How Do Stress and Depression Affect You?

Your stress and depressed mood has the ability to affect your health-related behaviours such as eating, sleeping, substance use, and exercising. The development of depressive disorders and the establishment of health behaviour practices are greatly shaped in your adolescence. So much so, that it is reported that there is a greater risk of smoking regularly if you start smoking from a younger age.

Engaging in these health-related behaviours is largely influenced by stress and depressive symptoms. For example, you may promote emotion regulation through drinking alcohol or exercising in order to reduce stress. This shows how we often turn to health behaviours to cop; however, sometimes the opposite happens as stress consumes our time and energy so we no longer engage in health practices such as exercising.

The study in this paper consisted of measuring the relationship between various kinds of stress and how they impact health behaviours in college students. The data for this study was collected from the participants’ diary entries as well as initial in-person interviews. A baseline measure of initial health behaviours was taken during the interview to serve as a comparison for future daily, acute, and chronic stress.

The predictions for this study were as followed: the engagement of maladaptive health behaviours would be independently associated with daily, acute, and chronic stress; maladaptive behaviours would be predictable from the interaction of stress and depressive symptoms; the relationship between health behaviours and depressive symptoms would be mediated by negative and positive affect.

The results of the first study showed that chronic stress had significant impact on maladaptive health behaviours, as these behaviours increased in response to chronic stress. Higher same-day maladaptive behaviour was attributed to daily stress as it caused a significant impact as well. Acute stress did not show significant impact on maladaptive behaviour. The results from the second study suggested that daily maladaptive behaviours as a result of either chronic or daily stress were not moderated by depressive symptoms. The results of the third study showed that negative and positive affect mediated the effects of baseline depressive symptoms on maladaptive behaviour.

Therefore these results concluded that whether or not you display depressive symptoms, you will experience an increased likelihood to express maladaptive behaviours due to daily or chronic stress. Taking this into consideration, it would be beneficial to help train young adults to develop healthy coping strategies through emotion regulation to better manage ongoing stress.

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Source:

• Dalton, E. D., & Hammen, C. L. (2018). Independent and relative effects of stress, depressive symptoms, and affect on college students’ daily health behaviors. Journal of behavioral medicine, 41(6), 863-874.