Feeling stressed? The remedy may lie in helping others
Along with joy, delicious treats and presents, the holiday season can bring unwanted stress and aggravation. Now, a new study suggests helping friends and strangers can alleviate the effect of daily stressors on our emotions.
he study, led by Emily Ansell of the Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut, is published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stress can sometimes be a positive thing, in that it helps people develop the skills they need to manage and adapt to new situations throughout life.
There is, of course, another side to that coin; when stress is intense enough to overwhelm our ability to take care of ourselves or families, it can cause major problems. In stressful situations, it is important to use healthy ways of coping so that stressful feelings and symptoms diminish.
The researchers from the latest study say that previous lab-based experiments have shown that providing support to others can help individuals better deal with stress, increasing their positive emotions.
But Ansell and colleagues wanted to assess whether this is also true in real-world contexts, so they did so in a group of 77 adults who were between the ages of 18-44.
For 14 days, the participants - who did not have substance dependencies, diagnosed mental illness or cognitive impairment - received an automated phone reminder to complete their daily assessment.
This consisted of reporting any stressful life events they experienced that day; the team tallied the total number of stressful events to determine each individuals daily stress measurement.
Medical news Today
