you both brainstorm things that could be done about
the stressor without being able to say why the person can’t implement those things.
Just present some ideas about how to actively cope with the stressor. Here it’s
important to recognize that there are some stressors that are outside of our control
and that we can’t do anything about. That is where you can turn to emotion-focused
coping as there are still things that you can do to manage your reaction to the
stressor.

In addition to receiving social support, giving social support is also useful for stress
coping. Giving social support to others gives you an opportunity to help others and
feel competent at something, which in turns gives you the confidence to deal with
your own stressors. Some research has suggested that GIVING social support can do
more for reducing stress than RECEIVING social support.

There was some interesting research done about social connection and building
support through expressions of gratitude that was conducted by a Harvard
Psychology researcher studying happiness named Shawn Achor. He wrote a book
called The Happiness Advantage. Most people think success will bring them
happiness; but, research shows that when you make yourself happy first, success
then tends to follow. Otherwise you’re happy for a little while after some success,
but then you just start looking for the next thing that you think will bring you
happiness. You’ll be happy when you get that promotion, or lose that weight, or
make more money. Dr. Achor’s research looked at raising happiness and optimism
through social connection. In their research study, they had people in a business
write a two minute thank you email to someone they knew at the start of each day
for 21 days. It could be something as small as an email saying ‘Hey, thanks so much
for your help on that project yesterday. You really helped me meet a deadline that
was important. I appreciated your insights’. So these emails didn’t take much time
out of their day.

They found at the end of the 21 days that the people in the study had improved
teamwork, social connection, and happiness. They also found that business metrics
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improved, like work productivity, simply because people felt more connected to their
coworkers and felt happier at work. So social support and connection can be very
powerful.

Lastly, hugs can be a great way to help combat stress. Hugs release oxytocin, which
makes us feel good and actually protects our hearts from the damaging effects of
stress. Research shows that people with more oxytocin in their blood have a smaller
stress response to laboratory-induced stressors. So getting some good hugs in from
your social network can be a really useful way to combat the negative feelings and
effects of stress. And here I want to throw in that pets can be an important part of
your social support network too. Getting cuddles from your pets can also help to
increase your oxytocin levels ☺

2) The next strategy for combating negative feelings related to stress is facial
feedback, which is a little way to try to trick your brain. It’s been suggested that even
just holding a pencil in your teeth can cause facial feedback similar to a smile and
make positive thoughts easier to access, which can put you in a better frame of
mind. This happens because holding a pencil in your teeth in this way (see picture on
slide) contracts the same muscles as a smile. We know that emotions aren’t just the
cause of facial expressions, but facial expressions can also cause the emotions
associated with them. If you make the expression of the emotion you want to feel, it
kind of tricks your brain into thinking it feels that emotion. Smiles have been
associated with happiness in the past. If your face is smiling, the brain interprets that
it must be happy, because why else would you be smiling? This is also an
evolutionarily adaptive trick of the body. We tend to unconsciously mimic the facial
expressions of others. This may help explain why people that smile a lot are rated as
more pleasant to be around. They unconsciously cause you to smile a bit too, and
your brain then thinks you’re happier.

Why might we do this kind of facial mimicry? One idea is that mimicry helps us
figure out what other people are feeling by evoking the same emotion in us, which
is evolutionarily important to avoid conflict. If you are prevented from making facial
expressions (think botox), then the theory goes that you are less able to identify
what other people are feeling. So, just tricking your face into smiling by holding a
pencil in your teeth can help to subtly improve your mood. I have a friend that will
walk to class with a pencil in his teeth to help promote a good mood before he
teaches a class. He also makes a big smile on his face before making phone calls
where he has to be pleasant but maybe he doesn’t feel that pleasant in the moment.
It can be a useful easy trick to try.

3) The last strategy I’ll present to you for combatting the negative emotions
associated with stress is laughter. There is a lot of research to suggest that laughter
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can help to combat negative feelings because laughter releases endorphins, our
feelgood hormones. Trying to infuse some humour into your stressful situation can
be really useful. This is one of my go tos for coping with stress. I will make jokes
about the stressor to help improve my mood and make the stressor not seem so
bad. Taking a break to watch your favourite comedy when stressed, or funny
YouTube videos, can be a beneficial way to help combat stress. These days I tend to
get most of my news through the late night comedy shows because otherwise the
news seems too depressing. By combining the news with comedy I still feel
informed, but I get that dose of laughter at the same time.

