Week 6 Flashcards
Surviving VS Thriving: Surviving
Ability to adapt in the face of challenging circumstances, but it costs you.
Find it difficult to be in the moment Unaware of the good things that are happening Pessimistic explanatory style Self-critical and judgemental Give up when overwhelmed
Surviving VS Thriving: Thriving
Knowing about and using positive skills, strategies, and routines that enable you to lead a happy, meaningful, and fulfilling life.
Mindfulness Gratitude Optimism Self-compassion Grit
Coping
Effort to master, tolerate, or reduce demands created by stress.
Short term coping strategies: learned helplessness
Theory of learned helplessness understood through an experiment done to dogs in an enclosure. The floor gave electrical shocks, once a wall came down, offering dogs a chance to escape the shocks, some merely laid down and accepted their fate.
A belief that we can’t change our outcome.
Behavioural Disengagement
Giving up the attempt to cope.
Self Indulgence
Works as a short term distraction to give ourselves a chance to regroup and calm down, problem arises if it gets out of control.
Self-blame
Self criticism Catastrophic thinking: -attribute failures to personal shortcomings -focus only on negative feedback -results in pessimistic view of future
Negative self talk
Counterproductive
associated with depression
Self-Delusion
Convincing ourselves that things are not real
Avoidance
Wishful thinking
Relates to poor health and delays in solution which results in distress
It is healthy to be realistic about stressful events
Optimal margin of illusion: there’s room to feel better or good, helps us to stay motivated.
Healthful coping is not correlated with
intelligence.
Appraisal-Focused Constructive Coping: Rational-Emotive Therapy
Focuses on altering irrational patterns of thinking to reduce maladaptive emotions and behaviour.
Appraisal-Focused Constructive Coping: Humour
Finding something funny in a stressful situation.
Results in more positive appraisals
Increases positive emotions
Facilitates rewarding interactions
Problem-Focused Constructive Coping: Systematic Problem Solving
- Clarify the problem
- Find alternative courses of action
- Evaluate options and pick a course of action
- Take action but remain flexible
Problem-Focused AND Emotion-Focused Constructive coping
Seek help!
Instrumental Support: Get advice and help from others
Emotional Support: Getting comfort and understanding from others
Problem-Focused Coping
Handling the stressor directly
Procrastination
Negatively affects task performance
Positively correlated with anxiety
Negatively correlated with physical and mental health
Low Conscientiousness:
-relying on a burst of energy to get tasks done
Low self efficacy
Unlikely due to excessive perfectionism, this idea is not supported in the literature.
Emotion-Focused Constructive Coping: Expressing Emotions
A journalling study found that people who wrote their emotions down and expressed their feelings had lower levels of stress which resulted in a list of increased health benefits like lower blood pressure and increase in immune system functioning.
Venting is beneficial when
It helps you to express yourself and move past an event,
facilitates insight,
brings us closer to each other,
and reduces stress.
Venting is harmful when
It interferes with active coping strategies,
can have a destructive influence on interpersonal relationships,
and turns into rumination.
Emotion-Focused Constructive Coping: Reduce feelings of anger
Hospital/heart attack experiment
-link shown between intense anger and heart health
Steps to reduce hostile feelings:
- Recognize anger
- Decrease hostility by reinterpretation, distraction, and self talk
- Increase empathy, tolerance and forgiveness
Strategies increase likelihood of forgiveness.
Researchers have found that individuals with high forgiveness did not experience
negative health due to stress.
Vengefulness can lead to
Rumination
Negative emotions
Lower life satisfaction
Meditation
Involves conscious effort to focus attention
Alter state of consciousness
Meditation: Mindfulness
Emptying one’s mind
