Yes, it’s true. Women usually have more stress and anxiety than men do. In fact, women are twice as likely to have severe stress than men are, and it can be dangerous. Stress and anxiety can lead to family conflicts, insomnia, and even heart problems. Also, signs of high stress are very similar to the antecedent symptoms of a heart attack, so they can be easily misinterpreted anxiety or stress. This shows that high levels of stress in women have been taking place. In a 2016 study, experimenters noticed a large gap between men and women’s stress levels. One key explanation of why women carry more stress is the idea of emotional labor. Made known by Jess Zimmerman in 2015 essay for the toast, she introduces a concept called “surface acting”, which is when women show emotions that they do not completely feel. This can happen in domestic situations, or in workplace settings. After the essay was written, hundreds of women responded, agreed and explained situations they had been in that caused anxiety and stress. The strong agreement from women shows the truth in the paper. Another key factor is domestic work. This is directed at the amount of housework women have to do versus the amount of chores a man has to complete. On average, women do more housework than men do. This can become a major stressor for the woman of the house and is likely to lead to family conflicts. Clearly, both of the above are terrible. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to fight the stress that’s stemming from these problems. First, self-care is very important. Getting good sleep, eating well and exercising are all important to combating stress. Sometimes disconnecting from school or work can help you tune out all the noise, and also let your mind relax for a bit. Think about what causes you stress, and be specific. Be descriptive, not just “school” but a certain teacher or class that is one of your stressors. This helps to truly identify your problems and is the first step to living a less stressful life. You should seek validation. Try to remember that no, you are not crazy, but instead trying to explain the feelings you really have under your calm exterior. If you reach out, you will find people who are also stressed. This will help to make you feel less alienated and lonely. Ms. Li, the subject of this article, is an app developer, and went on to invent an application called self & sanity, a media platform for women, but is more of a free space where you can set personality goals to better yourself. Recently I’ve gotten the app, with my goal being to be more mindful of other people around me. Currently, I am learning meditation to combat my stress. I recommend. Citations: Wong, K. (2018, November 14). There's a Stress Gap Between Men and Women. Here's Why It's Important. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/smarter-living/stress-gap-women-men.html?rref=collection/timestopic/Psychology and Psychologists&action=click&contentCollection=health®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=collection By Laura Russo This is a very insightful article! I enjoyed learning about it and seeing the ways in which women too much stress. I definitely think this is an issue that needs to be resolved. I think that our society should definitely share the burden of chores more equally among men and women. Especially because women are coming home from work to have chores to do. I can see how it feels as though they have two full time jobs and would lead to a lot of stress. Hopefully these issues can be resolved so women don't feel so overwhelmed and prevent health issues. - Alejandro Coury
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Ever had that dream where you forget your pants? People believe that dreams are not important and can be easily forgotten. Dreams are much more important than one might think, they try to communicate with us in a lot of different aspects. For example, a woman was on a date with a man and couldn’t decide whether she wanted to go out with him again. She had a dream later in the week, and in the dream, she was convinced that she shouldn’t go out with the guy again so she didn’t. This shows how dreams can communicate with us. This also shows that we can be easily manipulated and influenced by our brain. There is an experiment that shows that we actually able to recognize when we are dreaming and able to dream about real places. The experiment: “In the 1960s, after analyzing more than 600 dream reports from labs in Brooklyn and Bethesda, Md., Frederick Snyder, a psychologist, concluded that “dreaming consciousness” was in fact “a remarkably faithful replica of waking life.” In his sample, 38 percent of the settings were real places that dreamers recognized from their lives; another 43 percent resembled places they knew. This experiment shows how real dreams can be but it also shows how sometimes dreams don't always tell the truth, for example, your brain can make your dream of the wilderness and be attacked by a dangerous animal, even if you live in the city and are at no risk of a attack like that. This refers back to the idea of how impressionable our brains are. You could be having those dreams because you watched something related to the dream and your brain thought it was important and wanted you to be reminded. I thought this article was interesting because every night we dream and push those meaningless dreams to the side and don’t look into them, I was mesmerized by the idea of my little dreams might have a bigger meaning. Most of the time we dream about things that are familiar sometimes that always a good thing. In another study it talks about upcoming tests makes its way into their dreams. The experiment: “ a student contacted a group of aspiring doctors on the day they were scheduled to take their medical school entrance exam. Nearly three-quarters of the 719 students who replied said they had dreamed about the exam at least once over the course of the semester, and almost all of those dreams had been nightmares: They got lost on their way to the test center, found it impossible to decipher the test questions or realized they were writing in invisible ink.” This shows how anxiety about something stressful can also be replicated into your dream world. It doesn’t have to be positive, the most stressful things can make it into your dreams because your brain wants