How Does Your Explanatory Style Affect Your Stress Levels?

Your explanatory style affects your life in ways you may not realize. It can minimize your stress response or exacerbate it. It can keep you feeling safe in socially dangerous situations, or endangered in relatively safe ones. It can also motivate you when you're faced with challenges or leave you feeling vulnerable to them.

But what exactly does this all mean and where did this idea come from? Read ahead to learn more.

Where Did the Concept of Explanatory Styles Come From?

Grounded in scientific method, explanatory style is defined by psychologists Gregory McClell Buchanan and Martin EP Seligman as “our tendency to offer similar explanations for different events.”

Psychologists use the term "explanatory style" today to describe how people explain the events of their lives.

These Are the Three Parameters of Explanatory Styles

There are three parameters (internality, stability, and globality) of how people can explain a situation to themselves. Each one can lean toward optimism or pessimism.

Stable vs. Unstable

This has to do with how you perceive the permanence of a situation. Is it changing across time or unchanging? Do you expect things to get better or worse, or stay exactly as they are for a long time? 

This can make a difference in how stressful something seems. If you are taking a stressful class in school, you at least know that the class will be over in a few months (whereas a stressful job may be something to deal with for years).

Global vs. Local

Is a stressor universal throughout your life (that is, pervasive)? Or is it specific to a part of your life? A good example of this is the feeling of having good or bad luck. If you feel yourself to be unlucky (bad luck pervades throughout your life), one negative experience may seem like an omen that more bad things are to come. 

Likewise, if you attribute a poor performance at work as being due to something global like a perceived inability to do the job well, one failure may seem like a sign of more failures to come.

Someone who views one poor performance as being a sign of one bad day or lack of sleep—something more local and less global—will have an easier time shaking off one failure.

Internal vs. External

Do you see the cause of an event as within yourself (personalization) or outside yourself? If you are having a difficult day and you see it as being "your fault," you'll feel more stressed than if you see it as due to factors other than you. 

Likewise, when you are facing conflict with others, seeing the problem as being rooted in something that is "their problem" rather than "your fault" can help you to take things less personally and feel less hurt. 

How Explanatory Styles Relate to Your Stress Levels?

Explanatory styles affect how we perceive the world, which can affect our experience of stress as well as our reactions to our stressors.

If You Have a Positive Explanatory Style

If we have a positive explanatory style, we may feel less stressed by challenging experiences because a positive explanatory style can minimize the perceived severity of stressors—they seem like they're not such a big deal, will be over soon, are not our fault, and will not necessarily recur.

If You Have a Negative Explanatory Style

Negative explanatory styles tend to create more stress in life and can make our stressors feel more threatening.

Pessimists tend to see things in the opposite way, which can make stress seem like a bigger deal than it may need to be and expands stressful feelings even, research shows, symptoms of depression.

Studies also show that people with negative explanatory styles may have more trouble recovering from stressful life events.

Can People Change Their Explanatory Style?

Yes! Explanatory styles can be altered with attention and practice. However, you will need to learn how to recognize your own cognitive distortions and practice cognitive restructuring techniques to change those distortions. Doing so can lead to a change in explanatory styles from a negative explanatory style to a more positive one.