Toxic Stress & Your Well-Being

What does it look like to be stressed?

When you are stressed some may experience fatigue, high levels of anxiety, head aches, forgetfulness and social withdrawal etc. In my experience stress can be a combination of each of these or a complete shutdown of energy. Stress causes me to socially withdraw, become highly frustrated and agitated, and sometimes I am overly sensitive to emotions. I do not enjoy stress, but sometimes it helps me focus on work that needs to get done and gets through the overwhelming emotions brought on by stress. I guess you can say that my directed attention kicks into over drive, but I'd also blame procrastination.

Much of the strain that is caused by stress comes from our daily lives such work, school, kids, car troubles, money etc. These strains can be perceived as either acute or chronic stress depending on how an individual may deal with stress and how much exposure a person may have to these or other strains. How many of you work, go to class, go to an internship and then have homework and a family to entertain by the end of the day? Seems overwhelming just reading it all. Well these everyday stresses could cause more health problems than one may know when exposed to chronic stressors as a child.

Toxic Stress?
As a practicing clinical social worker working with youth, I am exposed to youth who deal with traumas and significant changes in their lives early on. These early on chronic stressors is called toxic stress. Toxic Stress as defined by the Center of Developing Child at Harvard University (2016) is "strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity- such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic abuse, caregiver substance abuse, exposure to violence and/or the accumulated burdens of family burdens and hardship without adequate adult support". These children are predispose to stress at a young age and not given a chance to restore their mental health or change their environment. These stressors are detrimental to the development of the youth because as they develop their coping skills, emotional and mental stability is fragile compared to other youth who are not exposed to the same amount of stress. As you see below, there are different levels of stress responses that someone can endure.

As you can see in lecture and in the video above stress is long lasting for your development and mental health. Toxic Stress is becoming a new study in infant development due to the predisposed stressed developed during pregnancy. Women who are pregnant are generally emotional and dealing with significant change, but when a woman is dealing with things such as abuse, homelessness, or a traumatic pregnancy these stressors can trickle down into the fetus. Without adequate support for the parent and child these can deem fatal or effect the development of the infant.

Resolutions?

While we can't fix everything for everyone, it is important to understand the effects of toxic stress and the effects it has on families and children. I believe that children with toxic stress or dealing with stressful environment should have a space to feel safe and someone to support them. While going to therapy is accessible to some, it may not for others. So having a community center, positive mentors and/ or extracurricular activities for youth- such as football, music, drama etc. to relieve this stress is important for youth to escape and release. Also providing adequate support for mothers by donating or giving supplies for newborns or providing a space for relaxation. At Beaumont Hospital in Berkeley, MI provides a support for mothers through their Birthing Center & Postpartum depression program.

Reference:
Harvard University: Center on the Developing Child.
http://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/toxic-stress/

Coping with Crowding in Mumbai, India

As a professional on track to work globally in the humanitarian and international development realm, I am increasingly intrigued to think about the interaction of humans with their environment; especially related to the concepts of environmental preference and stress. Yesterday’s lecture on stress as a failure of preference provided me some additional context for an experience on which I have been reflecting.

I interned over the summer with the nonprofit VIDYA in Mumbai, India working to provide integrated education for underserved communities. I should preface that I have had many privileged opportunities to travel, live, and work internationally including Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa so I have a transferable mental model. Mumbai, however, was a starkly different experience for me as an intensely urban and densely populated city. It was a first hand experience with just how stressful a non-preferred environment can be. Mumbai is the most populous city in India and the 9th most populous in the world at 18.4 million with a density of over 20,000 people per square kilometer. I definitely felt the “overload” Kaplan described as a problem of overabundance (p. 197). Mumbai is diverse, vibrant, and overstimulating. Kaplan goes on to say: “the larger the number of people an individual comes into contact with, the less preferred the environment is likely to be and the more damage is likely to be done to the social fabric (p.197). This is extremely fascinating to reflect on within the context of my profession of community organizing and its application in crowded cities.

A social connectedness activity I facilitated
with the leadership team from VIDYA-Mumbai.

If densely populated cities are non-preferred environments resulting in disordered relationships (Cassel’s first principle), is the fundamental need then to engage social organization? I’ve never quite thought about the impetus for community organizing being the restoration to the social fabric from the damaging number of people. The nonprofit I worked for in Mumbai was located in the communities they served to increase accessibility and provide community spaces for education and engagement. Through the framework I am learning in this class, I can now see that these structures helped to not only provide an opportunity for social organization but also structure that could lead to increasing coherence in the overstimulating density and non-preferred environment of the city.

