Category: Stress

Being prepared is important, but it needs a certain mindset to accompany it.

The key to staying positive is a combination of living in the moment and planning for the future.

Proactive planning is very effective at reducing stress.

Essentially, proactive planning means making plans for how to cope with inevitable problems.

For example, someone who knows they will be stuck inside all day makes themselves a schedule of activities to keep busy.

Similarly, a person who knows something will needlessly stress them out (say, the news) avoids it.

Although not every stressful event can be anticipated or ameliorated, many can.

Professor Shevaun Neupert, study co-author, said:

“It’s well established that daily stressors can make us more likely to have negative affect, or bad moods.

Our work here sheds additional light on which variables influence how we respond to daily stress.”

For the study, 233 people were tracked over 8 days.

Psychologists measured their ability to plan proactively along with their day-to-day levels of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the quality of living and appreciating the present moment.

Each day people reported the stressors they faced, how mindful they were and their mood.

The results showed that proactive coping helped people feel better.

However, planning ahead only worked to improve mood when people reported being mindful.

So, it is a combination of thinking ahead and living in the moment that helps people stay positive.

Professor Neupert said:

“Our results show that a combination of proactive coping and high mindfulness result in study participants of all ages being more resilient against daily stressors.

Basically, we found that proactive planning and mindfulness account for about a quarter of the variance in how stressors influenced negative affect.

Interventions targeting daily fluctuations in mindfulness may be especially helpful for those who are high in proactive coping and may be more inclined to think ahead to the future at the expense of remaining in the present.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Polk et al., 2020).

Both employees and their families suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.

The ‘always-on’ culture in modern organisations is killing people’s satisfaction with life.

Central to the always-on culture is monitoring email out of hours.

Merely expecting to be available for work creates considerable strain on employees and their families.

Both suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.

Dr William Becker, who led the research, said:

“The competing demands of work and nonwork lives present a dilemma for employees, which triggers feelings of anxiety and endangers work and personal lives.”

The study of 142 couples found that even without doing work during nonwork time, the expectation of work created stress.

Dr Becker said:

“…the insidious impact of ‘always on’ organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit — increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries,

Our research exposes the reality: ‘flexible work boundaries’ often turn into ‘work without boundaries,’ compromising an employee’s and their family’s health and well-being.”

Dr Becker said:

“If the nature of a job requires email availability, such expectations should be stated formally as a part of job responsibilities.”

Instead, the best solution is to have periods of time when employees are not required to respond to email.

Dr Becker concluded:

“Employees today must navigate more complex boundaries between work and family than ever before.

Employer expectations during nonwork hours appear to increase this burden, as employees feel an obligation to shift roles throughout their nonwork time.

Efforts to manage these expectations are more important than ever, given our findings that employees’ families are also affected by these expectations.”

The study was published in the journal Academy of Management Proceedings (Becker et al., 2018).

It is not just major events, like deaths and divorce, that affect our health.

Letting go of negative emotions related to everyday stress is linked to fewer long-term health problems.

How people react to little, daily irritations on the very same day is linked to both long-term health and physical limitations later in life.

The key is to avoid allowing the negative emotions to carry over to the next day.

Contrary to common belief, it is not just major events, like deaths and divorce, that affect our health.

Dr Kate Leger, the study’s first author, explained:

“Our research shows that negative emotions that linger after even minor, daily stressors have important implications for our long-term physical health.

When most people think of the types of stressors that impact health, they think of the big things, major life events that severely impact their lives, such as the death of a loved one or getting divorced.

But accumulating findings suggest that it’s not just the big events, but minor, everyday stressors that can impact our health as well.”

For the research people completed an 8-day survey of their emotions.

They were then followed up 10 years later to ask about the state of their health.

Naturally, people experienced more negative emotions in response to daily stressors.

But the people who let these negative emotions fester had the worst health 10 years later.

Dr Leger said:

“This means that health outcomes don’t just reflect how people react to daily stressors, or the number of stressors they are exposed to – there is something unique about how negative they feel the next day that has important consequences for physical health.”

Dr Leger explained that the best strategy for health was to let the emotions go:

“Stress is common in our everyday lives.

It happens at work, it happens at school, it happens at home and in our relationships.

Our research shows that the strategy to ‘just let it go’ could be beneficial to our long term physical health.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Leger et al., 2018).

The key to understanding why you feel older some days might be in how you see yourself.

Feeling really stressed out can make you feel more than 10 years older.

Just one stressful event, over and above the norm, can make a young adult feel one year older, psychologists have found.

Dr Shevaun Neupert, study co-author, said:

“Emerging adults are at an age where they are no longer kids, but they haven’t settled into their adulthood yet.

We wanted to know if stress affected their subjective age – how old they felt – and we found that it could make a big difference.”

Stress ages you

For the study, the researchers followed 106 people aged 18 to 22 over 8 days.

The results showed that as their stress levels changed, so did the age they felt.

Dr Neupert said:

“Stress was the determining factor.

It could be stress related to school, work or social circumstances, but stressful days led to study participants feeling older.”

The effect of stress was additive, said Dr Neupert:

“The more stressors someone experienced, over and above their average day, the older they felt.

We calculated that each additional stressor made people feel an average of at least one year older.

There was also an effect of being generally ‘stressed out’ such that young adults who were generally more stressed felt an additional five years older.”

Identity matters

This levels was increased to 11 years older when they were under a lot of pressure.

How old people felt under stress depended on how fixed their identity was.

Those with a more fixed identity reported little change to subjective age.

Dr Neupert said:

“We know that children often report feeling older than they actually are.

And that adults often report feeling younger.

This work helps us understand the role that emerging adulthood plays as a crossover period from one to the other – as well as the importance of stress in influencing fluctuations during that transition.”

The study was published in the journal Emerging Adulthood (Bellingtier et al., 2018).