1. Discuss in detail hassles, frustrations, and conflict, providing examples of each specific type.

● Hassles are the small, petty concerns of life, often momentary, that still lead to one being
frustrated and stressed. Often they are something such as being cut off at an intersection,
a friend talking too long, and preventing you from being able to contribute to a
conversation, or maybe just having to stand in a line for a long while.
● Frustrations in the psychological sense are things that get in the way of us accomplishing
a goal. These can be things such as:
○ Delays or being forced to waste time, such as my father often saying wasting
someone’s time is a slow form of murder.
○ lack of resources such as money or lack of access to necessary tools.
○ Loss, such as the loss of an important connection in our life, be it a relationship,
friendship, or the death of a pet, the last of which is something I experienced
recently.
● Conflict is what happens when two or more demands meet, and become incompatible or
hard to reconcile in some way. These can be things from as minor as everyone having
different tastes in where they want to eat, or more major such as needing to work at home
to help assist a chronically ill loved one, and most workplaces requiring you to work in
the office space.

2. Discuss in detail the various types of direct coping and defensive coping techniques, giving
examples of each of these coping strategies.
● Direct coping is when you take an active effort to deal with an issue that is causing you
stress, using methods such as:
○ Confrontation is when you take the issue head-on and acknowledge it, trying to
find a solution. The example that comes to my mind is the film Lorenzo’s Oil,
where a father studies medicine and tries to find a cure for his son’s dangerous
medical condition.
○ Compromise is where you try to figure out how to find the happy medium with
what you want and what is realistic for the situation. A Couple of years ago,
Steam released a device known as the Steam Deck, you may want the most
expensive version with the highest specs, but you know you can not afford that
one, so you settle for one of the cheaper if less robust versions for the sake of your
wallet.
○ And Withdrawl, this is where someone looks at an issue, and decides that the best
solution is to remove themselves from said situation. I used quite to enjoy Team
Fortress 2, but over the past number of years a crisis of bots made it more and
more difficult actually to play the game, and while I joined in on attempts to
convince valve to help, I eventually decided that the best option was to stop
playing the game.
 ● Defensive coping is where you adopt a strategy to deal with the stress of a situation you
feel like you can not resolve but do not want to leave. They can be methods such as:
○ Denial, where you deny there is an actual problem, such as you claiming that your
love life is excellent, despite the countless short-lived romances that crash and
burn,
○ Repression is when you block out painful memories to deal with a situation you
had or felt like you had little to no control over, such as an abuse victim
repressing the memories of their abuse.
○ Projection is when you take your flaws and issues and act like they are visible in
others and not yourself. You aren’t a backstabbing jerk who uses others to climb
the social ladder, everyone around you is though, and you are just making sure
you are protecting yourself.
○ Identification is where someone will begin to identify with someone else or
something and use the success that they or it gets to vindicate themselves. See
how fans of a certain property will use box office success or game sales to justify
why their intellectual property of choice is superior, and they are so smart for
sticking with it.
○ Regression is when someone goes back to a child-like state to cope with stress, as
that is a period when many stressors are out of our control. Think about someone
who whenever they were confronted with a conflict, would find themselves
beginning to throw a tantrum as they try to get their way.
○ Intellectualization is where someone detaches themselves from the emotional
aspects of the situation and looks at it from a more analytical way. People use
philosophy to justify their situation, for example.
○ Displacement is where someone takes their anger and frustration, and directs it to
someone or something else, such as someone throwing their cat outside thinking
them to be annoying, despite the cat not having done much.
○ Sublimation is where people take their emotions and channel them in ways that
work better with society.

3. Discuss in detail the General Adaptation Syndrome and provide examples of how it works in a
given situation.

General adaptation syndrome is the process that the body goes through when we deal
with stress.
● Alarm, where we register what is going on.
● Resistance, when we begin to use direct and defensive coping situations in
different orders or intensity to deal with the issue at hand. If this is not successful,
it will then lead to the third stage, which is…
 ● Exhaustion, as we continue to struggle against the stressor and slowly but surely
become burnt out.

4. Discuss in detail strategies for adapting to stress in our lives and how to stay healthy.
Some methods we can take are calming down and taking a breather, hoping that by doing
so we can analyze our situation with a cooler head, or find ways where we can vent our
frustration and stress in healthy ways, such as maybe playing a game to help cheer yourself up
and maybe vent out some anger. We can also reach out to friends and family and hope they can
provide support to us, maybe listening to our issues and allowing us to vent, or maybe they take
action to provide comfort. Finally, many turn to altruism, hoping that helping others can help
them feel better about themselves, and thus deal with their issues feeling emotionally better.

5. Discuss in detail the various sources of extreme stress that individuals may encounter at one
time or another in their lives.

Unemployment is a huge one, as it leads to one being worried if they can provide for
themselves, we live in a capitalist society and often need funds to provide basic necessities. The
ending of a relationship is another, as often times they can be a source of comfort and safety we
have just lost. Death is a huge one, as we mourn those we have lost and need to cope with how
our lives are now irreversibly changed.

How to manage stress (youtube.com)

This video, featuring a PHD, is of a woman explaining various ways we can deal with
stress, and handle it even if just in the moment. She speaks authoritatively, and it is clear she
understands what she is talking about, going into detail on some of these methods and explaining
how they work.

The Connection Between Emotion and Physical Health (youtube.com)

This is a video of a lecture done by Psychologist Esther Sternberg and goes into detail on
how our emotions and our physical health can be interconnected. After all, the placebo effect is
based upon the fact that if we believe something will happen to us, our body could trigger such a
reaction in ourselves. She brings up some ways we are able to help with our stress and go into
the biological aspects of stress, what hormones and chemicals our body releases, and other such
changes our body goes under. She brings up different stories of how aspects such as our
environment can help us feel more positive and recover more quickly from our issues both
mental and physical.