Everyday Applications of Psychological Science

Hacks to Happiness and Health

R. Eric Landrum,Regan A. R. Gurung,Susan A. Nolan,Maureen A. McCarthy,Dana S. Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000602456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Everyday Applications of Psychological Science explores several core areas of psychology, showing readers how to apply these principles to everyday situations in order to better their understanding of human behavior and improve their quality of life.

The authors of this book, who are award-winning educators of psychology, have culled and collated the best practical research-based advice that psychological science can offer in an easy-to-read and digestible format. Lively and peppered with anecdotes, this book explores topical areas normally found in introductory psychology books but do so in a way that makes psychological science practical, accessible, and relevant to our readers. In Everyday Applications of Psychological Science, the best science that psychology has to offer is translated into life hacks that are applicable to improving readers' physical health, mental health, psychological wealth, relationships, and happiness.

Everyday Applications of Psychological Science is vital reading for those interested in learning more about the field of psychology more generally and how aspects of it can be applied to daily life. Our approach may be of particular interest to current and prospective undergraduate students of psychology and those interested in learning more about mental health issues.

Section 1My physical health

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188711-2

Would you like a concise list stating what you need to do to be healthy? You probably know most of it already – eat nutritious meals, get physical activity, don’t smoke, don’t get stressed out. Easier said than done. We may know what we need to do, but it is a completely different thing to actually do it. The great news is that findings from years of psychological research can help us do each of these different healthy behaviors better. If you ask people what they most want, “money” may be a common answer (more on this in sections on that topic), but “healthy” and “happy” are often on the top of the list. Here, we focus on many of the ways you can be physically healthy.

Part 1.1 What is being healthy anyway?

Whereas a large part of our psychological mind space can be taken up by the fear of death, people consciously and unconsciously tend to want to live long, healthy, and happy lives. People buy personal health trackers such as Fitbits to exercise more though researchers show it may not lead to weight loss.¹ Every January gym membership jumps and home fitness equipment is lugged to basements to hit those New Year resolutions. We try to eat more of what is good for us. Sometimes we pop pills engineered to boost our immune systems or replenish missing elements in our diet. It is great to be alive, and being healthy helps us maximize the joys of living. Health is a complex blend of biological, psychological, and societal factors. What can you do to optimize your health? What does psychological science tell us about being healthy? The first key step to staying alive longer, healthier, and happier is getting a clear sense of what “health” is.

Health is best defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.² This broad definition is especially useful because it includes the mental component, which is particularly susceptible to psychological pressures from situations around us. One way to see health is as a continuum, with optimal health (broadly defined) at one end and poor health at the other. The number of healthy things we do in life determines our relative position on the continuum (closer to optimal health or closer to death) at a particular moment in time. The healthy things we do (eat and sleep well, exercise, take time to relax) move us toward the optimal health side. The unhealthy things we do (eat junk food, get stressed, smoke, drink excessively) make us slide toward the illness side. Of course, not everything can be compensated for. If you have smoked for 20 or 30 years, it is pretty hard to slide to the healthy other end. Furthermore, it is difficult to compare the extent to which different behaviors translate into longevity. Just because you do not smoke does not mean that you can drink excessively. Just because you exercise a lot does not mean you can afford to not eat a nutritious diet. Keeping your life moving toward optimal health is a daily challenge and a dynamic process, both strongly influenced by social psychological factors.³

The challenge to achieve optimal health is made more difficult by the interaction of nature and culture. Many times, nature pushes us in one direction but our cultural background or the rules of the culture we are embedded in push us in another. Our evolutionary history shows, for example, that we are all biologically wired to crave and enjoy fatty and salty foods. The tendency to eat as much fat and salt as we like, and consequently to grow heavier, runs into the cultural ideals of health and fitness we see in the media. Smokers with a nicotine addiction may want to light up a cigarette whenever they are out in public, but cultural smoking bans prevent them from doing so. Sometimes culture can work in the opposite direction as well. For example, in countries such as India and Japan, smoking is still normative as compared to North America. Although the urge to smoke is not a natural, innate urge, someone growing up in a culture where many people smoke may be more likely to smoke as well. Families are often such cultural settings, and young children are very likely to eat as well and be as physically active as their parents.

