In this video I describe traits and techniques associated with coping with stressors. Susanne Kobasa identified commitment, challenge, and control as important factors in understanding hardiness and people who were able to thrive in stressful circumstances. Resilience in the face of adversity also relates to post-traumatic growth, in which people feel that they have been strengthened as a result of grappling with a stressful situation. I also describe three techniques for increasing hardiness: reappraisal, focusing, and compensatory self-improvement.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to address the question of how some people handle stress so well. We might wonder if this is a personality trait like the distinction between type A and type B personality. But before we can address the question of how people handle stress well, we have to ask who are the people that are able to handle stress.

This brings us to the work of Susanne Kobasa and she was studying business executives who were able to thrive in stressful circumstances and she referred to this ability to thrive in stressful circumstances as hardiness. She also identified three main traits for coping with stress that were associated with hardiness and these we can think of as the three C’s of coping: commitment, challenge, and control. So commitment refers to an active involvement with life. Hardy people view their pursuits as important and as meaningful. So they have goals, they’re actively pursuing those goals, and they believe that the achievement of those goals actually matters. They also show a sense of challenge; so they view change or stressful situations as opportunities for growth and learning and improvement. So rather than being threatened by a stressor they see it as a challenge to be overcome. And lastly they show a sense of control. This is something we’ve talked about in previous videos. This is a belief that they have causal influence over their life; that their behaviors actually matter in influencing the outcomes that occur.

Now we have a lot of overlap with this idea of coping and Julian Rotter’s ideas of locus of control and Albert Bandura’s ideas about self-efficacy that I talked about in the unit on personality. And we also have overlap with the idea of resilience. So resilience refers to the ability to survive or even thrive in the face of adversity and people who are resilient are able to recover from stressful experiences more quickly. They’re also more likely to show what’s called post-traumatic growth and this is sort of like the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder that I talked about in the previous video. So post-traumatic growth refers to a situation where somebody experiences some traumatic event but they come out with a greater sense of meaning and a greater sense of purpose to their life. So rather than being broken down by this traumatic stressful event it actually has built them up and they feel that they have become a stronger person as a result of having this traumatic experience.

Now we might wonder, can we increase our hardiness or our resilience? Is this a personality trait or is it techniques that anyone can learn and apply to their own life? Well, the good news is it seems to be that there are techniques that can successfully improve people’s hardiness and people’s resilience in the face of stress. One of these techniques is reappraisal. This is where you reconsider a stressful stimulus and you ask yourself “could this be better or worse?” Now there might be aspects of this situation that you don’t have control but you might say “well, could I make this a little better?” or “what can I do that would at least prevent this from getting any worse?” And what that does is you then ask yourself well “what is it that I can do to make the better version the more likely outcome?” and then that helps you to create a plan a way of managing this stressor. This increases your perceived control and will increase your sense that you can actually do something about this. You might not be able to prevent this from being a bad situation, but maybe you can least prevent it from being a worse situation, you can make it slightly better.

We also have a technique of focusing and this is where a person gets stuck in feeling that they have no control over the situation. Sometimes this occurs, there are things that happen that we really don’t have control over. But we still have a sense of control over our own body and so focusing helps you to focus on how stress feels in your body, what emotions are involved, and then you can at least exert control over your response to this uncontrollable stressor. So you might not be able to change some aspects of this situation but you can focus on changing your emotional and physical response to those aspects of the situation.

And lastly we have the idea of compensatory self improvement. This is asking yourself how you could improve or learn from your experience with the stress and that learning might come in learning how to overcome the stressors. “Ok, I have this obstacle and I’m going to learn how to overcome it and then in the future I’ll be able to deal with it”. Or it could be that you’re not able to overcome this stressor but you’re able to learn about yourself from the process of combatting this obstacle. And so this goes back to the idea of challenge that we saw before. If you see potential threats as challenges, as things that you’re going to learn from, things that are going to help you to grow and improve, that’s a much better approach. And this is what Jordan Peterson refers to as voluntarily confronting the dragon. So it’s better to go seek out the dragon and attack it, confront it directly, rather than waiting for the dragon to attack you, right? In which case the dragon is a threat rather than a challenge.

And another way that you can think about this, I like to think about the distinction between an adventure movie and a horror movie, you know? In an adventure movie the hero is voluntarily confronting the obstacle, seeing it as a challenge, whereas in a horror movie the person is prey; they’re being attacked by this monster and generally what happens by the end of the horror movie is the person learns how to confront the monster and how to voluntarily attack and take it on and view it as a challenge rather than just a threat. And often at the end of the movie this results in, you know, some post-traumatic growth occurs and the person has become stronger as a result of overcoming this monster that was attacking them.

Okay so that’s a few ways we can think about coping with stress and in the next video we’ll look at some more stress management techniques. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!