Stress recovery

Stress Recovery Strategies in Older Adults and Their Link to Well-Being and Health [Seed Funding]

Stress has been shown to negatively affect core aspects of healthy aging, such as impairing well-being, physical and mental health, as well as enhancing morbidity and mortality. Given that older adults experience many stressful life events and daily stressors, better understanding their adaptation to stress to restore homeostasis is of great importance for our society to promote older adults’ health.

Despite its high societal relevance and research calling for more systematic investigations of stress recovery for decades, surprisingly little is known about these processes in older age. Poor physiological stress recovery leads to overexposure to stress hormones, eventually resulting in unfavorable physical sequelae like cardiovascular diseases. Older adults may experience age-related difficulties in stress regulation, shown by elevated baseline cortisol levels, elevated stress levels in response to challenges like bereavement, and higher blood pressure reactivity to daily stressors. However, individuals become more skilled in adequately dealing with stress-induced negative emotions through emotion regulation competencies with older age, which suggests potential advantages in stress recovery compared to younger adults.

Besides biological mechanisms, individual differences in several psychological factors seem to underlie stress recovery, such as personality traits, emotion (dys)regulation, resilience, and social support. Given the lack of knowledge on psychological stress recovery in relation to health and well-being in older age, it is essential to uncover how recovery takes place in older adults, which strategies are used and how it differs from younger adults.

As individual differences in adaptive stress recovery have not been systematically investigated, we aim to identify differences between younger and older adults in self-reported stress recovery strategies and their relation to health and well-being. Furthermore, we aim to evaluate psychological stress recovery processes in younger and older adults in real life by using Experience Sampling Method (ESM).

Team composition

Cross-cutting themes

The Herbert Simon Research Institute for Health, Well-being, and Adaptiveness is a research center devoted to carrying out excellent, state of the art research in order to contribute to healthy and resilient people. We have selected three themes, which involve the collaboration between various Departments  and address actual themes in need of both fundamental and applied research.