Environmental Stress:Basics

Greetings, Cats and Kittens! Today we're talking about environmental stress. I don't know about you, but I have been stressed out! Some of it's personal stressors, but some of it, too, is environmental stressors, which are our focus this week. You already know a little bit about this topic; we've touched on it in pretty much every lecture so far. This week we're going to go into more depth.

First off, we're going to do some environmental stress basics where we nail down a definition of stress, talk about physical and mental health effects, talk about coping, and talk about something called "cognitive appraisal." First is our definition of "environmental stress." We'll say that environmental stress occurs when the demands of the environment exceed people's ability to cope with them. We'll also say that "stressors" are environmental conditions or events that cause stress.

Next up, we're going to talk about physical and mental health effects of stress. Remember in that first lecture when I said that environmental psychology is interdisciplinary? You're going to see a lot of evidence of that here. We're going to touch on health psychology, biopsychology, and also clinical and counseling psychology as we proceed.

All right, next let's talk about the toll that stress takes on the body, that is, its effects on our physical health. And we've known for a long time that stress has health impacts. Today it's estimated that stress plays a role in anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of our physical illnesses. In some ways, this was first acknowledged in the 1930s by a Canadian scientist named Hans Selye. He postulated that there was a particular stress pattern which he called the General Adaptation Syndrome.

The General Adaptation Syndrome, he said, has three stages: Alarm, Resistance, and Exhaustion. In the Alarm phase—it sounds like what it is; it's a good name for it—because it's like an alarm goes off in your body and the body's sympathetic nervous system is triggered. It "sympathizes" with the fact that there's something to cope with. The sympathetic nervous system, you know, causes catecholamines and corticosteroids to prepare us for fight or flight. Now that's the alarm phase, the sort of mobilization of the body to fight or flee.

In the resistance phase, you appear less on alert, but the body is still coping. It's resisting the stressor outwardly. You may appear pretty normal, but the body is still being subjected to the physiological stress response as the person attempts to cope.

Now the exhaustion phase. If the stressor goes on too long, the person enters the exhaustion phase, and the truth is that you know our bodies were "designed," if you will, more for short-term stress responses. You know, those were the conditions under which we evolved; more short-term "It's a bear! Flee!" kind of situation. Exhaustion occurs if the stress goes on too long. The body becomes exhausted; the parasympathetic nervous system may even kick in and slow everything down. You see the decreased cognitive functioning; you see a lot of times illness, you know, from too much exposure to those stress hormones which actually can cause neural damage and damage to the organs.

A more recent theory called "allostatic load theory" builds on the Selye model in a couple of important ways. Now in the allostatic load model, every time we encounter a stressor, our body systems engage to find equilibrium as they attempt to adapt and function under the new conditions. And these adaptive changes are called "allostasis." It begins with a stressor that activates the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, called SAM for short, and the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis which is called HPA for short. SAM releases the catecholamines epinephrine and norepinephrine from the adrenal glands. These neurohormones are neurotransmitters. HPA releases glucocorticoids like cortisol, which are steroid hormones also produced and released by the adrenal glands.

Now these chemicals prepare the body for a fight or flight response. They increase our blood pressure, our lipids, our glucose, and c-reactive proteins. The problem is that this physiological stress response negatively affects our immune system, metabolic processes, and cardiovascular system. The allostatic load model emphasizes, though, that it's the cumulative effect of this body regulatory stress response from multiple stressors over time. "Allostatic overload" occurs when the cumulative effects of this physiological process over and over again leads to health problems; disease or sometimes even death.

Now one of the things that's nice about the allostatic load model is that it offers a more holistic approach to how stress affects the body. So the model actually includes other layers which influence how "resilient" we are. And in particular, the model talks about individual-level factors that affect our resilience to stress. Our body's resilience is our body's ability to withstand stress and not enter into allostatic overload. So these are things like genetics; your coping strategies and whether those are healthy or unhealthy; your health habits, like diet, exercise, your weight, your personal history (including your history of trauma and abuse because those are considerable stressors); the amount of exposure you've had to stressful environments over the course of your life—you know, things like the neighborhoods you've lived in, and the quality of those, how noisy they are, the amount of traffic you've been exposed to... So again, there are individual differences that affect our resilience and our resistance to allostatic overload.

So we've been talking about how stress takes a toll on the body, and it does. And you know, a cautionary tale: You know, keep this in mind; it's going to be real important as you go through life to take good care of yourself and to manage your stress well because you know, by the time you're aged 30s and 40s, you'll start to see um the effects, the cumulative effects of stress on your on your body.