you to know that is important. Dreams let us work our anxieties at a low-risk environment. Weather its import like a college exam or that you should dump a guy, your brain is trying to communicate with us and we shouldn't ignore that. This can also help with our memory, the article states “ “The dreamer’s own self was “well preserved” and “rarely plagued by features incongruous with waking reality.” “The representation of self is presumably one of the fundamental cornerstones of our long-term memory systems,” they explained.”I chose this article because every night we have these dreams, and we ignore them so much because it is easier to ignore rather than figure out what they actually mean. You might be able to figure more about yourself if you spend the time a take a look at your dreams. Robb, A. (2018, November 10). Why Do You Keep Dreaming You Forgot Your Pants? It'sScience.Retrievedfrom https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/opinion/sunday/dreams-meaning-science.html?rref=collection/timestopic/Psychologyand Psychologists&action=click&contentCollection=health®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=collection by Harry Steinharter Have you ever felt tired, ever felt sick, ever wanted to feel 30 years younger? Well, now you can! In just a few easy steps you transform your life and make your mind and body work as they used in the good old days. Ellen Langer, who was at the time, a 67-year-old psychology professor at Harvard, conducted a radical experiment in 1981. She asked 8 men in their seventies to participate in her study. The study involved the eight men staying in a hotel that was specially furnished to recreate 1959. The men stayed in the hotel for two consecutive weeks. She asked the men to not only live in the hotel and embrace the time period but to also recreate themselves as they were in 1959. They were told to talk about events that happened that year in the present tense, and they watched TV and radio programming from that year as well. In all respects, they were living in 1959. At the end of their stay, the eight men were proven to be more flexible, had greater dexterity, better vision, and sat taller than another group of men who stayed there. The difference between the two groups was that the group that didn’t improve was never told to recreate themselves as they were in 1959. Those men were living in the era because of their environment, but they weren’t living in the era in their mind. So what does all this mean? Well for starters it allows you to feel young again. All you have to do is live in an environment made to recreate the era you’re looking for and to embrace who you were during that time period. This is because the brain creates powerful placebos that then affect the rest of your body. The men who improved essentially tricked their body. Their eyes and ears saw and heard 1959, and then by talking in the present tense about 1959, they tricked their brain into believing that it really was 1959. This affected their muscles, eyesight, and everything else because it made their brain feel young again. by Gabby Colby-George Have you ever experienced a lack of retaining information? Or maybe you don’t understand something you’ve just learned the day before. Well here’s what may be the problem. Photo There are many forms of stress. Each different type has a different effect on the brain. Short term stress affects a person’s ability to remember facts. Although in the moment you may feel like taking notes and listening to the information that’s being given, is working fine, you may come back and realize that your brain did not retain the written/spoken information as well as you’d thought. There are three important steps to learning new information; acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval. Although, moderate stress related to memory itself can have positive effects on the acquisition and consolidation processes in the brain. The brain releases corticosteroids when it is stressed which prompt the amygdala to tell the hippocampus (where memories are held) to put together memories. Moderate stress signals the brain that the information it is hearing is worth remembering. Now, chronic stress, causes the brain to be constantly bathed in corticosteroids, this damages the amygdala’s ability to make memories. When stressed people find it hard to create short-term memories as well as turn short-term memories into long-term memories. This is one of the many reasons that it is so hard to learn when stressed When someone experiences stress the prefrontal cortex fires in able to allow the flight, fight, or freeze mechanism to kick in. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of retrieving memories and that’s why when taking a stressful test, or trying to remember something in a stressful moment the brain may not be able to retrieve the needed information. Stress affects the types of memories that we create as well. Stress at an event may mean that we remember the bad/stressful parts of the event instead of remembering the happier/fun parts of the event, the brain struggles to remember accurate depictions of what happened at the event. This is only one reason that eye-witness statements are so unreliable. Scott, E. (n.d.). How Stress Works With-And Against-Your Memory. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/stress-and-your-memory-4158323 Photo Photo by: Kaitlyn Bennett Everyone has bad days, for some people those are the only kind they know. They can remember being happy and they can try to recreate that feeling of joy but at a certain point there is no point. There are many different ways to treat depression. The most commonly talked about are therapy and antidepressant pills, however, there are other ways to find happiness again. It all starts with the mind. One can train their brain to think more positively, by writing down their negative thought and asking themselves for evidence about that thought. For example, say someone woke up one morning and they couldn’t imagine getting up and starting their day. They could ask themselves why they are having a hard time finding motivation in starting their day, and why they are not excited to see what the day might bring. If there is evidence for this, then they can think more about the evidence they find. In this scenario imagine that person had a presentation that day