填空题

Coping with Stress
In modern times, we human beings have to use thoughts and actions to deal with stressful situations and lower our stress levels. Many people have a characteristic way of coping with stress based on their personality. People who cope well with stress tend to believe they can personally influence what happens to them. They usually make more positive statements about themselves, resist frustration, remain optimistic, and persevere even under extremely adverse circumstances. Most importantly, they choose the appropriate strategies to cope with the stressors (紧张性刺激) they confront. Conversely, people who cope poorly with stress tend to have somewhat opposite personality characteristics, such as lower self-esteem and a pessimistic outlook on life.
Coping strategies
Psychologists distinguish two broad types of coping strategies: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. The goal of both strategies is to control one’s stress level. In problem-focused coping, people try to alleviate (减轻 , 缓和) negative emotions by taking some action to modify, avoid, or minimize the threatening situation. They change their behavior to deal with the stressful situation. In emotion-focused coping, people try to directly moderate or eliminate unpleasant emotions. Examples of emotion-focused coping include rethinking the situation in a positive. way, relaxation, denial, and wishful thinking.
To understand these strategies, consider the example of a premed (医学院预科) student in college who faces three difficult final examinations in a single week. She knows she must get top grades in order to have a chance at acceptance to medical school. This situation is a potential source of stress, To cope, she could organize a study group and master the course materials systematically (problem-focused coping). Or she could decide that she needs to relax and collect herself for an hour or so (emotion-focused coping) before proceeding with an action plan (problem-focused coping). She might also decide to watch television for hours on end to prevent having to think about or study for her exams (emotion-focused coping).
In general, problem-focused coping is the most effective coping strategy when people have realistic opportunities to change aspects of their situation and reduce stress. Emotion-focused coping is most useful as a short-term strategy. It can help reduce one’s excitement level before engaging in problem- solving and taking action, and it can help people deal with stressful situations in which there are few problem-focused coping options.
Social support
Support from friends, family members, and others who care for us goes a long way in helping us to get by in times of trouble. Social support systems provide us with emotional sustenance (支持), handy resources and aid, and information when we are in need. People with social support feel cared about and valued by others and feel a sense of belonging to a larger social network.
A large body of research has linked social support to good health and a superior ability to cope with stress. For example, one long-term study of several thousand California residents found that people with extensive social ties lived longer than those with few close social contacts. Another study found that heart-attack victims who lived alone were nearly twice as likely to have another heart attack as those who lived with someone. Even the perception of social support can help people cope with stress. Studies have found that people’s appraisal (评价) of the availability of social support is more closely related to how well they deal with stressors than the actual amount of support they receive or the size of their social network.
Research also suggests that the companionship of animals can help lower stress. For example, one study found that in times of stress, people with pet dogs made fewer visits to the doctor than those without pets.
Biofeedback
Biofeedback (生物反馈) is a technique in which people learn voluntary control of stress-related physiological responses, such as skin temperature, muscle tension, blood pressure, and heart rate. Normally, people cannot control these responses voluntarily. In biofeedback training, people are connected to an instrument or machine that measures a particular physiological response, such as heart rate, and feeds that measurement back to them in an understandable way. For example, the machine might beep with each heartbeat or display the number of heartbeats per minute on a digital screen. Next, individuals learn to be sensitive to subtle changes inside their body that affect the response system being measured. Gradually, they learn to produce changes in that response system -- for example, to voluntarily lower their heart rate. Typically individuals use different techniques ’and proceed by trial and error until they discover a way to produce the desired changes.
Biofeedback has become a widely used and generally accepted technique for producing relaxation and lowering physiological arousal (唤醒) in patients with stress-related disorders. One use of biofeedback is in the. treatment of tension headaches. By learning to lower muscle tension in the head and neck, many tension headache sufferers can find long-term relief.
Relaxation
In addition to biofeedback, two other major methods of relaxation are progressive muscular relaxation and meditation(深思). Progressive muscular relaxation involves systematically tensing and then relaxing different groups of voluntary muscles, while directing one’s attention toward the contrasting sensations produced by the two procedures. After practicing progressive muscular relaxation, individuals become increasingly sensitive to rising tension levels and can produce the relaxation response during everyday activities (often by repeating a cue word, such as calm, to themselves).
Meditation, in addition to teaching relaxation, is designed to achieve subjective goals such as contemplation, wisdom, and altered states of consciousness. One of the most common forms of meditation, as is said, involves focusing attention on and repeating a word, sound, or phrase thought to have particularly calming properties.
Both progressive muscle relaxation and meditation reliably reduce stress-related excitement. They have been used successfully to treat a range of stress-related disorders, such as tension headaches and chronic pain.
Aerobic exercise
Aerobic(增氧健身的) exercise -- such as running, walking, biking, and skiing- can help keep stress levels down. Because aerobic exercise increases the endurance of the heart and lungs, an aerobically fit individual will have a lower heart rate at rest and lower blood pressure, less reactivity to stressors, and quicker recovery from stressors. In addition, studies show that people who exercise regularly have higher self-esteem and suffer less from anxiety and depression than comparable people who are not aerobically fit. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends exercising three to four times a week for at least 20 minutes to reduce the risk of heart attack and other diseases.
The passage takes a premed student as an example to illustrate the difficulty in relieving stress.