Week 14 — Stress, Health & Coping

Welcome to your Week 14 Start Here page.

Why this matters

Stress shows up in a nurse's double shift and a small-business owner's slow month, and this week explains why the same event can energize one person and overwhelm another.

In plain language

Everyone knows the feeling of too much at once: a deadline, a bill, a sick relative, a phone buzzing with bad news. Stress is the word psychologists use for how your body and mind respond to an event you see as threatening or challenging. This week you will learn why the same event can energize one person and flatten another, how a worry in your head reaches your heart and your immune system, and what happens when stress lasts for months. You will also compare two ways of coping, which means the things you think and do to manage a stressor and the feelings it brings. Finally, you will look at which stress-management habits the evidence actually supports, and how careful you need to be when you read that evidence.

• Already covered: Week 3 mapped the nervous system, Week 10 took emotion apart, and Week 13 showed how powerful situations are.
• This week: stress, appraisal, the body's response, coping, and the evidence.
• How they connect: the sympathetic nervous system drives the stress response.
• Where we're going next: Week 15, Psychological Disorders & Treatment.

Focus

Why does one event stress one person and not another, and which ways of coping does the evidence support?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] use primary and secondary appraisal to explain two reactions to one event
• [ ] order alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, and trace fight-or-flight
• [ ] sort a coping move as problem-focused or emotion-focused
• [ ] read a stress-related correlation as an association

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 14 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and the slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Analysis Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort a ten-minute walk after a laptop dies as problem-focused or emotion-focused, and say why.

You've got this

If stress ever feels like more than you can carry, your campus counseling or health center, or a health professional you trust, is a good place to start.

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