In this video I describe three main approaches for dealing with stress: appraisal-focused coping, problem-focused coping, and emotion-focused coping. Next I discuss physical exercise as a means of managing stress, in addition to the many physical and cognitive benefits that exercise brings.

John Ratey – Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain – https://amzn.to/2qOASk6 (Amazon affiliate link)

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we talked about hardiness resilience and post-traumatic growth and we also looked at some techniques for coping with stress. So in this video I’d like to continue looking at some stress management techniques and in particular physical exercise.

So stressors are inevitable; we will definitely have to confront some stressors and stress is an inescapable part of life. So we all have to cope with stress and we can broadly divide our ways of coping with stress into three main categories. We have appraisal-focused coping, problem-focused coping, and emotion-focused coping. So in appraisal-focused coping we’re really asking the question, is this really a threat? Is this something that I should be stressed about or not? And maybe if I reappraise the situation and reconsider things I might decide that it’s actually not the threat that I thought it was. That would be appraisal-focused coping. Now in problem-focused coping we directly confront this stressor itself. We focus on what the problem is, and we ask “can I eliminate or reduce this particular stressor?” And in emotion-focused coping we focus more on our emotions. We ask how we can manage our response to the stressors so we might say “okay this is a threat and perhaps I can’t eliminate it or reduce it but what I can do is change my response to it. I can learn how to better manage the emotions that it causes.”

So we could imagine three students in a class together and they all have the same stressor; they have an exam coming up in a few days and so they’re all experiencing some stress because of this exam. Now an appraisal-focused way of coping with this might be that a student says “you know I actually don’t care about my grade in this class and therefore I don’t really care about my results on the exam and so if I stop caring then the exam is no longer a source of stress”. They’ve reappraised the situation, they’ve reconsidered what it means and decided that it’s not really a threat and therefore they don’t need to have a stress response. Now I’m not necessarily recommending this approach for this particular situation but there are situations where we can see that sometimes you have to re-evaluate things. You have to ask yourself whether you’re making more out of something than you should. Maybe you’re exaggerating, maybe you’re overreacting to something that really isn’t much of a threat. And if you’re doing that then that’s appraisal-focused coping.

Now another student in the class might respond by studying harder. So they’re directly confronting the stressor. They’re saying “okay I have this exam it’s causing me some stress, the way that I can reduce that stress is by preparing for the exam. If I’m well-prepared, if I have reviewed all the material and I’m confident that I’ll do well on the test, then I don’t need to have a stress response to this idea that the test is coming up, because I’m ready for it.” That would be a problem-focused approach to coping with this particular stressor.

And a third student in the class might have the same stress response and decide that they need to learn how to relax better. They need to learn some relaxation or meditation or breathing techniques that can help to reduce their response to the stress. Now this might be especially important if this is a student who says, you know, “it doesn’t matter how much I study, I always get really nervous before the test and I always have anxiety and my heart’s racing and, you know, my palms are sweaty” and they might say “okay I need to learn how to relax more. I need to focus on the emotions that this stressor is causing in my body because maybe directly confronting the stressor isn’t as helpful for me. It doesn’t seem to reduce my stress response, so I need to focus on what’s going on in my body, how I’m responding to this stressor.” And if they’re doing that then they’re engaging in this emotion-focused coping.

Ok, so the last stress management technique I’d like to talk about is physical exercise. Now there’s some intuitive logic to using exercise as a means of reducing the stress response because one of the things we’ve learned the stress response does is it prepares the body for action. We have this fight-or-flight response, right? We have this mobilization of energy, mobilization of resources, and if it’s a physical stressor this makes sense. You know, if you’re about to run from a tiger then you want to mobilize all this energy in your body.

But when we have psychological stressors, so when you’re stressed about an exam that’s coming up tomorrow, you can’t really physically fight the exam. So you might need to have a better way of using up this energy that’s been mobilized and physical exercise is an excellent way to do that. And physical exercise is associated with reductions in stress but also has a broad range of other physical and cognitive benefits. So physical exercise is associated with improvements in self-efficacy, so that’s the feeling that you can accomplish things that you can do the things that you set out to do, and it’s also associated with improvements in energy levels, improvements in mood and well-being, and reductions in the risk of a huge number of physical illnesses and also reductions in the symptoms of some psychological illnesses like depression and anxiety.

Physical exercise can be used to effectively treat these disorders in some cases and this may relate to the effects of physical exercise on neurogenesis. So this is the creation of new neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, and physical exercise seems to improve this. We know for sure that this happens in rats and mice, there’s been some dispute recently about how much neurogenesis is really happening in adult humans and how much it matters, but even if we put that aside we can say for sure that exercise does influence a number of hormones in the body. It influences things like brain derived neurotrophic factor, insulin-like growth factor-1, and vascular endothelial growth factor and all of these are related to neurogenesis and this may also relate to the reductions of symptoms of things like depression and anxiety because these are associated with smaller hippocampal volume. That’s something we talked about in the video on PTSD and it’s something that we’ll talk about in more detail in videos on psychological disorders but it might be the case that the physical exercise is improving neurogenesis and this is reducing some of the negative effects of stress on things like hippocampal volume. But we’ll get into that in another video.