There is even a practice called Laughter Yoga that you can try. Google it, and I dare
you not to laugh :) Laughter yoga starts with the principle that is doesn’t matter if
the laughter is fake at first, but that by starting with fake laughter, you will
eventually reach genuine laughter and then receive the benefits (it's even argued
you can get the same benefits from fake laughter). In laughter yoga, they start with
bizarre exercises, like pouring imaginary water from one imaginary glass into the
other while saying Ha Ha Ha really loudly in a fake laugh. If you have a group of
people doing this in a circle it becomes almost impossible not to laugh because the
whole situation is so absurd. If you need some relief from stress, a good belly laugh
can be enormously helpful. (I've included a short Laughter Yoga video as one of the
optional resource videos for module 7 if you want to check it out for yourself...)

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 Behaviours

Conquer Procrastination
Self-efficacy/manage negative moods
Tolerate the negative feelings, thenACT

Hobbies
Just for FUN
Social or alone

Say NO
Establish boundaries
Take on things thatfill your cup

Our third broad category in terms of how you can be impacted by stress is through
your behaviours. We already talked quite a bit about one behaviour that is caused by,
and can also cause, quite a bit of stress: procrastination. Managing your
procrastinating behaviours can help to reduce a lot of stress.

1) I already covered some of the reasons we tend to procrastinate in the first

module 7 video. What it comes down to is that often people will procrastinate
because of an inability to manage negative moods surrounding a task. This is why
procrastination is sometimes referred to as an emotion regulation problem and not a
time management problem. Those moods might take the form of boredom, anxiety,
insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt, etc. Procrastination is often called an
irrational behaviour because we do it to manage negative moods in the moment, yet
we know it will lead to even more negative mood later. We will still have the task to
do later, but now we’ll have less time (or fewer resources) to complete the task.
Procrastination is essentially a maladaptive coping mechanism. It is similar to many
of the other health-compromising behaviours we’ve talked about in this course,
because it involves a focus on the short-term goal of managing and avoiding negative
moods instead of the longer-term goal of getting the task done, just like many other
health compromising behaviours are focused on short-term pleasure rather than
longterm health.

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You do get temporary relief from the negative feelings when you step away from the
task, so in essence, you get rewarded for procrastinating. This is what then makes
procrastination behaviour in the future more likely. We know from basic behaviorism
that when we’re rewarded for something, we tend to do it again. This is precisely why
procrastination tends not to be a one-off behavior, but a cycle, and one that easily
becomes a chronic habit.

In the first two module 7 videos, I talked about recognizing the deeper reasons why
we procrastinate and cultivating self-compassion as a couple ways to try to combat
procrastination behaviour. Another strategy is exposure. Expose yourself to the task
that you find aversive, to help show yourself that it probably isn't as bad as you think.
This is similar to the idea of exposure therapy for phobias. You expose people to the
thing they are afraid of until their fear response subsides.

For exposure related to procrastination, there’s a practice called prescribing the

minimal amount of effort as a way to start. This means working on the task for a
small amount of time to start, just to get started, because usually getting started is
the hardest part. If you think you have to get started and do the whole task in one
sitting, you’re more likely to put it off. But, if you tell yourself, "I will just work on the
task for 10 minutes, then I can stop and take a break, or decide whether I want to
continue", then it seems less intimidating. If the task brings up negative emotions,
you’re basically saying, "I’m going to tolerate those negative emotions for just
10min, and then I can escape from them". I personally do this all the time. For
example, when I have a pile of grading to do, I will tell myself that I will just start by
grading one assignment, then I will take a break or I can be done with that task for
the day. Then I grade one assignment and realize it was actually not so bad. Then I say
"ok, I’ll do two more, then take a break". Then before I know it, I’ve graded 6 or 7
assignments. So just tolerating those negative feelings for a short amount of time to
expose yourself to the task can help those feelings dissipate and help you get started.
Our feelings can be fairly transient, so if you accept those negative feelings and
tolerate them for the time it takes you to get started on the task, once you actually
start working, you may find those feelings dissipate and then are replaced by deep
satisfaction once you complete the task.

