Stress and Crisis
Included In This Lesson
Study Tools For Stress and Crisis
Outline
Overview
- Stress & Crisis
- Stress
- Crisis
- Coping
- Nursing support
Nursing Points
General
- Stress
- An experience or stimulus which forces a change in homeostasis
- Perceived or anticipated change
- Varying degrees of stress
- School project- minor
- Loss of job – major
- Good vs bad stress
- Good – stimulates a positive response to growth
- Ex: exercise
- Bad – stimulates a negative response
- Contributes to disease
- Worsens mental health
- Ex: Loss of job
- Good – stimulates a positive response to growth
- Stimulates a physiologic response
- An experience or stimulus which forces a change in homeostasis
- Crisis
- Severe stress that forces a major change
- Can exacerbate mental illness if negative stress
- Anxiety or depression
- Crisis and stress are subjective
- What is stressful to one person may not be to another
- Coping
- Ability to respond to stress
- Maturation based
- Cognitive development influences ability to cope with stress
- Coping tools
- People can sometimes adapt to stress and crisis better than others
- Life experience
- Life experiences can contribute to coping skills
- Family support
- Presence of family can reduce stress and allow for resources for coping
Assessment
- Nursing Assessment
- Assess patient for stress
- Conduct interview
- Determine baseline stress
- Evaluate for new stressors
- Assess for knowledge
- Misinformation or knowledge deficits contribute to stress
- Assess patient for stress
Therapeutic Management
- Symptom management
- Manage symptoms of illness
- Manage physiologic manifestations of stress, if not the primary cause
- Promote health
- Exercise
- Health promotion assessment
- Offer resources for patient
- Other healthcare providers
- Mental health services
- Other resources pertinent to the patient’s cause of stress
- Socioeconomic
- Chaplain
Nursing Concepts
- Coping
- Interpersonal relationships
Patient Education
- Educate patient on ways to cope
- Educate patient on accuracy of misinformation which may be contributing to stress
Transcript
In this lesson, we’re going to look at stress and crisis.
We all get stressed. School, work, family…it’s all a part of stress.
What I’m gonna try to do today is share some knowledge with you about what stress really is, and how it affects our patients and other people.
Stress is the experience or a stimulus that forces a change. Our bodies like to be in homeostasis or balanced. And any outside force that changes that balance is what we call “stress.”
There are varying degrees of stress. Some stress is minor, and some stress is major. A school project would be a minor comparison to something like losing your job. And that’s the other thing. Stress is extremely subjective. That school project that’s coming up next week that you haven’t worked on may seem daunting to you, but may pale in comparison to someone else who has the same project that just lost their job. It’s just something to keep in mind when dealing with your patient, and that’s that you need to treat everyone’s stress as subjective.
The other thing about stress is that it stimulates a physiologic response. Sometimes it triggers the fight-or-flight response and sometimes it totally jacks with hormone production and dysregulation and other times different types of stress promote muscle growth, like in exercise.
Stress is usually classified as good or bad stress. Good stresses are positive stimuli that usually contribute to growth. An example here is exercise. Strength training encourages muscle growth because you stress the muscles to the point of creating microtears in the muscle, and which encourages the muscles to grow back stronger.
Then you have things like bad stress, or negative stress. Negative stress can make illnesses worse, including different types of mental illness.
This is why we want to encourage good or positive stress and really try to minimize bad stress.
When we talk about stress, we really think of it being on this scale of severity, subjective to everyone. A loss of a parent who is the breadwinner of the family might be considered a crisis, whereas losing a parent suffering from cancer that is expected may not be considered a crisis.
The important thing to remember here is that crisis is severe stress that forces a change in the patient, or forces the patient to change.
Now that we’ve covered stress and crisis, let’s look at the healthy way to respond – and that’s coping.
Coping is the ability to respond to stress, and it looks different for everyone. You’ll continue to hear things like “coping mechanisms,” which is basically a fancy way of saying “how well a patient responds to stress.”
There are lots of things that influence how people cope. Maturity is a big one. Some people are more cognitively developed, and have the ability to physically process stressors differently. In addition some people have been given different coping tools, especially through life experience. It’s not uncommon to see maturity, coping tools and life experience all born from similar things a patient may have gone through. Another major factor leading to a patient’s ability to cope is family support – they’ll be able to process things easier with the support of family. They feel less isolated and alone, and family members can be there to reinforce positivity for the patient.
So how do we deal with patient stress as nurses?
Take a look at your patient and figure out how stressed they are. Use that health promotion assessment to find out what their baseline stress level is. Hospitalization can often in itself be stressful. So find out what their stress level was before they came in. Also, be sure to manage the illness or disease. The last thing you need is a patient’s illness contributing to their stress level. Manage those stress-induced symptoms. If you’ve got a patient with hypertensive crisis, meaning their blood pressure is jacked up and they’re concerned that they’re missing work, and now their blood pressure is 220/120, well you’d better be working on that blood pressure.
