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Photo Source: Pixabay the good news is that as we get older, our ability to cope with stress does improve. But if you live in an era of uncertainty, it's hard to say.

Write | Daisy Juhasz (Daisy Yuhas)

Translation | Ma Dongyuan

Editor | 2 / 7

Everyone is very familiar with stress. Studies over the past few decades have clearly shown that major events in life, such as losing a spouse or starting a new job, can take up a lot of energy and attention. But recently, scientists have made progress in studying the effects of smaller daily stressors (stressor) on our emotions and life experiences. David David Almeida, a developmental psychologist and professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University (Pennsylvania State University), has been tracking stressors in the daily lives of more than 3000 adults since 1995. Almeida talked to Daisy Juhasz, editor of Scientific American Spirit, to discuss some of the good news he found about aging-and how major national or international events can affect our experience of dealing with stress.

The following is an edited transcript of the interview

For twenty years, you have been tracking people's daily experiences. How does this change your point of view as a psychologist?

My research tries to treat people's every day as a separate object of study. I observe how people plan their time, how they deal with stressors and positive events, as well as their emotional and physical symptoms. I used a chart to record the daily changes of these observations. So, although I am a psychologist, my research object is not everyone, but every day.

The more I study, the more I find that every day people are different from who they were yesterday, as if they were a different person. Our identity is not only defined by our daily experiences, it may fluctuate with the changes of our daily experiences within the scope of our behavior.

How do you track people's daily stressors?

We ask people to answer a series of questions at the end of the day. At first I used the phone, now I use the Internet. We ask people how they spend their days, their emotions, their physical conditions, and who they interact with, and then ask a lot of questions about the types of stressors they experience that day. In some studies, we also collected saliva samples from subjects to measure their levels of stress-related hormones.

We surveyed a lot of people in this way. In particular, I would like to thank the outstanding participants in the American Daily experience Research Lab Project (National Study of Daily Experiences), who also participated in a large-scale survey called American Middle-aged people (Midlife in the United States), who have shared their lives with me over the past 20 years.

You recently published the results of an analysis of 2845 adults (initially aged between 22 and 77) for more than 20 years. In this job, you find that people seem to experience less stress as they get older. Can you tell us more about it?

Yes, finally there is some good news about daily stress! It seems a little better, right? We found that young people said they were more exposed to stressful events than older people, referring to things they thought were challenging, frustrating or destructive. As a result, people in their 20s may report stressors for at least 40% to 45% of the days, but that proportion may drop to 20% to 25% when you are in your 70s.

In addition, we also studied how painful people are in the face of stress. We found a similar pattern in which young people feel more painful than older people when there are stressors. However, this tendency of "the older you are, the more you will face stress" tends to disappear around the age of 55.

Why is there an age advantage in dealing with stress?

I think this is the combined effect of three factors. One has to do with the social roles that people play. When you are young, you may continue to experience changes in social roles as a parent, start a new job, and start a new relationship. There is a lot of pressure to start a new social role, and when you have multiple social roles at the same time, there will inevitably be conflicts between the roles.

The second reason may be that as we get older, we realize that our life is limited and want to make full use of it-so we want to enjoy life more.

The third reason, which interests me most, is that with experience, opportunities and past stressors, we have learned how to deal with them, and as we get older, we become more and more good at dealing with daily stressors.

Does this explain why the old are happier than the young?

In the process of getting old, you can make a list of things you don't want to happen, such as poor health, loss of friends, illness and cognitive decline. These are not the things you expect to increase happiness. But we continue to see that as people get older, so does their life satisfaction.

Nonetheless, the rule that older people are happier than young people will stop at a certain age. At the end of life-in the eighties and nineties-life at this age is sometimes very difficult, and life satisfaction is declining.

How do factors such as economic and political uncertainty in the context of our lives affect our daily stress?

Our data can study the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. According to the data, adults in 2010 had significantly more stress in their daily life than they did in 1995, and felt more distressed about these stresses. Our assumption is that major events such as the financial crisis and technological developments have changed the way society interacts. From this we can speculate how the recession and other changes will affect us. In later work, we hope to see what impact the epidemic has had on us, and we may not see such obvious age advantages in this era.

But what really surprises us is that the analysis of the 2008 recession shows that the pressure difference seems to be concentrated on middle-aged people. I thought young people who had just started working and retired old people were the worst off. However, this is not the case. on the contrary, middle-aged people in their 40s and 60s are more troubled. I think it has something to do with the social role of the middle-aged. They have to worry about both their children and their parents.

If we want to solve the problem of stress in real life, should we try to eliminate all the stressors in our lives?

It may actually be good to be under some stress every day. People who report that they have no stress in their lives, you think they are lucky and happy. But at the same time, they reported fewer happy things in their lives. There are fewer other people in their lives, and they perform worse on cognitive tests.

What plays a role in maintaining our health and well-being is our response to stress-how you respond to the stress you encounter. What causes cardiovascular disease, increases inflammation and leads to early death is not stress itself, but your emotional response to stress.

So how should we adjust our response to stress?

Some adjustments can be done by ourselves, such as eating well and getting enough sleep. But we need to remember that not everyone can eat and sleep well. It's not just a personal choice.

We find that minorities are more responsive to stress by race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, because they are not always in a position to deal with their own stress. For example, when your body is under stress, it needs some exercise to relieve it. Getting up for a walk at this time is the best way to prevent emotional reactions due to stress. But many people can't do it because they can't suddenly get up on their way to work and go for a walk outside.

We need to start exploring how to provide resources so that people can face and deal with stress on their own.

Original text link:

Https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/your-response-to-stress-improves-as-you-grow-older/

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue)

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