Now stress also takes a toll on the mind, and you know this already—not just from personal experience, but because we've touched on it before. Stress can be considerable, and you know it can, as you know, create anxiety. It can mess with your sleep; it can mess with your mood; it can also cause something that mental health professionals call "decompensation." And what decompensation means is that you know someone who's been managing pretty well, managing their mental health condition pretty well, like their depression or their anxiety, may regress when under stress. Stress oftentimes causes a setback; you know, it can cause a worsening of symptoms or a recurrence of a mental health condition. And so this is one reason, too, why it's really important that you, if you have a mental health condition, that you work your mental health program, whatever that is. Keep on practicing those cognitive behavioral strategies, take your medication, you know, whatever your healthy strategies are, eat properly, exercise. You know, doing the things that that can help you withstand stress are especially important if you have a pre-existing mental health condition because you can do what's called decompensate under stress.

Now while we're talking about mental health, I want to mention that there are two diagnoses in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that's used by mental health professionals to help them diagnose and treat mental health conditions and psychiatric disorders. And one of these is called the acute stress disorder or ASD. Some environmental stressors can create an acute stress disorder; events like pandemics, war, and natural disasters that expose people to death or the threat of death. So when an environmental stressor threatens your life or the life of someone you care about, trauma may result, and that trauma may result in symptoms of trauma. And an acute stress reaction uh and disorder or ASD is diagnosed if symptoms of trauma last from three days to a month, and the symptoms are things like dissociation (you know, so the person can be somewhat catatonic or just um act like nothing's happened at all). It can include intrusive distressing thoughts, nightmares and flashbacks, a decreased interest in their normal activities and in people that they normally care about. It can affect people's mood and emotions. You can see a restricted range of emotions; you can see depression and irritability; you can see anxiety, pessimism, difficulty concentrating, an exaggerated disturbance response, and hyper vigilance where the person is excessively worried that it's going to happen again, always on alert.

Now if these symptoms continue and they last more than a month, then we might diagnose you with a post-traumatic stress disorder. So acute stress disorder can sometimes go from an acute disorder into a chronic one, and the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are basically the same as acute stress disorder, but they last longer, making this a more chronic stress reaction than the acute stress disorder. Now you don't always see an acute stress disorder before PTSD, but there often is, and this is why psychologists recommend that you, that people with an acute stress disorder get help quickly so that it doesn't progress into PTSD. And when there are natural disasters, for instance, you'll see psychologists and licensed clinical social workers be dispensed by the Red Cross, for instance, to go and provide some mental health triage, you know, so that this acute stress reaction doesn't turn into acute stress disorder which then turns into post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now I want to talk next about coping because there's no question that coping and social support affect how stress affects you. So the mental and physical health effects of stress depend on how well a person copes and whether they have adequate social support. So coping is the thoughts and the actions used to manage stress. And broadly speaking, researchers classify coping responses into one of two types. There's problem-focused coping, and there's emotion-focused coping. And problem-focused coping is, it's basically cognitive and behavioral efforts that are made to change the stressful situation. So it's things like planning what you might do to reduce and stop the stressor; it's taking those actual steps to eliminate the stressful problem; it's seeking advice from other people about how you might get rid of the stressful problem. You know, so for instance, train tracks run through my neighborhood which is generally not a problem, but there was a period there of about a year where the railroad, for some reason, decided to park their idling trains on the tracks right in the middle of this community of thousands of people. And they didn't turn the trains off; they idled them, and because of something having to do with the air and the brakes, they would also make these very loud and strange noises, maybe possibly releasing some kind of pressure or steam having to do with the the brakes. Now maybe this wouldn't have been a problem if it was predictable, but it wasn't. The noise was unpredictable. It could be any time of day or night. It could be from a few minutes to days on end. It was crazy-making. Nearly drove me freaking insane.

Now back to the problem-focused coping. Many people in the neighborhood coordinated together. We shared the railway phone number; we made phone calls every single time it happened; we contacted city officials; we contacted the air quality management district. Eventually we were able to get the problem solved, but again, you know, we were going directly to the source of the the issue and trying to reduce the stress by getting rid of the stressor. That's problem-focused coping.

Now emotion-focused coping is more about cognitive and behavioral efforts to reduce the distress caused by the stress. So these are efforts to manage how we feel in response to the stressor. And there are lots of different strategies, and some are healthier than others. For instance, there's "cognitive reframing." So this is trying to change how you look at it. You know, saying "This too shall pass," tell yourself in the midst of a pandemic. "We will get through this; this will be over with eventually." You tell yourself that every quarter probably! Also, using humor; meditating; exercising; just trying to accept that this is the way it is; trying not to think about it; ignoring and denying it; faith-based efforts like prayer; venting; and one of our personal favorites, drugs and alcohol and stress eating, and binge-watching TV, Netflix a favorite for many people.