Always promote health and wellness, like exercise and mobility. Use your resources when you need to, like other health care providers. For patients suffering with mental illness who need the help of a mental health professional, be sure to find a resource for them, or if they’re suffering a hardship, see what resources your facility offers for them. Be their advocate, and use your therapeutic relationship skills.
Today, our nursing concepts really help to drive home building interpersonal relationships with our patients through coping with stress.
So let’s recap for today.
There are both good and bad types of stress. They can positively or negatively affect your patient.
Everyone perceives stress differently, so trust your patient when they tell you they’re stressed.
Extreme stress is crisis, and that usually mean a patient needs a change or the patient will change.
Coping is how the patient deals with stress. Some people cope better than others.
One big takeaway is just to recognize stress in the patient. Sometimes that stress can contribute to illness and sometimes it can be the main symptoms. Manage your patient first
That’s it for our lesson today. Make sure you check out all the resources attached to this lesson. Now, go out and be your best selves today. And, as always, happy nursing!!
NCLEX
Concepts Covered:
- Circulatory System
- Emergency Care of the Cardiac Patient
- Cardiac Disorders
- Cardiovascular
- Shock
- Shock
- Disorders of the Posterior Pituitary Gland
- Endocrine
- Disorders of Pancreas
- Disorders of the Thyroid & Parathyroid Glands
- Hematology
- Gastrointestinal
- Upper GI Disorders
- Liver & Gallbladder Disorders
- Newborn Complications
- Lower GI Disorders
- Multisystem
- Neurological
- Nervous System
- Central Nervous System Disorders – Brain
- Renal
- Respiratory
- Urinary System
- Respiratory System
- Noninfectious Respiratory Disorder
- Test Taking Strategies
- Note Taking
- Basics of NCLEX
- Prefixes
- Suffixes
- Medication Administration
- Gastrointestinal Disorders
- Respiratory Disorders
- Pregnancy Risks
- Labor Complications
- Hematologic Disorders
- Fundamentals of Emergency Nursing
- Factors Influencing Community Health
- Delegation
- Perioperative Nursing Roles
- EENT Disorders
- Basics of Chemistry
- Adult
- Emergency Care of the Neurological Patient
- Acute & Chronic Renal Disorders
- Emergency Care of the Respiratory Patient
- Respiratory Emergencies
- Studying
- Substance Abuse Disorders
- Disorders of the Adrenal Gland
- Behavior
- Documentation and Communication
- Preoperative Nursing
- Endocrine System
- Legal and Ethical Issues
- Communication
- Understanding Society
- Immunological Disorders
- Infectious Disease Disorders
- Oncology Disorders
- Female Reproductive Disorders
- Fetal Development
- Terminology
- Anxiety Disorders
- Cognitive Disorders
- Musculoskeletal Trauma
- Intraoperative Nursing
- Tissues and Glands
- Vascular Disorders
- Renal Disorders
- Eating Disorders
- Prenatal Concepts
- Microbiology
- Male Reproductive Disorders
- Sexually Transmitted Infections
- Infectious Respiratory Disorder
- Depressive Disorders
- Personality Disorders
- Psychotic Disorders
- Trauma-Stress Disorders
- Peripheral Nervous System Disorders
- Integumentary Disorders
- Neurologic and Cognitive Disorders
- Integumentary Disorders
- Newborn Care
- Basics of Mathematics
- Statistics
- Labor and Delivery
- Proteins
- Emergency Care of the Trauma Patient
- Hematologic System
- Hematologic Disorders
- Developmental Considerations
- Skeletal System
- Digestive System
- Urinary Disorders
- Postpartum Care
- Basic
- Musculoskeletal Disorders
- Bipolar Disorders
- Metabolism
- Cardiovascular Disorders
- Concepts of Population Health
- Musculoskeletal Disorders
- EENT Disorders
- Postpartum Complications
- Basics of Human Biology
- Postoperative Nursing
- Neurological Emergencies
- Prioritization
- Disorders of Thermoregulation
- Writing
- Community Health Overview
- Dosage Calculations
- Neurological Trauma
- Concepts of Mental Health
- Health & Stress
- Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders
- Childhood Growth and Development
- Prenatal and Neonatal Growth and Development
- Concepts of Pharmacology
- Integumentary Important Points
- Emotions and Motivation
- Renal and Urinary Disorders
- Developmental Theories
- Reproductive System
- Adulthood Growth and Development
- Psychological Emergencies
- Growth & Development
- Basics of Sociology
- Somatoform Disorders
- Reading
- Intelligence and Language
- Oncologic Disorders
- Med Term Basic
- Med Term Whole
- Central Nervous System Disorders – Spinal Cord
- Muscular System
- Neonatal
- Learning Pharmacology
- Pediatric
- Psychological Disorders
- State of Consciousness
- Sensory System