The Farmer Stress Management Toolbox Part 1

Defining Stress

This article is the first article in The Stress Management Toolbox, a series of publications related to stress management on the farm. This series of three articles will help you understand the impacts of stress on your health, work environment, and daily life. It will provide you with strategies and tools that will help you manage stress and reduce its impact on your daily life.  This article will help you define and understand the concept of stress and its different dimensions. The second article will provide information to help you identify the symptoms of stress. The third article will help you learn how to cope with stress.

Why Should Farmers Care About Stress?

Psychological stress affects people's health and daily life performance, including productivity on the farm (Kalia, 2002; Donald, 2005; Halkos, 2010, Windon et al., 2014). For example, stress can affect a farmer's ability to care for crops or livestock, increase farm work-related accidents, and affect the relationship with farmworkers, friends, and family members. Thus, it is essential to understand the concept of stress and to raise awareness of how to cope with stress.

Stress on the Farm

Think back to a time when you experienced stress on your farm — perhaps waking up to an unexpected frost, a vital piece of equipment breaking down during harvest, a sick animal, flooding during the rainy season, or crop failure. When we think about it, we can usually identify a time when we felt stressed. However, we may not always recognize or understand how stress impacts us, our farm operations, and our relationships with family members and the community.

In Pennsylvania, several organic dairy producers lost their milk contracts in 2020-2021. Could this cause stress for dairy farmers? One farmer said, "Not having a buyer for your organic milk is a really severe position to be in." The possibility of closing a three-generation farm operation or finding a way to diversify existing operations can cause stress for a farmer.

According to the American Psychological Association, the COVID-19 pandemic affected U.S. farming communities. Rural and agricultural communities experienced a disruption in supply chains and greater financial instability due to more significant uncertainty. American psychologists and other mental health professionals are concerned about the rate of undiagnosed mood disorders and substance misuse in farming communities.

What is Stress?

Identifying the causes of stress is key because it is the first step in coping with stress and may help motivate the farmer to manage their stress, stay healthy, and be more productive.

Stress is a double-edged sword that affects our psychological strain and job performance (Lin et al., 2015). Stress is defined as a disruption to the internal stability of our organism, involving physical and/or mental tension, resulting in a compensatory response to restore stability and reduce tension (Tsigos et al.,2020). In other words, stress is an adaptative body's response to any emotional, psychological, and/or physical tension—such as long work hours, lack of sleep hours, the fear of failure, an uncertain financial situation, a physical injury, to name a few—it can affect everyone, including farmers. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, stress is a natural biological, psychological, and physical response/reaction against predators or any situation that can put us at risk. In other words, stress is the body's response to personal or environmental pressures. Thus, it can vary significantly from person to person and differs according to social and economic circumstances, the environment we live in, and our genetic makeup. 

Dimensions of Stress

• Physical Stress

A physical factor that disrupts the body's internal balance is physical stress, which is identified by the skin's sensory receptors that bring information to the brain, which interprets it. This stress is processed in a bottom-up manner. Examples of physical stressors (demands) are extreme temperatures, pain, and physical work. All these demands cause our bodies to regulate the internal balance. (McRae et al., 2012). Farmers often experience physical stress during harvest season when they receive little sleep, change their mealtimes, and operate farm equipment during long hours. 

• Psychological Stress

A psychological factor that disrupts the person’s internal balance. Mental representations of real and supposing situations or events that may imply a risk for us can be considered as stressors or triggers of stress (McRae et al., 2012). These negative or challenging mental representations disrupt mental/central processes and affect the body. This stress is processed top-down because it is directly identified by the brain and extended toward the rest of the body, producing a physical response or attitude evidencing the tension. Some examples of psychological stress can be fear, anxiety, and surprise (McRae et al., 2012). Psychological stressors (disruptions) can be based on the detection of threats/challenges in the environment ("I see something dangerous") or in the brain ("I think I did something wrong"). These mental representations are expressed as emotions. An emotion is a conscious mental reaction (ex. anguish or anger) and a coordinated behavioral response that supports reward or avoidance of punishment approaches. An emotion is subjectively experienced as a strong feeling usually caused by a specific event/object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body (Merriam-Webster, n.d). Emotions are composed of subjective feelings (ex. fear), activation of the internal (physiological) process (ex. increment of heart rate), and physical actions (ex. escape from a situation).