but their anxiety was holding them back from wanting to present. This person could then ask themselves why presenting makes them so anxious, and go about finding a solution. Of course this is an extremely hard task and when someone is in a depressed state of mind it can feel impossible to even begin this process, which is why there are other ways. Finding happiness can be a long and hard road, but one should not feel as though there is any sort of timer on them. Learning to enjoy life should be a personal and slow process. Studies have shown that “rewriting your story” can be very beneficial in this process. Rewriting your story is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Take a pen or pencil, a piece of paper, and write down an event or time in your life that you would like to understand a little more. After writing this down reread it and change the things you wish you could have changed. Literally rewrite the story of your life to make it fit who you are and who you want to be. This will help you understand not only the things that have happened to you in your life and the feelings you have surrounding those experiences, but it will help you get a better idea of who you are as a person. Another way to make yourself happier in life is to stay active. Many studies have been done that prove physical activity makes people happier. This activity can be as simple as walking around, doing some jumping jacks, or going outside for a bike ride. Simple things like this can boost a person's happiness almost immediately. Lastly one of the most effective things a person can do to change their happiness is take a look at their community and where they live. Living in a place where one can be surrounded by positive people who are motivated and want to do as much as they can with their lives is a very healthy environment to put oneself in. Living around that kind of energy is very healthy especially when someone is not in their best state of mind. This is a short list of strategies one can use in their path to happiness, but a very helpful one. Doing any one of these things can and will bring a change to ones life, one must simply give it a try. Link to full article Link to hand picture Link to happy face picture Parker-Pope, T. (2017, November 15). How to Be Happy. Retrieved December 7, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/guides/well/how-to-be-happy?&action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Mind&redirect=true Claudia Coolidge Picture yourself given a task. Do you prefer to complete the task through visual learning or verbal learning? Most people claim that they are either a “visual learner” or an “auditory learner.” But what if scientists have proven that there is actually no proof a person can be categorized in this way? Through multiple experiments, some scientists now believe that there is no actual proof of “learning styles.” Psychologists have many different theories about how to categorize learners. Some have suggested that certain people are always able to learn better with pictures and others are able to learn better with words. Other psychologists have explained that some people prefer to solve problems intuitively, whereas others prefer to solve by analyzing. In order to test these theories of auditory-visual learners, they conducted a couple different experiments. The results were shocking. In the first experiment, researchers asked subjects a series of questions about the mental strategies they use when learning new information. The subjects were asked questions: Do you use words or draw a map to explain directions? Researchers then read statements and participants rated how easily they could picture it or how easily they could pronounce it. They gave diagrams and written instructions to the participants and asked them to learn a new task. The individuals were already identified as “auditory” or “visual” learners based on how they told the researchers they identified. Those who self-identified as visualizers went to diagrams and those who saw themselves as verbalizers went to written. The researchers believed people who were auditory learners should have remembered better if they focused on sound while visual learners should have remembered better by creating image. However, this is not how the results came back at all. The results demonstrated that they did not learn faster just because they were using a technique they thought was better for them. In another experiment, researchers looked at brain activity to find that people mentally changed the task to align with what they think their learning style is. When participants who thought they were “visual” saw words, their visual part of brain was active, and when “verbal” saw pictures their verbal part of brain was active. However, neither group performed better when the stimuli matched what they thought their learning style was. The results of this experiment demonstrate that there is no scientific proof learning style that works for one individual more than another learning style. These studies support the idea that it is better to change the learning style for the task at hand than the individual. I thought of myself as a visual learner before researching this topic, but I now wonder why I thought that and whether my learning style affects how I learn or not. If the experiments above are true, then I wouldn’t be either. I think I might try learning in multiple ways to test the theory for myself. I encourage you to think about your own perception of your learning style and challenge yourself to try other, alternate methods of learning! Willingham, D. T. (2018, October 04). Are You a Visual or an Auditory Learner? It Doesn't Matter. Retrieved December 3, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/sunday/visual-learner-auditory-school-education.html?rref=collection/timestopic/Psychology and Psychologists&action=click&contentCollection=health®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=search&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=collection By Lilly Weinrich
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Ms. Carrigan's Psych ClassWe have been reading articles about psychological studies to inform the way we live our lives. Please explore, and we hope you learn a bit about the psychology in your life! Categories
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