Health & Medicine - Posted by Sara LaJeunesse-Penn State on Monday, November 5, 2012 15:57 - 5 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Stress today hurts ‘Velcro people’ years later
"I like to think of people as being one of two types. With Velcro people, when a stressor happens it sticks to them; they get really upset and, by the end of the day, they are still grumpy and fuming. With Teflon people, when stressors happen to them they slide right off," says Professor David Almeida. "It's the Velcro people who end up suffering health consequences down the road." (Credit: iStockphoto)
PENN STATE (US) — It’s not stress that causes health problems, it’s how people react to stress, a new study shows.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“Our research shows that how you react to what happens in your life today predicts your chronic health conditions 10 years in the future, independent of your current health and your future stress,” says David Almeida, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.
“For example, if you have a lot of work to do today and you are really grumpy because of it, then you are more likely to suffer negative health consequences 10 years from now than someone who also has a lot of work to do today, but doesn’t let it bother her.”
Using a subset of people who are participating in the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) study, a national longitudinal study of health and well being that is funded by the National Institute on Aging, Almeida and colleagues investigated the relationships among stressful events in daily life, people’s reactions to those events, and their health and well being 10 years later.
Specifically, the researchers surveyed by phone 2,000 individuals every night for eight consecutive nights regarding what had happened to them in the previous 24 hours. They asked the participants questions about their use of time, their moods, the physical health symptoms they had felt, their productivity, and the stressful events they had experienced, such as being stuck in traffic, having an argument with somebody, or taking care of a sick child.
“Most social-science surveys are based on long retrospective accounts of your life in the past month or maybe the past week,” Almeida says. “By asking people to focus just on the past 24 hours, we were able to capture a particular day in someone’s life. Then, by studying consecutive days, we were able to see the ebb and flow of their daily experiences.”
The researchers also collected saliva samples from the 2,000 individuals at four different times on four of those eight days. From the saliva, they were able to determine amounts of the stress hormone, cortisol. They then linked the information they collected to data from the larger MIDUS study, including the participants’ demographic information, their chronic health conditions, their personalities, and their social networks.
“We did this 10 years ago in 1995 and again in 2005,” Almeida says. “By having longitudinal data, not only were we able to look at change in daily experiences over this time but how experiences that were occurring 10 years ago are related to health and well being now.”
Teflon vs. Velcro
As reported in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, the team found that people who become upset by daily stressors and continue to dwell on them after they have passed were more likely to suffer from chronic health problems—especially pain, such as that related to arthritis, and cardiovascular issues—10 years later.
“I like to think of people as being one of two types,” Almeida says. “With Velcro people, when a stressor happens it sticks to them; they get really upset and, by the end of the day, they are still grumpy and fuming. With Teflon people, when stressors happen to them they slide right off.
“It’s the Velcro people who end up suffering health consequences down the road.”
Certain types of people are more likely to experience stress in their lives. Younger people, for example, have more stress than older people; people with higher cognitive abilities have more stress than people with lower cognitive abilities; and people with higher levels of education have more stress than people with less education.
“What is interesting is how these people deal with their stress,” Almeida says. “Our research shows that people age 65 and up tend to be more reactive to stress than younger people, likely because they aren’t exposed to a lot of stress at this stage in their lives, and they are out of practice in dealing with it. Younger people are better at dealing with it because they cope with it so frequently. Likewise, our research shows that people with lower cognitive abilities and education levels are more reactive to stress than people with higher cognitive abilities and education levels, likely because they have less control over the stressors in their lives.”
While stress may be a symptom that a person’s life is filled with hardship, it could also simply mean that the person is engaged in a wide variety of activities and experiences. “If this is the case, reducing exposure to stressors isn’t the answer,” says Almeida. “We just need to figure out how to manage them better.”
Researchers from the University of California at Irvine and California State University at Fullerton were co-authors on the paper, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Source: Penn State
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5 Comments
Learning how to manage stress by utilizing a combination of thinking strategies, coping skills, calming techniques and relaxation techniques is the real game changers. I have seen a complete change in my clients once they learn these things.
Learning how to manage stress by utilizing a combination of thinking strategies, coping skills, calming techniques and relaxation techniques are the real game changers. I have seen a complete change in my clients once they learn these things.
Martin Nielsen
It’s very true that there is a big difference in how different people handle stressors in their lives. If the “velcro people” were a small minority, it would probably be feasable to offer them all counseling, training, or therapy that can probably help, like htowncounselor indicate. But I’m afraid velcro people constitute quite a large part of the population, depending on how you set the limit for the definition. And on a bad day, we could probably all react like velcro people for a while. So, to avoid to totally individualise the problem, we should also think about reducing avoidable stressors to a reasonable extent. And train managers to spot the velcro people and help them get the right settings, tasks, co-workers, education, etc. to minimize overload. According to research on “Highly Sensitive People” the approximately 20 percent of the population with these characteristics are not only fragile, but also have valuable skills and abilities that are useful in many jobs, if allowed to be used in a constructive way and in a trustful environment.
Research like this is important, but inherently carry a risk to “blame the victim” that the researchers should address when reporting the results. Otherwise, some managers and consultants could tend to jump too quickly to conclusions, and fire or stop hiring “velcro people” and loose qualities that their organisations need.
Michael O'Donnell
This study is a timely reminder that stress is a subjective experience. Workplace initiatives that seek to prevent stress are therefore unlikely to succeed. What we have to try and do is give people the skills to deal with everyday life and we also need to help their colleagues and supervisors understand how to help people who aren’t coping. The same people who report that life is stressful are the very same people who are likely to respond adversely to pain and ill health. What I didn’t see in the report was whether the health conditions reported were objectively verified or self-reported. Either way, it’s interesting, but it’s important to know whether the correlation was with actual pathology or perception of illness.
Yea stress not only affects you mentally, but it can also take a serious physical toll on the human body. Consistent levels of stress can actually cause people to suffer through episodic periods of back pain. Our limbic system simply can’t tell the difference between the various levels of stress that we may encounter in our lives.