Coping with Stress

1. Coping is expending conscious effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems, and seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress or conflict.
2. In proactive coping, the coping response aims to head off a future stressor.
3. Social support is the perception and actuality that one is cared for, has assistance available from other people, and that one is part of a supportive social network.
4. Hardiness is a personality style described as a pattern of personality characteristics that help individuals remain healthy under life stress, as compared to those who developed health problems.
5. Behavioral medicine is an interdisciplinary field combining both medicine and psychology and is concerned with the integration of knowledge in the biological, behavioral, psychological, and social sciences relevant to health and illness.
6. Biofeedback is the process of gaining greater awareness of physiological functions with a goal of being able to manipulate them at will. Some of the processes that can be controlled include brainwaves, heart rate and pain perception.