Yesterday, I wrote what I hope was a slightly provocative post about how we can reduce the effects of stress. Having read a few books and articles on stress, it seems to me that there is a disconnect between how stress actually causes health problems and the general methods used to combat it.
Stress causes health problems primarily through the disruption of the HPA axis. However, most stress management techniques focus on enhancing the parasympathetic nervous system at the expense of the sympathetic nervous system: i.e. getting you to relax more.
However, we know that a bit of adrenaline now and then actually beefs up our ability to respond to stress and reduces the disruption to the HPA axis. So, yesterday, I suggested that we should focus on what the research tells us can reduce disruptions to the HPA axis, which include:
- Taking control of your life
- Having more social interactions
- Having the occasional adrenaline rush
And this study that I’d to have a look at today considers a further technique that we can use to reduce disruption to the HPA axis: Affirmation of Personal Values Buffers Neuroendocrine and Psychological Stress Responses, Creswell, Welch, Taylor, Sherman, Gruenewald, Mann, American Psychological Society, 2005.
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This article is one in a new series I am doing in which I review some research on a topic that I am interested in. Last week, I looked at an article about the centralisation of body fat by the amazing Swedish researcher, the late Per Bjorntorp. The week before, I looked at a meta-analysis about psychological stress and the immune system.
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Where do we start?
Let’s start with the hypothesis, which is that self-affirmation can reduce the adverse effects of stress (i.e. reduce cortisol levels following the stressful event). This hypothesis wasn’t just plucked out of the air but was drawn from other research, as follows:
Claude Steele has suggested that people use self-affirmatory behaviour to resolve potentially stressful conflicts or problems in their lives. See The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self, Steele, in Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology: Vol. 21. Social psychological studies of the self: Perspectives and programs, 1998 (Google Docs)
Taylor has proposed that in response to threatening events, people undergo thought processes in three themes: (1) a search for meaning in the event, (2) a search for control over the event and over their lives in general, and (3) an attempt to increase self-esteem through self-enhancing evaluations. Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation, Taylor, American Psychologist, 1983
So we can see that there is a history of people who think that it is a natural and helpful response to a stressful situation to engage in self-affirmation.
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Hang on a minute, what’s self-affirmation?
As Wikipedia will tell you, the theory of self-affirmation is a psychological theory that people are motivated to maintain a self-image that has self-integrity, self-worth, morality and adequacy.
Self-affirmation in this context basically means any statement or behaviour that helps to increase self-image. So it can be quite wide-ranging definition but, typically, it seems to refer to positive statements about ability or character or future accomplishments.
I know that’s a bit woolly but I hope it will do for the time being.
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OK, so does it work?
Yes. Let’s have a look at the study.
In this study, a group of students were instructed to prepare a speech. They were randomly assigned either to the value-affirmation condition or to a control condition.
In both conditions, the students completed a values questionnaire before giving the speech, which asked them to consider their thoughts and feelings about a number of values they had rated. For each values item, participants indicated their relative preference against two options.
For example, for the political value, participants answered questions such as ‘‘assuming
that you have sufficient ability, would you prefer to be: (a) a banker (b) a politician?’’
Value-affirmation participants answered questions relating to their top-ranked value, whereas control participants answered questions relating to their fifth ranked value.
The students delivered their speeches and did some challenging mental arithmetic under stressful conditions. Their cortisol levels were monitored and their blood pressure and heart rates were also tested.
And what happened?
Well, the value-affirmation participants had significantly lower cortisol responses to the stress tasks, compared with control participants. Furthermore, changes from baseline to peak stress revealed that only control participants had significant stress-related increases in cortisol, suggesting that value affirmation mitigated HPA-axis activation.
So in other words, we now understand that making positive statements about your self-image can reduce the damage stress does to your health. Positive thinking can therefore improve your health.
Interestingly, value-affirmation and control participants had equivalently elevated heart rate responses to the stress tasks. This suggests to me that the fight-or-flight response (the activation of the sympathetic nervous system) was about the same in both cases, but I can’t tell from the study whether this is a valid assumption to make.
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So what?
Well, we can add to our list of things that help us reduce the effects of stress. My list now stands at:
- Taking control of your life
- Having more social interactions
- Having the occasional adrenaline rush
- Making positive statements about your self-image
It’s amazing that these things are probably the last things people think of when it comes to managing their health but the research indicates that they are probably also the most important.