The slum communities my nonprofit worked with were experiencing acute and chronic stress, in addition to social disorganization and cultural dislocation. Reflecting on some of the projects my nonprofit sought to engage, I can see now they are fundamentally working to make the communities more preferred environments and reduce stress. Another way the organization is seeking to make the community a more preferred environment is by co-creating a green space in the neighborhood which would add complexity by increasing natural space. The organization is also attempting to reduce stress by mentoring women’s self-help groups that could increase income generation and financial security.

I’m interested in hearing from others about what considerations or strategies from the framework we are learning in class have you used or would considering using in working with people to cope with crowding.



Humanscape: Environments for People
Greenbie: Social Territory, Community Health, and Urban Planning

Crowding, New Environments, and Stress: Perspectives from a Rural Midwestern Family

I grew up in a small town of 1000 people in Central Illinois. I have five siblings (yeah, I know, huge family…), and I am the only one who has moved away from my hometown, choosing instead to live in Chicago. Since I moved away almost 14 years ago, I have had multiple encounters with my family that uniquely depict the concepts of crowding and the stress induced by new environments.

Driving in Chicago – Perceived Crowding

My mother is an excellent driver. She’s confident and capable, and has a far better driving record than anybody else in my family. However, she blatantly refuses to drive to my home in Chicago, explaining that Chicago traffic is horrible and overwhelming. Whenever I suggest it, she becomes visibly flustered and stressed. 

For a very long time, I found this outrageously frustrating. She is a very independent woman who regularly takes long road trips alone to visit family out of state. Moreover, she has never expressed concerns with rush-hour traffic in urban areas that she is more familiar with, which can be easily as crowded as traffic in Chicago. But, as Greenbie suggested, “its is probably not densities that cause a person to feel more or less crowded, but what (s)he thinks being crowded is.”

Regardless of whether or not the traffic in Chicago is actually worse than other traffic to which she is accustomed, my mother perceives the traffic as worse, and that is all that is required to cause her stress.

A Chicago Cubs Game – Insensitivity of a City Dweller

A year ago I invited my dad and two brothers to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, which is a short walk from my apartment in Chicago. About 30 minutes before the game, we left my apartment to walk to the stadium. As we walked, I pointed out things that were important to me: the local grocery store, a friend's apartment building, the library, but they seemed relatively uninterested. Instead, they stopped me to ask me how the EL train worked or to point out random buildings with unique architecture.

Then at one point, we met a gentleman on a street corner who appeared to be homeless. My youngest brother who was about 11 at the time asked what he was doing there, and I explained that he was likely homeless. My brother was very upset by this, and ultimately asked to go back and give him some money (to which, of course, I obliged).

Looking back now, I realize why the buildings/landmarks that my family asked about were different from those that I mentioned. As Milgram described, I have developed a mental map of my neighborhood, which focuses on those landmarks/situations that are important to me. I effectively ignore all other buildings to prevent overload. Along these lines, I ignored the homeless gentleman on the corner, showing little compassion for him, whereas my brother who had not yet adopted the impersonal aloofness of a city-dweller was moved by the man’s situation.  

Ann Arbor – The BIG City

Three weeks ago, I invited my family to a Michigan football game. All 5 of my siblings came, along with my 3 nephews and my parents. They arrived on Saturday morning and got caught in game-day traffic, adding about 30 minutes onto their trip. When they finally arrived, my youngest sister looked me straight in the eye and says, “I don’t know how you handle all of these people or this traffic! This is why I could NEVER live in a big city.”

As the day wore on, I found myself getting overwhelmed. There were 10 extra people in my small apartment. People were all over the place. I found myself getting short with my guests, and when they finally left, I swore that I’d never host all of them in my home again.

In retrospect, the dichotomies in this story are not just funny; they also perfectly demonstrate how perception plays a role in crowding. For my sister, Ann Arbor really is a big city, even if I think that Ann Arbor is barely more than a large town. Similarly, I was overwhelmed with feeling crowded in my home, but nobody else expressed any concerns as they are accustomed to being together in a large group.

Discussion Questions

Reflecting on these experience, a couple of discussion questions come to mind:

1.     How often do I ignore others’ perceptions around crowding and new environments instead assuming that they share my own perceptions? And, how can I learn to be more aware of others’ perceptions around crowding and new environments?

2.     How can being more aware of others perceptions play into the creation of more inclusive, less stressful work spaces or community spaces?

