14.2 Stressors — Your Daily Hassles Are Hurting You More Than Trauma | Psychology 2e

• Understand that stress isn't always obvious and can be caused by positive events.
• Differentiate between long-term, persistent chronic stress and brief, focal acute stress.
• Learn about severe acute stressors, their demographic distribution, and the resulting PTSD.
• Understand the 1960s attempt to quantify stress using life change units (LCUs).
• Identify the limitations of the SRRS and the critical role of individual appraisal in stress.
• Understand that minor daily irritations are better predictors of health than major life events.
• Learn how job strain and burnout in the workplace negatively impact physical and psychological health.
• Understand how chronic negative interactions in close relationships can significantly harm physical health.
• Consider how consciously reframing minor annoyances could protect physical health.
• Up next in “Psychology 2e — Full Course (OpenStax) | Intro Psychology Lectures”14.3 Stress and Illness — How Chronic Stress Physically Breaks Your Body | Psychology 2e

This lesson dives into the science of what actually causes stress — and the answer is more surprising than most people expect. From traumatic events and the Social Readjustment Rating Scale to the hidden, cumulative damage of daily hassles, Section 14.2 maps out the full landscape of stressors and how they affect physical and psychological health. Along the way, we explore how job strain, burnout, and even close relationships quietly wear down the body over time — and why your personal appraisal of any stressor may be the single most important variable of all. In this video: • Chronic vs. acute stressors — and why the effects of a brief event (like breaking your leg on an icy sidewalk) can linger long after it ends • Traumatic events and PTSD, including how exposure to trauma is unevenly distributed across demographic groups • The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) and Life Change Units — why even a vacation or a wedding registers as physiological stress • The Navy study showing that pre-voyage LCU scores predicted sailors' illness symptoms months later at sea • Why daily hassles (traffic, lost keys, obnoxious coworkers) are actually a better predictor of physical and psychological health than major life events • Cyber hassles on social media as a modern stressor, linked to rumination and sleep loss in adolescents • Job strain, the three-stage burnout cascade (exhaustion → depersonalization → diminished accomplishment), and the role of appraisal as the master key to the stress experience #OpenStax #Psychology #StressAndHealth #MentalHealth #IntroPsychology OpenStax Content adapted from "OpenStax Psychology 2e", by OpenStax licensed under CC BY 4.0. Content based on Web Version: Apr 23, 2026. Read the textbook online https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e Music first girl talking to me. by ikkun (ex. Barradeen) | https://soundcloud.com/ikkunwastaken Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US