2) The next strategy I have for you to combat dealing with stress behaviourally is
to engage in hobbies. It’s always a good practice to try to incorporate something you
do on a fairly regular basis in your life that is just for fun. You’re allowed to just have
fun in life. This is not something you do to pad your resume, or as volunteer work, or
because it's good for the world, unless doing those things is genuinely fun for you. It's

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something you do just because you enjoy it. I am in a bowling league. Because I’m
part of a team in this league, it motivates me to attend every week and block off that
important time in my schedule, because otherwise I’m letting my team down. I’d be
much more likely to skip weeks of bowling when I’m busy if the consequence was just
to my own average. But being a part of this team helps me to keep something in my
week that I do just for fun with a group of people that aren’t connected at all to my
work. For those couple hours a week, I get to interact with friends doing something
social and forget about everything else. It can really help to put things in perspective
to remember there are other aspects to life than just the things stressing you out, like
your job or school work.

If you generally spend a lot of time alone, a social hobby, like my bowling league, can
be a good chance to interact with people to get some social contact. If you generally
spend a lot of time around others, having a hobby that is more individual-based can
be a good chance to reconnect with yourself. For example, by creating art, or baking,
or nature walking.

3) The last strategy I’m going to share related to behaviours is saying NO. This
one has always been hard for me, so I realize it can be quite hard for others too.
When someone asks us to do something, we often want to help, or think people will
think poorly of us if we don’t pitch in, or maybe we see an opportunity and think if we
don’t jump on it, an opportunity like that won’t come around again. But saying no
and establishing boundaries is an important life skill that will serve you well for the
rest of your life.

There is literally not enough time in a day or a life to do everything, so focus the time
you do have on the things that are most important to you. You don’t have to do
something just because someone asks you to. It is not your job to make everyone
else’s life easier. You have to do what’s best for you sometimes. I have been trying to
put this behaviour into practice much more diligently this past year since the
pandemic started. I have a lot on my plate right now and my resources are pretty
much taxed to the breaking point as it is. I know that if I take on anything else, those
demands are going to really outweigh my resources, and that will bring a lot of stress
into my life. I’ve been getting better at this skill by recruiting the help of my husband.
I let him know each time I say no to something that someone has asked of me. He
then gives me a lot of positive reinforcement for doing that and protecting my time
for the things I’ve already committed to and the things that are truly important to me.
That positive reinforcement then helps me be more likely to stick to my boundaries in
the future.

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I actually just said no to someone’s request not too long ago. I was asked to give a talk
to a group of new faculty members at MacEwan, but the talk was supposed to be
during a time when I already have a lot of commitments scheduled. I’d have to
prepare the talk from scratch, so it would require a lot of time and energy. I said no
and that I just didn’t have the resources to take on that task right now. The person
that asked me actually responded by saying that she really respected my choice to say
no. I told her that if I give other people advice to say no to things to help manage
their stress, I better follow my own advice, otherwise, why should anyone listen to
me? So you might be surprised at the response if you do say no – it might be more
positive than you anticipate. I also remind myself that by modeling establishing
boundaries for myself, I’m helping to contribute to a culture of work-life balance and
not instead modeling a glorified culture of overwork. That’s something I think about
when I’m having a hard time saying no to something. What’s the behaviour I want to
model?

Also remember that each time you do say yes to a new commitment, you are
essentially saying no to a range of other things, like time with your loved ones, or
time for yourself, or some other commitment that is maybe something you’d prefer
to do or aligns better with your interests and values. It’s not just about managing our
TIME but also about managing our ENERGY. I’m not saying to say no to everything,
but to be really selective about the things you do take on. Make sure they align with
your goals and values and help to fill up your cup of joy in life, instead of draining it. I
always like to use the airplane metaphor here. Put on your own oxygen mask first
before helping others. You will best be able to help others if you’re first taking good
care of yourself by managing your own boundaries.

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 Physiology
Deep Breathing
Focus on exhaling
Activate the PNS

Exercise
Use that mobilized energy!

