PSY 101: Introduction to Psychology

Lecture:8
Chapter 10: Stress
Ms. Ashma Rahman
Lecturer
Department of History and Philosophy
• In this chapter we are going to know about
• What is stress
• Types of stress
• General way of bodily response towards stress
• Coping strategies
• Some practical way to cope with stress
 What is stress
• According to Feldman (2013), stress is an
individual's response to events that are
threatening or challenging.
• stress is a feeling of strain and pressure that
has both mental and bodily component.
According to nature stress is of 2 type
• Positive stress: the kind of stress people
experience when faced with an event whose
outcome is pleasing. Positive stress is useful for
improved performance. For example, Receiving a
promotion or raise at work, Starting a new job,
Marriage.
• Negative stress: occurs when a person feels
unable to perform or to cope with a situation. It is
the response of a person when faced with
something unpleasant or undesirable. For
example; got fired from job, failing in exam.
 Stressor can be of 3 types from the basis of sources;
1. Cataclysmic event: strong stressor that occurs
suddenly and typically affect many people at
once. E.g. natural disaster.
2. Personal stressor : major life events that have
immediate negative consequences that generally
fade away with time. E.g. death of family
member.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): a
phenomena in which victims of major
catastrophes or strong personal stressors feel
long-lasting effects that may include
re-experiencing the event in vivid flashback or
dreams. E.g. the soldiers of Vietnam war.
 The general adaptation syndrome
model or the GAS model
Stress is sometimes thought of as a mental pressure, but
it also has a physical effect on the body. Understanding
the stages the body goes through when exposed to
stress helps people become more aware of these
physical signs of stress when they occur.
Hans Selye, a Vienna-born scientist, working in the 20th
century, was the first person to describe GAS.
This theory suggests that, regardless of the sources of
stress, a person’s response to a stress consists of three
stages: alarm and mobilization, resistance and
exhaustion.
 The three stages of GAS:
1. alarm & mobilization
2. resistance
3. Exhaustion

• alarm & mobilization: The alarm reaction stage refers to the initial
symptoms the body experiences when under stress. You may be
familiar with the “fight-or-flight” response, which is a physiological
response to stress. This natural reaction prepares you to either
flee or protect yourself in dangerous situations. Your heart rate
increases, your adrenal gland releases cortisol (a stress hormone),
and you receive a boost of adrenaline, which increases energy.
This fight-or-flight response occurs in the alarm &mobilization
stage.
Your body gives you a signal and prepare you against the stressor.
e.g. if an earthquake strikes now, your the first reaction will fall under
this category.
• Resistance: After the initial shock of a stressful event
and having a fight-or-flight response, the body begins
to repair itself. If you overcome stress and the
situation is no longer an issue, your body continues to
repair itself until your hormone levels, heart rate, and
blood pressure reach a pre-stress state. But, some
stressful situations continue for extended periods of
time. Then this resistance phase comes into play. It
consists of both bodily and mental resistance or coping
against the stress. At this stage people adopt different
strategies to fight against the stress. If you have an
exam in two days, you are probably at this stage now.
Trying to tackle the exam by taking preparation.
• Exhaustion: This stage is the result of prolonged or chronic stress.
Struggling with stress for long periods can drain your physical,
emotional, and mental resources to the point where your body no
longer has strength to fight stress. You may give up or feel your
situation is hopeless (the learned helplessness). Signs of
exhaustion include:
• fatigue
• burnout
• depression
• anxiety
• decreased stress tolerance (symptoms of PTSD; post traumatic
stress disorder)
The physical effects of this stage also weaken your immune system
and put you at risk for stress-related illnesses.

• This stage occurs if someone fails to remove the stressor from his
life during the resistance phase by adopting necessary coping
strategies. There are usually two types outcome of this stage;
learned helplessness or PTSD.
 Coping strategies
• There 2 ways people deal with the stress
1. Emotion focused coping: people try to manage their
emotions in the face of stress by seeking to change
the way they feel or perceive the stress. E.g.
accepting sympathy from others or looking at the
bright side of the situation.
2. Problem focused coping: coping attempts to modify
the stressful problem or the source of stress. This
strategies lead to changes in behavior or to the
development of an action plan to deal with the
stress. E.g. join a workshop to learn new thing.
 Some practical way to cope with stress

Experts have suggested some practical ways to

deal with the daily life stressors;
1. Turn a threat into a challenge: in doing so
people use both problem focused and
emotion focused coping strategies. This
strategy will work when the individual has
enough resources to tackle the stressor or
can execute some sort of control over the
threat.
2. Making a threatening situation less
threatening: this will mainly involve the
emotion focused coping strategy, where the
person has to deal with his inner conflicts
and tensions and convince himself to see the
bright sides of the stressful situation. It is a
way to change your appraisal of the situation,
view it in a different way and modify your
attitude toward it.
This strategy is adopted when the stressor
seems out of control.
3. Change your goals: this is a problem focused
coping strategy. When the previously decided goal
became very hard to attain then people shift the
goal to something easier and within their reach.
e.g. if you lost the chance to get an A then you will
change your goal and strive for an A-.
4.Take direct action to alter your physiological
reaction to stress: this is a way to minimize the
hyper aroused state of bodily activities that were
triggered by the stressors. Exercise can reduce the
highly activated level of bodily arousal those are
further adding to the subjective experience of
stress.
5. Alter the situation that are likely to cause
stress: this strategy will work only when you
have full control over the stressor. For
example, to avoid the intense mental pressure
during exam you can take enough preparation
beforehand. This is purely a problem focused
coping strategy.