In this video, we're just going to introduce the idea of stress. Stress is essentially a psychological and physiological response to events that we perceive as challenging, threatening, or potentially overwhelming. It's important to note that there are two different components to stress. We have this psychological component where we're thinking about and conceptualizing the stressor, worrying about it, or ruminating on it.
Then, we have this physiological piece where we're having some kind of specific bodily reaction to the stress. We are going to talk about that in more detail in some upcoming videos. One thing to note is that while we often talk about stress as a very negative thing and describe it negatively, it is important to know that stress can be beneficial to things like motivation and performance. Having that kind of physiological response and thinking about this thing that is overwhelming you can actually be really productive and helpful in certain contexts. So just know that while we often think of it as negative, it can actually be really beneficial.
It might not feel that way in the moment, but it can be. Now, our stress response, or how we're going to be responding to that stressor, essentially depends on our appraisal of it. Your appraisal is basically your judgment of the stressor. We conceptualize this process using two terms. First, we have our primary appraisal. Primary means that this is the one that happens first. Your primary appraisal is basically your determination of how potentially harmful or threatening this event is going to be to you. For example, are you facing unemployment, or did you burn your chicken and have to get takeout for dinner?
Let's imagine you are on the job market and you have this huge job interview tomorrow and you feel totally unprepared, and this is a great job opportunity. Let's say if you got this job, it would change your life in a very positive way, and if you did not get this job, it would change your life in a very negative way. That's a super threatening event. So if we have this primary appraisal and we decide, yes, this is stressful, this is potentially harmful to me, then we're going to move into our secondary appraisal.
Our secondary appraisal is essentially our determination of what coping resources are available to us and how effective they may be. I do want to make a quick note here that when we often colloquially say the word "coping," you might picture a person curled up on the couch with a blanket feeling sorry for themselves. But in psychology, coping is a very neutral term. This is basically just any way that you deal with a stress, whether it's productive, unproductive, positive, or negative. To go with our job interview example, some coping resources available to you might be, let's say, that night we stay up a bit late and study and prep for the interview, and then the next morning we wake up early, practice the interview in the mirror.
These types of coping resources, if they are available to you, might then make you feel more prepared, more able to tackle the stressor, and they might decrease the amount of stress that you are feeling. I do want to be clear, in our example here, our stress ended up getting decreased thanks to our coping, but secondary appraisals don't necessarily lead to lower stress levels. You could appraise that you don't really have any coping resources available, and that might lead to increased stress. It is important to just keep that in mind. Alright, that's our introduction to stress, and I will see you guys in our next video.
Bye bye.