Nutrition
Hangry; magnesium

Alright, the last of the 4 broad ways that stress affects us is physiologically. We’ve
talked a lot about our physical response to stress throughout this course. Here I’ll
present three broad strategies for managing our physiological reaction to stress.

1) The first strategy, and another of my favourite ways to cope with stress in the
moment, is the classic stress management technique of deep or diaphragmatic
breathing. Deep breathing helps to reduce the physical feelings of stress because
deep breathing mimics the type of breathing we do when we are deeply relaxed, like
when sleeping, and contrasts the type of breathing we tend to do when we are
stressed, which is often to take short, shallow breaths. Deep breathing involves
breathing into your abdomen instead of into your chest. I’ll post a video to
Blackboard showing you how to do diaphragmatic breathing if it’s something you
want to practice. Deep breathing also works because exhaling activates our
parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest system. Remember
that the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems cannot be activated at the same
time. So, when you activate your parasympathetic system, you are in essence
deactivating your stress response sympathetic system. This can be an invaluable
strategy if you find yourself starting to become overwhelmed with stress or feelings
of panic in the moment, like during a tense exam.

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I encourage you to give this technique a try to show yourself that it works. I use this
technique a lot. One of the most salient memories I have of using it was the night
before one of my academic job interviews. An academic job interview is pretty
intense. It is typically around 12 hours long, usually involves giving a talk about your
research, a teaching demonstration to faculty and undergraduate students, a 90
minute panel interview with 5 or 6 people asking you questions, then usually a dozen
or so 15 minute meetings with various faculty members, lunch with students, and
dinner with faculty. And you’re basically being judged the entire time. It’s exhausting
and stressful. So of course, the night before I had one of these interviews, I was
having a hard time getting to sleep. I looked at my Fitbit and saw my heart rate was
almost 100. Normally when I’m laying down and relaxed it’s around 55. No surprise
why I couldn’t fall asleep, right. So I did deep breathing for just 3 minutes while
watching my Fitbit and my heart rate went down to 65. It really does work. Then I
turned on reruns of The Big Bang Theory to fall asleep to so I was also getting a little
dose of comedy and laughter ☺ Combining multiple stress coping strategies is also a
great plan when you can.

2) Another great strategy that we have mentioned throughout this course is

exercise. We’ve already learned that exercise can be just as important for people
with depression as anti-depressants. Exercise doesn’t have to be going to the gym. It
can be things you incorporate into your daily life, like dancing in your room to your
favourite music, or going for a brisk walk. Exercise will use up all that glucose and
energy mobilized by your stress response, so you don’t feel all amped up and jittery,
which can really help to reduce the physical feelings of stress. Exercise also releases
endorphins, which will help to combat those negative feelings associated with stress.
Exercise is a good double whammy stress coping mechanism.

3) The last point I want to touch on here is nutrition. We already covered a lot of
information about the benefits of a healthy diet in module 4. One of the benefits that
isn’t often talked about is that a healthy diet can help to regulate your stress
response. For example, I wonder how many of you get ‘Hangry’. You know, that
feeling of irritability when you know you need some food? Well, there’s your stress
response in action again. It’s trying to help you out. When you’re low on food, your
body recognizes that you don’t have enough glucose (or energy) in your bloodstream.
So, what do we know mobilizes glucose from storage and dumps it into our
bloodstream? Stress hormones! When your blood sugar gets low due to not eating,
your stress hormones actually rise to get more glucose out of storage and into your
blood, so you can use it to keep powering through your day. But, those stress

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hormones then cause some of the other effects of stress, like negative mood and
negative thoughts. So, try to keep some good food on hand to prevent that rise in
stress hormones that comes with a drop in blood sugar.

The last thing I’ll talk about regarding nutrition is magnesium. I’ve been reading a lot
about nutrition, the gut microbiome, and how our food is made lately. Some things
are not so great. Our soil is often depleted of nutrients because of the way crops are
grown these days. So, even if we eat healthy foods, we often don’t get the same
nutrients from those foods that even our parents would have gotten a few decades
ago. This leads to many of us being deficient in a lot of nutrients that our bodies and
brains need to function properly.