It was not until the early 20th century that psychology started to play a part in the examination of health. We now have a good set of #psychhacks because of early psychologists such as Freud, Alexander, and Dubar and organizations such as the Society for Health Psychology and the Society for Behavioral Medicine. For the past 50 plus years, health psychologists used the methods of psychology to examine health. Within mainstream psychology, researchers in social psychology, personality psychology, cognitive psychology, and clinical psychology realized that the basic theories that they derived to describe and predict behavior could be used in the study of health and well-being. The following sections give you some key life hacks based on this research.

Part 1.2 Get stressed much?

Why do different people experience stress differently? What can we do to reduce stress? If you can get a good handle on dealing with stress, that is perhaps the best #psychhack to know of. Stress is a word we use often, but there are some significant variations in how it is defined, how it is studied, and everyone has a different notion of what is stressful. It is useful to have a specific definition of stress which can be applied to many different people (and animals too).

All negative events need not be stressful, and all positive events are not automatically free from stress. For example, losing your job may sound initially like a stressful event, but it may be a happy event if you hated your job. Similarly, although finding a romantic partner after a long period of being single sounds very positive, you may worry about how to make sure it lasts. As you can see, stress is subjective. What, then, is a convenient way to define stress? This is a good time to assess your own stress, using the questionnaire in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Some of the major stressors as assessed by the Hassles scales

1. Death of a close family member	100
2. Death of a close friend	73
3. Divorce between parents	65
4. Jail term	63
5. Major personal injury	63
6. Marriage	58
7. Fired from job	50
8. Failed important course	47
9. Change in health of a family member	45
10. Pregnancy	44
11. Sex problems	44
12. Serious argument with family member	40
13. Change in financial status	39
14. Change of major	39
15. Trouble with parents	39
16. New girl or boy friend	38
17. Increased workload at school	37
18. Outstanding personal achievement	36
19. First semester in college	35
20. Change in living conditions	31
21. Serious argument with instructor	30
22. Lower grades than expected	29
23. Change in sleeping habits	29
24. Change in social habits	29
25. Change in eating habits	28
26. Chronic car trouble	26
27. Change in number of family get-togethers	26
28. Too many missed classes	25
29. Change of college	24
30. Dropped more than one class	23
31. Minor traffic violations	20
On the scale, you can determine your “stress score” by adding up the number of points corresponding to the events that you have experienced in the past six months or expect to experience in the coming six months.

Most researchers contend that the best way to know when a person is stressed is to look at how the person’s body responds to a situation. If the sympathetic nervous system activates in response to an event, then the person is under stress. This results in elevated heart rate, respiration, and circulation. Many early definitions of stress relied heavily on biological activity. Cannon⁴ viewed stress as the biological mobilization of the body for action, involving sympathetic activation and endocrine activity. Selye⁵ similarly viewed stress as the activation of a host of physiological systems. We will give you what all the physiology you need to understand this in a bit. More psychological theories defined stress as being caused when the perceived demands on the organism exceeded the resources to meet those demands.¹

Although these different definitions have all been well supported, the simplest definition of stress is the upsetting of homeostasis.⁹ Our bodies have an optimal level of functioning in regard to blood sugar level, body temperature, rate of circulation, and breathing. Homeostasis is the ideal level of bodily functions. Similar to the thermostat in homes, our body is designed to maintain its optimal level in all areas of functioning. We set our thermostats and if the temperature drops below the set level, the furnace starts. In this way a constant temperature is maintained. The hypothalamus in our brains similarly maintains set levels. Stress to our systems can thus be seen as something that upsets our ideal balance.

This simple but effective definition of stress harkens back to the origins of the word stress. Physicists long studied the effects of large forces on solid structures, and stress was originally used to describe the force exerted on a body that resulted in deformation or strain. Stress has similar effects on our body. This definition allows for subjectivity, as stressors can vary across individuals. If an event does not activate your stress response or disrupt your system, it is just another event. If an event disrupts you, it is a stressor. One person’s event can be another person’s stressor. For example, talking in public may not be stressful for you, but it could be very stressful for someone else. Four major psychological theories expand on this basic understanding of stress. But first, some critical physiology.

Part 1.3 The biological secrets you need to know

Understanding the physiological bases of stress provides us with a better understanding of how psychology can make a difference. Even if you are or were anti-biology, you will appreciate getti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1 My physical health
• Section 2 My mental health
• Section 3 My wealth
• Section 4 My relationships
• Section 5 In closing: My happiness
• Index