References
Milgram, S. "The experience of living in cities." Science, 13 March 1970, 167, 1461-1464,1468.
Greenbie, B. "Social Territory, Community Health, and Urban Planning" Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 40 - 2, March 1974, p. 74-82.

Office Space

After I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I worked in two different offices. The first gave me a workspace within my own office (!) which I was allowed to decorate however I'd like. My office was small but cozy; it had a "solar tube" in the ceiling which provided so much light that I rarely needed to turn on the overhead light. There was a window and extra shelves on the wall for books and plants. Most importantly, my first office provided me privacy. It wasn't that I needed privacy for my work, and I wasn't procrastinating on my work (although I did occasionally take a quick glance at the news or Facebook). The act of having privacy helped me to relax on doing my job most effectively.

In my second job, my workspace was essentially the opposite of the first. In this office, I worked in a cubicle within a large room lit with fluorescent lights. There were windows but I was nowhere near them and my coworkers often kept the blinds partially closed. My cubicle was positioned right next to the main walkway that my coworkers used to navigate the office, and my computer faced away from them. This meant that my coworkers walked back and forth behind me, all day, completely eroding any sense of privacy. Again, I wasn't looking to slack off - I just found it distracting to have people behind me and potentially watching what I was doing without my knowing.

Why do I bring these examples up? Because workplace environments are significant contributors to stress if they are not planned properly. Like Ray said in class, 36% of Americans regularly experience work stress , according to the APA (2011). While these statistics don't focus specifically on the contribution of the workplace environment on stress, I think that it would be fair to assume that it has some sort of impact on these statistics. After all, there is a reason why there are so many references to workplace environments in popular culture. There is also a reason why Google has so many images to display when you google "cubicle stress". (Seriously, try it out - they're hilarious.)

Image source: Cody Carlson

What contributed to the stress of these environments? Based on Ray's lecture and the Humanscape chapter introduction (Kaplan & Kaplan 1982), I believe that it was due, at least in part, to each environment's preference or lack thereof. In my first job, my office was small enough that it would have been difficult to design to not include coherence and legibility. The placement of the desk, chairs, and shelves made sense, and I felt more relaxed because I could see people as they entered (contributing to its legibility). However, by adding in my decorations on the walls, I also increased its environmental complexity, and its differing lighting throughout the day contributed to its mystery. 

However, in my second job, environmental preference was not as high. The cubicles were still high in coherence (I'd guess that "coherence" is one of the concepts most associated with cubicles) but it lacked legibility, complexity, and mystery. It did not feel legible because I could not discern who was walking behind me and when, thereby giving me a general sense of unease throughout the day. Additionally, I eventually (unconsciously) tried to add some complexity to my cubicle by hanging a few decorations inside of it, but its effect was limited. Additionally, the only aspect of my cubicle that I can retrospectively consider as contributing to its mystery was my office plant that I began to grow because I was always curious about its progress. However, before I introduced my office plant to this environment, there was very little mystery incorporated into the work space.

Now that I've provided an introduction to the possibilities of workplace environments that are preferred and not preferred, I'm curious to know what you all think about this subject. What are the best ways to create environmental preference in office spaces? And have you worked or interned in an office that was environmentally preferable (or not preferable at all)?

Image Credit: Office Space

References:

American Psychological Association. (2011). Stress in the workplace: Survey summary. Online publication. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/phwa-survey-summary.pdf. 

Kaplan S., & Kaplan J. (1982). Stress and the failure of preference: Introduction. In S. Kaplan & J. Kaplan (Eds.), Humanscape: Environments For People (194-199). Michigan: Ulrich's Books Inc. 

The Non-Preferential Environments of Prisons

Prisons should not be nice places to live in. 

True or False?

What if, by making prisons too unpleasant, we were making people in the prison system more likely to become violent and suffer from negative health effects?

We learned from our readings this week that certain situations, particularly overcrowding and non-preferred environments, can lead to atypical social behavior (aggressiveness, irritability) and stress. We also learned that the stress response can lead to damaging physiological effects.

It seems to me that a definitively stressful, non-preferential environment would be a prison; low complexity, high coherence, and a complete lack of legibility and mystery make for a very boring environment. Photos of prison make them seem designed from the ground up to be soul-crushingly monotonous:

 As Kaplan states in the introduction to Chapter 7 of Humanscape, “An environment that neither provides stimulation nor permits it to be sought would surely be stressful.”