The latest addition to my own supplement regimen is magnesium. Magnesium is

great for helping to deal with stress. Most studies estimate that 80-90% of people
these days are deficient in magnesium because it’s almost impossible to get the
amount we need from the foods we eat, for reasons I just mentioned related to soil.
Magnesium is important because it’s a cofactor for hundreds of enzymatic reactions
in the body, meaning it has to be present for those reactions to occur. Some of those
reactions are in pathways that help to produce feel-good neurotransmitters like
serotonin. So, if we don’t have enough magnesium, we may not have enough
beneficial neurotransmitters that contribute to a positive mood.

Also, magnesium is an important molecule that blocks certain receptors on neurons.

This blockage by magnesium prevents a neuron from firing too much. If we don’t
have enough magnesium, that may contribute to racing thoughts that often
accompany feelings of stress, because our neurons are essentially firing too much and
can’t relax. Magnesium will also prevent too much calcium from getting into neurons,
so it also helps with things like muscle spasms or muscle cramps. Do you know
anyone that gets an eye twitch when they are stressed? That could be a sign of
depleted magnesium manifesting as a muscle spasm. My husband used to get an eye
twitch when he was stressed. Since we’ve added magnesium to our supplement
regimen, he no longer gets that eye twitch. Because magnesium helps to relax the
muscles of the body, it can help relieve some of that physical tension that we feel
from muscle cramping during stress. When our body feels more relaxed, that can help
our mind feel more relaxed because of the mind-body connection.

Our stress response depletes us of magnesium because magnesium is needed to

make cortisol. It’s one of the most important minerals to replenish consistently, and
especially when we’re under stress. It’s sometimes referred to as one of the great

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relaxers of the body. So, I encourage you to look into magnesium on your own and
consult with your medical practitioner to decide if it’s right for you.

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 Find What Works for YOU
New techniques may take a couple weeks to show benefits

Ok, that’s it for the specific stress management techniques I’ll share with
you in this video. There are of course many many more techniques for
managing stress that I didn’t talk about. I wonder what some of your
favourites are...

I want everyone to remember that not all of these techniques will be useful
for everyone. You might think of trying to refute negative labels and think,
"nope, that’s just not for me". And that is totally fine. Maybe instead
exercise will work really well for you. Whatever you find is best for you is
the thing you should do.

Just like different construction projects require different tools, often

different stressors will require different types of coping mechanisms.
Some coping mechanisms take more time and effort to implement, but
have more long-term results, like conquering procrastination, and some
techniques are easy to implement in the moment for short-term relief
from stress, like deep breathing. Some stressors we can do something
about, and others we just have to deal with and are out of our control.
Those different types of stressors will also require different types of
coping mechanisms, as covered in your textbook with problem and
emotion-focused coping.

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So, don’t necessarily expect one stress management technique to work for

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everything. If you try something and it doesn’t work for one type of stressor, don’t
necessarily discount it for other types of stressors or at other times of your life.

It’s also good to remember that health habits usually take a few weeks to
form. You want stress management to become a habit. Give that habit
some time to develop by giving it consistent attention while you’re forming
it, just like you would with any other health habit, like changing your
eating or exercise behaviours.

And lastly, this may be the most important thing to remember: Effective
stress management is not a magic wand to just make all your stressors
disappear. It is impossible to remove all the stressors from your life, so
that shouldn’t be the goal. The goal is to reduce the negative impact that
stressors have on you. You do that through building the skill set of stress
management, which is a skill set that you cultivate and add to over time.
You’ve learned lots of skills in your lives already, so you can learn skills
related to stress management too. If you can start building or
strengthening this skill set now, the benefits you will reap for the rest of
your life will be invaluable.

Often half the battle of coping with stress is believing that we can deal
with stress. By building up your skill set, you will gain confidence that you
will have the tools and skills at your disposable that you can draw on to
deal with the variety of stressors that life will throw your way. I hope you
took some useful stress management tips away from this video that you
can incorporate into your own stress-management toolbox. This brings us
to the end of my video content for module 7. I’ll see you back here for
module 8. I wish each of you the very best on your journey to build up
your stress management toolbox!

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