We also see that physical exercise is associated with improvements in quality of sleep and it’s also associated with pain relief. You’ve probably heard of “runner’s high” which refers to this experience of improvements in mood and feelings of well-being as well as reductions in pain following a period of intense exercise and this is related to the release of endorphins and enkephalins in the body, which are released in response to physical exercise. So we could spend a lot more time talking about each of these benefits of exercise if you’re interested in this and you want to find out more detail I’d recommend John Ratey’s book “Spark” and I’ll post a link in the video description where you can find that book. I’d recommend it and for now we’ll just say that there’s a number of benefits of exercise.

It’s often said if if you could get all these benefits in a pill, you know, it immediately be become the best-selling drug in the world. But we see the problem is that people don’t exercise as much as they should and they have a tendency to reduce their exercise when they’re experiencing lots of stress. So during stressful periods people tend to exercise less and the reason for that is often that they’ll say they don’t have enough time, you know, they have too much to do, they have all these other stressors that they have to deal with, and so exercise sort of gets put at the end of the list. They have all these much more urgent problems that need to be dealt with. But instead we should think about prioritizing exercise because the reductions and stress that it will bring as well as the cognitive benefits and physical benefits and improvements in mood will make us better able to confront those other stressors that remain. So by putting exercise first it can help us to deal with all those other things and it also helps us to exert some control. So perceived control that we’ve talked about in several previous videos can be improved by taking action by saying “okay I’m going to exercise, I’m going to get better control over myself, and I can feel that I’m capable of confronting the stressors that I have to face”.

And it’s important here that I say we choose to exert control, we choose to exercise. And the reason that I say this is that in rats we can see that exercise can reduce levels of glucocorticoids, those stress hormones that we’ve talked about, but this isn’t the case if the rats are forced to exercise. So what we can do is give a rat a wheel, they can choose to run and you can see how much time they spend exercising on that wheel and you can see that this is associated with reduced glucocorticoid levels. But then you take another rat and you force it to do the same amount of exercise that the other rat did, the one that was voluntarily exercising, and when you do this you can actually see increases in stress in the rat that was forced to exercise and you can see elevated levels of corticoids. Now this means that we want to make sure that we’re exercising voluntarily. It’s not something that is being forced upon us.

Now whether forcing yourself to exercising when you don’t feel like it is still beneficial maybe we could have some debate about that but another thing that we can see is it’s important for exercise not to be excessive. Now for most people this is not a problem. Most people are not exercising excessively but some people are and one way we can see the effects of excessive exercise is that in males who engage in moderate physical exercise we see an increase in testosterone but once they start doing things like running more than 40 miles per week then we start to see actually decreases in testosterone. And we also see higher levels of glucocorticoids so we have, in addition to that, reduced reproductive function. And in females we see reduced reproduction reproductive function in the form of amenorrhea which refers to cessation of the menstrual cycle. So in both of these cases we see that excessive exercise is not a good thing for your reproductive function. And we also see loss of bone density in males and females who engage in excessive amounts of exercise and this is probably related to the elevated levels of glucocorticoids in the bloodstream and the damage that this can cause.

Ok, so we should view exercise as a means of managing our stress, as means of improving our functioning both physically and cognitively, and a means of getting better quality sleep and improving our overall mood and sense of well-being. These are all benefits that we should all want and that we should all be able to get because physical exercise is something that we can all engage in to some degree, and hopefully we can find some form of exercise that’s enjoyable for us and that we will voluntarily pursue.

And you’ll notice something that’s missing from this list and that is reductions in body fat and the reason that I didn’t include that on the list is I don’t think it’s particularly important and in addition to that exercise is really not a very effective way of losing body fat. Most people think of exercise as something you do to lose weight, something you do because you want to lose body fat, but exercise isn’t really the most effective way of doing that. There’s a number of studies demonstrating this; people exercise more and then they tend to just eat more and they tend not to lose weight despite their improvements in how much they’re exercising. So I think we should put that aside as a reason to exercise.

If you want to lose body fat I think there’s much more effective ways of going about that through nutrition, through diet, through changes in the hormones associated with hunger signaling, things like fasting that can help bring about those improvements. I recommend those but not thinking of exercise as a way of losing body fat and this relates back to the idea of excessive exercise. If you think that you’re going to have to exercise off all of your excess weight then that might tempt you into engaging in excessive exercise and then you’re actually doing more harm than good.

So if we focus instead on the psychological benefits that we get from physical exercise, the improvements in cognitive functioning and the reductions in stress, I think that’s a much better way to view exercise and a much more motivating one because often people give up exercise because they feel they’re not getting the physical benefits that they want in terms of how they look. But if you put those aside and you focus instead on the other benefits, you can get those whether or not you’re losing body fat or losing weight. Okay I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!