Last weeks articles on stress seemed very interesting and really captivated my attention. The first article titled, Social Stress: Theory and research is trying to differentiate stress consequences from social organization rather than stress from psychological disorders. The second article titled, Stress, Health, and the Life Course: Some Conceptual Perspectives, is about how status and status attainment affect the least privileged by exposing them to more health-related stressors.
Chronic stressors come about more through everyday tasks than in extreme, and crazy, one in a million events. I thought that this fact from the first article was intriguing. We do so many things in our day that contribute to our stress levels and as time passes it affects our health in a great way. For instance, resource deprivation, goal-striving stress, excessive environmental demand, frustration of role expectations are all examples of things that happen in our jobs, family life and school. The people that sufferer the most are women, young people and those in low socioeconomic status in role strains. Racial differences also bring forward issues in psychological distress at low socioeconomic levels, poverty is more damaging to blacks than whites (Aneshensel, 1992).
I remember watching a video called, Unnatural Causes: When the Bough Breaks, and it talked about black women and how stress put on them by racial discrimination affected the health of their baby. They talked about how it wasn’t even about economic status because they talked about a lawyer and how she lived in a good neighborhood, ate good food, exercised but still had her baby premature. They said this resulted from stress related from discrimination, all that stress accumulated in the body and the unequal treatment releases stress hormones that in the long run really harm the body. This also correlates to the second article that says that there is a cumulative effect put on the allostatic load that functions in responding to hardships and demand.
To me these articles showed how the problem of stress and its effects on our health come from deep within our society. Not only the big life events like death hurt us but also stress from work, from not having enough money, and from discrimination. I think changing these stressors to benefit us would be very difficult because of the way society is set up, work is all about time efficiency and moving fast, life now is so fast paced that we don’t have time to unwind and destress. One thing that the articles did say help was social support, from family or friends. I think with this in mind, we should look out for each other and help by being supportive to one another.
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