hello again okay so this is the second mini lecture for health psychology and this time i wanted to talk about the general adaptation syndrome uh it's a model out there that they developed quite some time ago and it focuses on people's ability to cope with stressors and how a failure to cope with stressors is the kind of thing that could lead to physical health problems so here we have a graph we have stress on the x-axis and i guess resistance or coping to some degree on the vertical axis or the y-axis and what we can see here is as stress levels get you know more intense and that's as you go along the horizontal axis you go to the right um people engage uh psychological and physiological systems uh that allow them to cope with more and more stress so as the stress goes up the physiological systems kick in to help you better cope with those those stressors and you can see you're coping you're coping you know you're engaging the system more you're engaging the system more and you're still coping but at some point uh the level of stress exceeds your ability to cope and so your physiological response is not adequate but it's still kicking in you know so you really can't cope with this situation it's just not fixable but your body continues to engage and to react physiologically like i'm stressed i'm stressed and instead of the stress this is the initial physiological reaction of the body allowing you to better cope at some point it's not helping you cope but it's still it's still causing this physiological reactivity and actually becomes problematic and probably starts to harm you physiologically because you're turning on this you know this you know intense physiological response system and attempt to cope but as you turn that on you turn that on you turn it on it's not good for your body so um a failure or an inability to cope with mounting stressors or distress uh will eventually lead to burnout and as well as engage a bunch of fairly you know demanding and intense physiological reactions in the body that's the that's essentially the general adaptation syndrome but now i'll go through the three parts okay so if you think of the general adaptation syndrome as i like the physiology of the stress response it's a series of physiological responses to stressors that occur in three stages the alarm stage the resistance stage and the exhaustion stage so alarm is the sort of your fight or flight response so big stressor or some stressor happens your body's like oh i've got to do something i've got to prepare so i've got to fight i've got a flight i've got to do something and so by having a sort of an initial intense reaction physiologically speaking you're you you engage the sympathetic nervous system you change you know your blood flow levels maybe you release some uh adrenaline adrenal hormones kick in so you're basically preparing your body to act and react to the situation and deal with what might be a threatening uh stressor in your life and and oftentimes if you're able to cope or deal with or eliminate that stressor that all's good that's great the alarm phase did the thing it was supposed to do but what if you can't deal with the stressor what if you have this alarm reaction you know it's like your body oh my god we've got to do something got to do something you know adrenaline's pumping through the system changes in blood flow you know your sympathetic nervous system is on fire but you can't actually fix the problem maybe it's a chronic stressor that you can't do anything about but but it keeps activating your physiology well that's not great right so you're basically having this chronic continuous physiological response but it's not actually effective it's not allowing you to cope with and eliminate the stressor so that's not good for the body to be constantly in some hyperactive hyper arouse mode so that's the so you're attempting to deal with the situation uh physiologically speaking but it's not working and so at some point you basically run out of the adrenaline you run out of that physiological energy in the response system and you're exhausted so persistent ongoing chronic stressors uh associated with an intensified physiological reaction will deplete the body of energy and that that energy expo you know expenditure that hyped up ramped up hyper aroused sympathetic nervous system response and all of the all of the things that go with it is not great for your body it might put you at it does put you at increased risk of developing physical problems and health problems so that's the the gis the general adaptation syndrome is basically a three-stage model you have an alarm phase and if it works in dealing with the corporate stress and cope coping great then you have the resistance phase where you're not effectively dealing your body's still in you know hyper arousal mode but it's not solving the problem so you've got this continued hyper arousal and then you finally run out of juice you run out of energy uh and you're exhausted physiologically speaking and and during the process it puts you at increased risk of problems health problems so that was the general adaptation syndrome