Stress

"Stress" names a kind of grief unique to the modern period, a grief perpetually unresolved, evoked by the rapid and relentless changes characteristic of modernity. Yet, it was not until World War II, when the psychiatric difficulties of pilots and bombers in particular brought stress into the open, that stress became a topic of medical and psychological research and a named cause of disorders. The term borrows the notions of pressure and tension from the engineering world. Included is this book are a phenomenology of the experience of stress, a history of the construction of "engineered grief," and an assessment of stress management programs.

In this original work, Alex Zautra offers a fresh approach to understanding how emotions and stress influence health. When we brave the emotional complexities within our lives, according to Zautra, we resolve many paradoxes that we face in understanding ourselves. When we ask ourselves, " Is my glass half empty or half full?" for instance, we seek a single answer to questions about the fullness of our lives. Doing so, we often overlook the obvious truth. The glass is both halfempty and half full. Our emotional life is a rich tapestry of hope, woven from experiences with positive emotion, and fear, arising from encounters with negative emotion. With scholarship, wit and a wealth of data from carefully conducted research, Zautra presents a convincing case for understandingour emotions in two dimensions: the pursuit of the positive and defence against the negative.

Changing the workplace to help prevent is much more cost-effective in the effects of stress. But to date, there has been little guidance for employers who wish to implement such programs. Preventing Stress, lmproving Productivity gathers together examples of best practice in the workplace across a range of countries and organizations and identifies the factors that are crucial for a stress reduction program to work, both in terms of employee well-being and from a financial point of view.

Caffeine. Candy. Sex. Shopping. Smoking. Whether we realize it or not, all of us have strategies for self-medicating ourselves when we feel threatened or overwhelmed by tension or tiredness. But why does one person respond to pressure by going for a five-mile run, while another indulges in a five-hour drinking marathon? Why do some of us crave companionship, while others just want to be alone? And what really helps most to reduce tension and increase energy, a brisk ten-minute walk, twenty minutes of meditation, or two hours of watching TV? In this fascinating new book, nationally known psychologist Robert E. Thayer serves as an expert guide through the latest research into moods and mood management, offering proven techniques for putting today's most important breakthroughs to work in our day-to-day lives. Thayer, whose own work on the biopsychology of moods has been widely discussed in the leading scientific journals--as well as in the pages of Reader's Digest, Prevention, USA Today, McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Men's Health, Redbook, and hundreds of other magazines and newspapers, and on the popular radio show "The Osgood File"--evaluates the hard scientific evidence as he reveals which behaviors energize and empower us, and which sabotage our best interests. (Just five or ten minutes of walking, for example, can enhance mood for an hour or more, while sugar snacking, Thayer shows, causes more tension than it reduces.) Thayer argues that when we learn to see moods as vital barometers of our whole psychology and physiology, rather than mysterious, purely emotional reactions to events around us, we not only understand ourselves better, we have the opportunity to substantially improve our personal effectiveness, both mentally and physically. Thayer offers compelling evidence that our moods--particularly feelings of energy and tension--are closely tied to the rhythms of our evolutionary past. They are directly affected by our health, the food we eat, the amount of sleep we get, exercise (or lack of it), and the time of day. We learn why problems seem more serious late at night, and why a simple disagreement with a co-worker or spouse is more apt to turn into an emotional flare-up at certain times of day. We investigate key differences in the most common ways men and women deal with bad moods, and probe the implications of these findings on our understanding of alcoholism and depression. Far from a shallow quick-fix book, Everyday Moods: Energy and Tension is an in-depth exploration of the origins and influences of moods that affect us every day of our lives. It brings readers to a new understanding of the underlying biology of their daily cycles of energy and tension, and offers powerful recommendations for breaking self-destructive habits and leading a richer, more enjoyable life.

Western medicine, including psychiatry and psychology, has had a virtual monopoly of the health industry. This has led to economic incentives that literally keep people sick. Anthropologists, because of their holistic and comparative base, are in a unique position to apply their knowledge within clinical settings. Written for anthropologists, but useful to all clinicians, Rush's book offers a new model for understanding health and illness, provides a review of techniques found in many cultures for reducing individual and system stress, and offers processes for recovering health and individual and social balance.

This is a companion volume to Coping: The Psychology of What Works, which is also edited by Snyder. This second book includes chapters by some of the most well known clinical and health psychologists and covers some of the newest and most provocative topics currently under study in the area of coping. The contributors address the key questions in this literature: Why do some of us learn from hardship and life's stressors? And why do others fail and succumb to depression, anxiety, and even suicide? What are the adaptive patterns and behaviors of those who do well in spite of the obstacles that are thrown their way? The chapters will look at exercise as a way of coping with stress, body imaging, the use of humor, forgiveness, control of hostile thoughts, ethnicity and coping, sexism and coping aging and relationships, constructing a coherent life story, personal spirituality, and personal growth.

The latest volume in the series based on the Annual Stress and Coping Symposia held at the University of Miami, Drs. McCabe, Schneiderman, Field, and Wellens bring together an outstanding group of researchers to examine the relationship between bio-behavioral and social factors and heart disease. Highlights of the book include an in-depth look at the latest research on: * basic physiological processes in cardiovascular reactivity to stress; * pathophysiological mechanisms in cardiovascular disease; * ethnic differences in cardiovascular regulation; * psychosocial influences on cardiovascular function/disease; and * Behavioral interventions designed to treat cardiovascular disorders. The goal of Stress, Coping, and Cardiovascular Disease is to provide a solid empirical foundation on the relationship between stress and cardiovascular disease so as to stimulate further research into the pathophysiology and treatment of the leading cause of death in industrialized countries.

This book takes a risk management approach to stress evaluation in the workplace, offering practical guidelines for the audit, assessment and mitigation of workplace stressors and providing a comprehensive source of theoretical and practical information for students and practitioners alike.

The purpose of this volume is to seek out, describe, and explain the shared commonalities of stress, fatigue, and workload. To understand and predict human performance response, we have to reach beyond the sterile, information-processing models to incorporate the emotive, affective, or more generally, energetic aspects of cognition. These facets of behavior surface most readily when the individual acts under stress, is faced by significant cognitive workload, or is in the grip of fatigue. However, energetic characteristics are pervasive and exert a vital and ubiquitous influence, even when they are not obviously in play as in extreme circumstances. Indeed, one cannot hope to understand behavior without their inclusion and integration into models and theories. This text addresses such theoretical questions as one of its main thrusts. However, in addition to the drive for scientific understanding, there are requirements in our progressively more utilitarian society which generate the need for a more fundamental understanding of this particular topic.