Week 5 Post 3: Stress

     The first part of the stress module consisted of professional terms of things I already knew. Frustration, conflict, change, and pressure were things I already understood completely just through experience. Understanding the different appraisals was also simple, however the concept that perception plays an extremely significant part in stress was the most interesting to me. I already knew that everyone sees situations differently, and therefore have different stress levels, but the idea of changing one's perception of stressful situations raises many ideas and questions relating to more topics of clinical psychology.

    This part of the module didn't state whether changing perceptions to lower stress was a practice, but I would assume that this concept would be considered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, changing the way the client thinks of the situation to get a more positive outcome. Obviously, the positive outcome for this topic would be to lower stress for a better performance of behavior. For regular stress, CBT would likely work for many people. However for mental illnesses like anxiety disorders, it is more difficult to get to some sort of remission with just CBT. Is there a way to expand the CBT practice to reach the goal of lowering not only stress, but other negative reactions associated with mental disorders? Given the lack of research in many areas of clinical psychology, a practice like CBT would likely require more studies on the human brain. So, what else do we need to know about the human brain in order to expand CBT? What do we not already know about cognitive brain functions? My educated guess would be that we still need a lot of information to get an understanding of many brain functions. And so to start at the very beginning of the research process, what tools do we still need to begin more studies on the human brain?