Top 7 stressful events

In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe examined the medical records of over 5,000 medical patients as a way to determine whether stressful events might cause illnesses. The top 7 stressful events list back then were Death of a spouse, divorce, marital separation, imprisonment, death of a close family member, personal injury or illness and marriage (yes marriage.)

More recent research based on a large cohort of people during 20-year period suggest an even more insidious and chronic stressors that take an even heavier toll.

1. The inner critic

Freud called it the superego. It is commonly known as the inner critic. Most people experience it as an internal voice that monitors and berates and criticizes on autopilot. Most people respond negatively to the inner critic without realizing what they are responding to, which makes the inner critic a formidable force.

2. Negative relationships

Clinging to stressful, negative relationships is a revolving door for stress and depression. In this case, you have shackled yourself to negativity and empowered another person to pile on. Common scenarios involve maintaining relationships with people who criticize you, reject you, dismiss you, Refuse to meet your needs, etc

3. Self-sabotage

Self-sabotage happens when you do the opposite of what would make you happy and successful. It's called getting in your own way. Examples of self-sabotage include: you know you should not eat that doughnut, but eat three or four.

4. Internal conflict

Internal conflict is at the heart of indecisiveness. On the one hand you want this. On the other hand, you want that. You can spin your mind on inner conflict for weeks and months and not come to any conclusions or take action.

5. Inner passivity

Inner passivity occurs when you experience self-generated problems as if they were being done to you, rather than as something you are doing to yourself and therefore can stop doing. Nothing causes a greater sense of personal helplessness.

6. Mental activity on autopilot

Medical research suggests that autopilot thinking - the constant churning of the mind that occurs when you are not consciously engaged in a task.

7. Physical or nutritional imbalance – eating well, etc.

Faulty thinking

Our thoughts are constantly helping us to interpret the world around us, describing what’s happening, and trying to make sense of it by helping us interpret events, sights, sounds, smells, feelings. Because of our experiences, life story, culture, religious beliefs and family values, we often make very different interpretations of situations than others.

Cognitive therapy was developed with the belief that a person's experiences result in thoughts. These are connected with schemas or core beliefs developed from early life to create our view of the world and determine our emotional states and behaviours. Disorders are sometimes maintained by negative attitudes and distorted thinking. We must of all, at one point or another held views, or patterns of thoughts that might be seen as thinking errors, fantasies, fallacies and faulty thinking. And faulty ways of thinking are often more likely to occur when we are stressed.

Cognitive therapy focuses on altering faulty thinking patterns. The father of Cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck proposed six types of faulty thinking

1. Drawing conclusions about oneself or the world without sufficient and relevant information. For example a man not hired by a potential employer perceives himself as totally worthless and believes he probably will never find employment of any sort.
2. Drawing conclusion from very isolated details and events without considering the larger context or picture. For example a student who receives a C on an exam becomes depressed and stops attending classes even though he has A's and B's in his other courses. The student measures his worth by failures, errors, and weaknesses rather than by successes or strengths.
3. Holding extreme beliefs on the basis of a single incident and applying it to a different or dissimilar and inappropriate situation. For example a depressed woman who has relationship problems with her boss may believe she is a failure in all other types of relationships.
4. The process of overestimating the significance of negative events. For example a runner experiences shortness of breath and interprets it as a major health problem, possibly even an indication of imminent death.
5. Relating external events to one another when no objective basis for such a connection is apparent. For example a student who raises his hand in class and is not called on by the teacher believes that the instructor dislikes or is biased against him.
6. An "all-or-nothing," "good or bad," and "either-or" approach to viewing the world. For example at one extreme, a woman who perceives herself as "perfect" and immune from making mistakes; at the other extreme, a woman who believes she is totally incompetent.

Can you keep a secret

Recently much has been written about the physical and psychological consequences of secrecy. We know for example, that some of us can be trusted with other’s private matters, while some of us are less capable of keeping our mouths shut.

A diagnostic tool called the Self-Concealment Score gauges how secretive we are on a scale of ten (very open) to 50 (bank vault). Most of it turns out fall somewhere near the middle, which is the healthy range.

Generally, people with high-self concealment scores are those who tend to keep their thoughts and feelings bottled up and can be correlated with a host of emotional and physical issues, including stress, depression and have low self esteem.

Secrecy, it turns out, is taxing. Studies suggest that exercising the kind of self control required to deliberately conceal information is psychologically and even physically tiring, which sheds light on why secrecy can sabotage our health and well-being. It may also help explain why, for instance, it’s harder to diet during times of stress—because restraint depletes the same physical and emotional reserves as do stress and exhaustion.

Social Stress, Identify and Brain Response

Jack Dikian

March 2011

Stein, Vidich and White expressed the concern back in the 1960’s that the advent of a mass society would lead to a loss of identity and hence to widespread anxiety or stress. As well as interest in the relationship between stress or anxiety and identity, research in how the brain responds to social stressors is growing.

How brain responds to social stressors is said to influence the body's immune system resulting in a number of illnesses. George Slavich and Shelley Taylor, of the UCLA, have shown, for example, that individuals who exhibit greater neural sensitivity to social rejection also exhibit greater increases in inflammatory activity to social stress. Chronic inflammation increase the risk of a variety of disorders, including asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and depression.

The same team suggests that exposure to large amounts of social stress can make the brain respond by modifying the way the immune system responds to threats. These modifications can open the way for numerous diseases or infections to set in, which is why eliminating social stress should become a priority for most people.