Now the thing about these coping efforts is that they may be effective or ineffective, and sometimes they can actually make things worse. So imagine you have a stressful event. If coping's effective, stress is reduced, right? But sometimes, like I said, people try to deny or they simply vent or they use drugs or alcohol to excess—I mean a little bit to take the edge off, fine. Same thing with distraction; sometimes that's a good thing to do, right? To distract yourself. But again, used in excess, you know, some of these strategies become what we call "avoidant coping strategies," and they can leave the problem unchanged and sometimes even make it worse. So you know, when coping efforts produce negative results, it can cause increased problems and exacerbate stress, so it's called an "exacerbation cycle" for that reason. So avoidant coping refers to unhealthy or ineffective coping strategies. Right, if you drink too much and that becomes your "go-to," you can develop a substance use disorder, right? And you can hurt your body in the process, which makes the cumulative effects of stress, that allostatic load, even greater. So again, you know, some of these avoidance strategies can actually make things worse. So you might take some time to consider your own methods of coping and whether those are effective or ineffective, and not just in the short term, but in the long term.

I mentioned before that "social support" is really important as far as moderating the effects of stress. Social support is a buffer that reduces some of the negative effects of stress. So "social ties" are connections and ties to other people, and they provide the opportunity for social support. And simply put, "social support" is things that are done for the individual by other people, and it's categorized into three different types. So there's "emotional social support," which is verbal and non-verbal demonstrations of love or care or sympathy. Then there's "informational social support," which is just what it sounds like—you know, facts or advice that someone gives another person to help them cope. And then there's "instrumental social support," and that's behavioral or material assistance with practical, direct solutions for problems. And again, social support is so important. You know, when we provide someone with social support, we're giving them a positive experience in the face of a negative one. We're meeting their needs for social connection and belonging. We're helping them feel heard and valued and accepted. We're helping them solve problems or cope with problems. We're agents of stress reduction. We're buffering people from the negative effects of stress. So reach out and touch someone!

Now over 40 years of research demonstrates just how important social support is in coping with stress and disasters and in reducing stress and disaster-related mental and physical health effects. So, for example, McGuire in 2018 found that social support was associated with a reduced incidence of disaster-related depression and PTSD following Hurricane Katrina. And there are some researchers, too, who say that receiving social support may even essentially tranquilize the neuroendocrine system, thereby reducing its reactivity to stressors. So social support is very important.

Now in our discussion of environmental stress basics, I want to say a little bit about cognitive appraisal because remember, we environmental psychologists are trying to take a holistic view. And one of the things that's interesting to consider is that the same environmental stressor may be experienced differently by different people, and that has to do with "cognitive appraisal." Let's put it this way: Back in 1966, Richard Lazarus suggested that it's not just a simple stimulus-response relationship between people's experience of stressors and people's experience of of stress. It's mediated by people's interpretation of an event as possibly exceeding their ability to cope with it. So you know, basically, your evaluation of a potential environmental stressor influences whether or not you experience it as stressful. And if you feel or think it's a challenge to your coping abilities, you'll experience stress.

Now, like I said, this can explain some individual differences in the experience of stressors and how they affect us. Broadly speaking, cognitive appraisal (how we interpret these possible stressful events) is determined by two things, and and one of those has to do with the individual and the other has to do with things about the situation itself. So you know, the first thing is that people vary, and these individual differences affect cognitive appraisal. So your personality, your nervous system sensitivity, your past experiences, and your goals in that environment, all affect how you interpret the situation. Right? So an introverted person is likely to experience a party as more stressful than a person who is extroverted, right? So there's personality for you!

Now second, "cognitive aspects of the stimulus situation," as Lazarus put it. This has to do with objective features of the environment. I mean, there are certain features of environments that are definitely more stressful. We're going to focus on that in our next lecture. But Lazarus in particular pointed out that control and predictability are huge as far as aspects of the situation, the environmental situation, that are likely to be appraised as stressful. So low-control environments where you have very little control over what happens to you and little control over the stressors in that environment are especially likely to be appraised as stressful. Likewise, predictability matters. You know, so when we can't predict the environmental stressor, like I was mentioning that noisy train before. That it was an unpredictable stressor; we can't habituate to. We can't get used to it, and that also implies we have less control over it, implies less control. So those things make us more likely, those aspects of the stimulus situation, make us more likely to appraise them as stressful. Now that's primary cognitive appraisal. Lazarus also mentioned something called "secondary cognitive appraisal," and it has to do with once you've assessed the situation as stressful and you've made efforts to cope with it, secondary cognitive appraisal occurs when you evaluate whether those efforts have worked or not. So you know, "Am I successfully coping? Did I solve this problem? Am I still feeling stressed?" That's primary, I'm sorry, that's secondary cognitive appraisal.

Now next time we're going to be talking about different types of environmental stressors and more aspects of the stimulus situation that make them more likely to be appraised as stressful.