Cognitive Therapy and Stress: Changing our Approach to Stress
Watch this great TED talk on using stress to our advantage as opposed to disadvantage and consider the following:
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How does this relate to other areas of cognitive psychology?
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How does this relate to “learned Helplesness” and the the longitudinal study by Marmot et al (1997) on civil service workers in the UK?
And connected to all of this is the following piece in the NYTimes:
This relates to the self-fulfilling prophecy, which states that because you believe in something, you will become that. For example, if you believe stress is bad for you, it will be bad for you. But if you believe that stress does not cause harm, it will not cause harm. It also relates to positive thinking, because if you treat stress positively, it will not affect you.
“Learned Helplessness” states that mental illness may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. If you believe that stress will harm you and you have no control over it, it will harm you. But if you think positively and encourage yourself to overcome stress, you will gain confidence and overcome stress. This theory applies to the UK civil service workers because the lower ranking workers thought they had no control and therefore suffered from more stress-related diseases, while the higher ranking workers had control over events, which resulted in confidence and suffered less from stress-related diseases.
How does this relate to other areas of cognitive psychology?
– This relates to cognitive psychology because basically it is stating that stress can affect people differently based on their cognitive process. If one positively encounters stress, it will not only not harm them but also give them the ability to cope a situation, whereas if one negatively encounters stress, it will possibly kill them.
How does this relate to “learned Helplessness” and the the longitudinal study by Marmot et al (1997) on civil service workers in the UK?
– This new understanding of stress suggests that problems related to learned helplessness or chronic stress earned from working can eventually be rectified through change of cognitive process.