The Power of Stress-Reducing, Sleep-Enhancing Attitudes and Beliefs (Part I)

By Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs

As I discussed in a previous focus article on stress and sleep, stress is one of the most powerful disrupters of sleep. Virtually everyone has experienced stress-induced nights of insomnia or periods of insomnia from traumatic events, losses, or stressors at home or work. Stressful life events are the most common precipitators of insomnia in chronic insomniacs and most insomniacs have a harder time sleeping on stressful days. Studies on insomniacs have revealed that the more frequent and intense the daytime stress, the greater the likelihood of sleep difficulties that night.

Emerging research suggests that a variety of attitudes and beliefs can be powerful stress-reducers that minimize stress and its deleterious effects on sleep, stress symptoms, and health. Awareness of these stress-reducing attitudes and beliefs can not only improve your sleep; they may actually extend your life. This focus article will review emerging research on three attitudes and beliefs that can improve your sleep by reducing stress: optimism, positive illusions, and faith. Specific techniques for developing these attitudes and beliefs in daily life can be found in my books Say Good Night To Insomnia and The Ancestral Mind. A future focus article will focus on additional stress-reducing attitudes and beliefs that can minimize insomnia.

Optimism

Take a moment to consider the following questions:

When you think about the past, do you recall successes more easily than failures?
Do you usually attribute positive outcomes to yourself instead of luck?
When you think about the future, do you expect the best?
Do you believe that something positive can be found in most negative situations?
Do you feel that things usually don't work out the best for you?
Do you find it hard to count on good things to happen to you?

If you answered yes to the first four questions and no to the last two, you are likely an optimist. If you said no to the first four questions and yes to the last two, you are likely a pessimist. Being either an optimist or a pessimist can have a significant effect on stress and its symptoms such as insomnia.

Optimism is the feeling that, despite frustrations and setbacks, things will turn out okay. Optimists, by nature, feel secure about themselves, the world, and the future. They focus on and expect positive experiences, are more likely to attribute positive outcomes to themselves, and believe they can influence events through their actions. Optimists also expect the best when faced with uncertainty, view setbacks as temporary, count on good things to happen, and remember successes better than failures.

While optimists certainly experience the full range of thoughts and emotions, their positive attitudes and beliefs create a mental filter that allows in primarily positive thoughts while preventing negative ones. Optimists do not experience as many negative thoughts, and they can change from negative to positive thinking more easily.

Pessimists hold persistent negative beliefs about themselves, events, and the future and are more likely to see negative events in the worst possible light. They interpret negative events:

Personally (they blame themselves for the events)
Permanently (they see bad events as never-ending and think in terms of "always" and "never")
Pervasively (they believe negative events will undermine everything).

Pessimists also encounter more bad events in life, in part because they are less proactive in avoiding and more passive in reacting to negative events when they occur. Pessimists experience more stress-related health problems because negative beliefs induce stress.

Pessimists also have weaker social support systems, which is a further risk factor for increased morbidity and mortality. Pessimists may encounter more slips, fender benders, and household mishaps because the bad moods that characterize pessimism may distract them or lead to more risky behaviors. This is a double whammy, because such negative events can then trigger even more unhealthy stress reactions.

Optimism is linked to happiness and achievement, and actually may increase life expectancy. It improves health and health behaviors, reduces susceptibility to health problems and disease, and enhances recovery from disease. In a major study involving members of the Harvard University classes of 1939 through 1944, men were rated on levels of optimism and pessimism at age twenty-five, then tracked for thirty years. Overall, the men who were pessimistic at age twenty-five were less healthy and had more chronic illness later in life than the men who were optimistic.

Positive Illusions

Psychologists have found that stress-resistant people are more than just optimistic: they distort reality in order to view it in the best possible light.

Psychologist Shelley Taylor has conducted extensive research at UCLA on stress-resistant individuals and identified three factors she calls "positive illusions". These are an individual's mildly distorted positive beliefs about themselves, an exaggerated belief in their ability to control what goes on around them, and unrealistic optimistic beliefs about the future.

These beliefs appear to be especially important when people are faced with threatening information or stressful events. Taylor coined the term "positive illusions" to describe this constellation of stress-reducing beliefs.

Taylor's research suggests that distorting reality in a mild way is actually healthful and that a lack of positive illusions is correlated with depressed or highly anxious individuals. Those who are mildly depressed, in fact, see themselves, the world, and their future far more realistically. Severely depressed individuals, however, clearly suffer from negative, distorted views of themselves, the world, and future that are directly proportional to the severity of their depression.

Religious and Spiritual Beliefs

Although religion and science have been kept separate in modern times, and often seem at odds, several dozen major studies have begun to document that religious and spiritual beliefs may reduce stress and improve health. Consider the following:

Religious and spiritual beliefs offer some protection from stress-related illnesses, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
Religious and spiritual beliefs are associated with reduced anxiety, anger, and depression, and with greater life and marital satisfaction, intact and stable families, well-being, and self-esteem. In fact, in a review of over 100 studies that measured religiousness and well-being, 79 of the studies reported a relationship between religious involvement and greater happiness, life satisfaction, moral, or positive mood.
People who attend religious services have lower blood pressure and half the risk of heart attack as non-attendees. Religious beliefs may be as important in heart disease as traditional risk factors such as cholesterol and smoking!
Several studies have discovered that individuals with greater religious involvement exhibit stronger immune systems.
Religious beliefs are associated with fewer unhealthy behaviors such as smoking and drinking.

Religiously active people cope better with bereavement, divorce, unemployment, and serious illness. Religiously active people are happier, and for the elderly, one of the best predictors of life satisfaction is religiousness.

It may be that some of the positive health effects of religious beliefs can be attributed to what used to be called "clean living". And religion usually provides a rich social support network, promoting volunteer activities and community life, and we know that that reducing loneliness and isolation is good for health.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School maintains that religious beliefs and prayer may be health enhancing because they elicit the relaxation response, in inborn quieting response. He suggests that when we pray, we enter a relaxed state that enhances feelings of joy and contentment. Because the relaxation response improves health, he believes the tendency for humans to engage in religious beliefs and prayer may be encoded in the physiology of the Ancestral Mind. Benson contends that we are "wired for God"; that is, we have always known that believing in a higher power was good for us. While this belief elicits the relaxation response, on a more fundamental level, it counteracts our fears about our own mortality.

Religious affiliation and spiritual beliefs also foster many of the other adaptive and stress-reducing attitudes and beliefs: optimism; a sense of control, commitment to something outside of oneself, and challenge; forgiveness and tolerance of the imperfections in oneself and others; empathy and altruism.

Spirituality gives us a broader perspective on our lives rather than being caught up in the materialism, individualism, and the smaller daily frustrations that surround us. When crises occur, they can be interpreted through a spiritual lens as steps to growth. Religious beliefs help us make sense of tragedy and suffering. They reduce stress by providing a sense of meaning, hope, and purpose, as well as a philosophical system that allows us to organize our experience in a way that is more intelligible and coherent. Through spirituality, we see our connection to others and the world. Above all, religious belief satisfies the need to know that we matter.

Ultimately, religious beliefs are one of the most deeply personal aspects of our existence, and what works for one person won't necessarily work for you. But if only for the sake of your emotional and physical health, try opening up your receptivity to the spiritual dimension of life, then exploring whatever path to faith you feel comfortable with.

Read Part II