So, how do we combat this? Maybe the first thing to change would be public opinion about what should be allowed in prisons. Television, video games, and even yoga classes have all been publicly derided for making prisons “too comfortable”, even though it’s the prison administrations that often push to implement these amenities. Why? Because they make prisons safer for the people incarcerated and for the employees of the prison systems.

Targeting overcrowding would also be a huge step in the right direction, both from an ethical standpoint and from an Environmental Preference viewpoint. Statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Prisoners in 2013 report indicate that 18 states had prisoner populations larger than their listed facility capacity, some larger by as much as 50% (These are just the state-level numbers; individual prison overcrowding rates can be and are much higher).

So, my question to the readers is this: 

Knowing that prisons are overcrowded, and in the interest of reducing stress, what are other steps could we take to make prisons a more preferred environment?

Where would you go for a first date with someone?

First dates can be awkward and unnerving, even if the person of interest is no stranger. First dates often dictate the prospect of second dates and more. If done right, a first date can become a piece of magical memory both parties can look back on fondly. But if done wrong, it can leave one or both parties looking for an eternal exit in distaste. Therefore, when planning for a first date with someone special, one must carefully choose an environment that is right for the occasion.

If you are thinking about a coffee shop or a restaurant for a first date, you are not alone. According to Refinery29 (2016), Starbucks is the most popular venue for first dates. The survey results from the 200,000 users of Clover, a dating app and the source for Refinery29, show that the top 30 hotspots consist of popular coffee shops, restaurants, and bars, from Tim Hortons to LongHorn Steakhouse. Granted that this survey only considered franchised establishments, it is still no surprise that the entire list is necessarily venues around food and drinks. Moreover, coffee shops and restaurants of casual ambience make up the top rank for the first-date destination. The top five locations after Starbucks are, in decreasing order, Chipotle, Panera Bread, the Cheesecake Factory, Texas Roadhouse, and Buffalo Wild Wings. So why this pattern of preferred environments for a first-date? Are these venues really conducive to our information-processing needs for assessing and getting to know someone? Here are the breakdowns in the context of coffee shops according to the four principles of the Environment Preference Theory.

Source: http://www.refinery29.com/2015/04/85149/popular-first-date-location

For starter, food satisfies a basic human need and is a universal preferred way to socialize, bond, and celebrate in groups. In the case of dating, food provides some comfort in the uncomfortable process of getting to know someone.

Coherence

Coffee shops are designed for many activities, but one in particular is the enjoyment of coffee beverages and conversations. Charming decors hanging from walls, themed furniture, dimmed lighting, and soft background music provide enough coherence that does not overload one’s sensory or channel capacity. This coherence is further enhanced by people perpetuating the activities of coffee drinking and conversations. In addition, one can reorganize his or her immediate surrounding to an extent of desirability by moving furniture around. This gives the party some control over the physical space between them and the crowd as well as the relative spacing between the individuals.

Complexity

Coffee shops are often designed to deliver soft but rich environmental stimulations while preserving the room for conversations. The soft music, the chatting noise of people, and the aroma of espresso brewing in the background provide enough involuntary fascination to prevent the entirety of one’s attention on the other person, thus easing the nerve-wrack from the engagement. The act of drinking and being able to fiddle with a cup in one’s hand also provides some healthy distraction. Furthermore, the background noise from the surrounding provides a noise buffer for private conversations. At the same time, these noises and distractions elicit the need for active listening since one must exert directed attention to engage meaningfully in the conversation in such a setting. Thus one can quickly assess whether the other person is expressing genuine interest.

Legibility

Coffee shops are often designed for accessibility for the busy people who just want to grab and go, with identifiable entrances and easily maneuverable interior layout. This simple layout provides the necessary legibility and reassurance of a quick and easy escape route in the event that one is needed. In such case, one can readily make an exit disguised as a trip to the bathroom.

Mystery

The variety of elements in a coffee shop, in terms of its décor, ambient illumination scheme, alluring smells, and even people provides a venue for mystery in just about every direction one looks. Take lighting for example, the contrast between well lit areas and dimly lit spaces of the shop educe not only attention to the well-lit but also an urge to look closely at the dimly-lit. In this setting, choosing to sit in a partially lit corner of the coffee shop can help to evoke a sense of mystery for the party, drawing one to observe the other more closely for facial expressions, body gestures, and to find out more.

Given these attributes, a coffee shop can indeed be a preferred environment for a fabulous first date. However, since not all coffee shops are created equal, one must still choose wisely the exact venue for the occasion. As a coffee-lover, a coffee shop is a perfect venue for me, though I would pick a local coffee shop over a franchised one to add to the uniqueness of the experience.