Psychological stress on the farm might include different situations where a farmer has no control; for example, an unfavorable weather forecast, the fear of losing the family farm, or the anger when an employee does not show up to milk cows.

There is a bidirectional relationship between psychological stress and physical stress. For example, the anxiety caused by the fear of losing a family farm (psychological stress) can affect farmers' sleep disruption or muscle tension (physical stress). Also, experiencing an elevated high blood pressure (physical stress) could lead a farmer to think that he/she can have a heart attack or die (psychological stress). Thus, these types of stress usually work together, engaging an individual's health, work performance, and daily life activities.

Duration of Stress

• Good stress is called eustress, which has a beneficial effect on the human body. For example, shopping for new farm equipment can be considered as good stress because it motivates a farmer to do his work more efficiently. In this case, stress can be released when the deal is closed.

• Bad stress is called distress, which has a deleterious effect. It is defined as an aversive, negative state in which coping and adaptation processes fail to return the body to its physiological and/or psychological balance (Carstens & Moberg, 2000). Simpson et al. (2004) define distress as a subjective process when a perceived imbalance between demand and one's response capability under conditions where failure to meet demand has significant (perceived) consequences. The individual's perception of stress plays a crucial role in health. For example, the pressure of having too much to do in too little time during harvest season.

• Short-term stress, also known as acute stress, can go away quickly. For example, having a conflict with farm employees about the quality of their work. This type of stress goes away after resolving a work conflict.
• Long-term stress, also known as chronic stress, refers to the cumulative effect of stress. For example, the fluctuation of market prices for corn can make farmers constantly worry about financial loss, which might cause sleep disorder, racing thoughts, inability to focus, and, as a result, can lead to poor farm management or a farm accident.

In summary, we all experience stress in our work and personal life. It is important to understand that stress involves mental, cognitive, and physical components. Stress in our bodies can be considered as an adaptative response to internal and external factors that modify the organism's internal balance. Coping mechanisms facilitate our body's reestablishment of its internal balance. Long-term stress can negatively affect an individual's health, daily life performance, and productivity on the farm.

Moving Further

We hope this article can help the reader understand the meaning of stress, its different dimensions, and durations. In the following article, the reader will learn how to recognize stress symptoms. Keep learning about how to cope with stress!

We appreciate Dr. Derek Spangler's profound insights and feedback that helped shape the series of articles on stress management on the farm. Dr. Derek Spangler is an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State who conducts research related to real-world stress and its impacts on health.

AgrAbility for Pennsylvanians Project is supported under USDA/NIFA Special Projects 2021-41590-34811 in collaboration with Penn State Extension. Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences research and extension programs are funded in part by Pennsylvania counties, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and USDA.

Photo Credit: Abbie Spackman, AgrAbility PA project

References

Carstens, E., & Moberg, G. P. (2000). Recognizing pain and distress in laboratory animals. Ilar Journal, 41(2), 62-71.

Donald, I., Taylor, P., Johnson, S., Cooper, C., Cartwright, S., & Robertson, S. (2005). Work environments, stress, and productivity: An examination using ASSET. International Journal of Stress Management, 12(4), 409.

Halkos, G., & Bousinakis, D. (2010). The effect of stress and satisfaction on productivity. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management.

Kalia, M. (2002). Assessing the economic impact of stress [mdash] The modern day hidden epidemic. Metabolism-Clinical and Experimental, 51(6), 49-53.

Lin, W., Ma, J., Wang, L., & Wang, M. (2015). A double‐edged sword: The moderating role of conscientiousness in the relationships between work stressors, psychological strain, and job performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(1), 94–111. doi.org/10.1002/job.1949

McRae, K., Misra, S., Prasad, A. K., Pereira, S. C., & Gross, J. J. (2012). Bottom-up and top-down emotion generation: implications for emotion regulation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(3), 253-262.

Merriam-Webster (n.d). Emotion definition.

Selye, H. (1956). The Stress of Life.

Simpson, K., Sebastian, R., Arbuckle, T. E., Bancej, C., & Pickett, W. (2004). Stress on the farm and its association with injury. Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health, 10(3), 141.

Tsigos, C., Kyrou, I., Kassi, E., & Chrousos, G. P. (2020). Stress: endocrine physiology and pathophysiology. Endotext [Internet].

Windon, S. R., Jepsen, S. D., & Scheer, S. D. (2014). Identifying the Factors Affecting Ohio Farmers' Quality of Life. Journal of the NACAA, 7(2).