Stress Awareness Month: Mediating Factors
What are mediating factors? Mediating factors is a fancy way of saying factors that explain how or why a stressor ends up in a specific outcome. These factors help explain the mechanism that conveys the effect of stress on us as humans, whether physically, psychologically or both. For example, why do some people end up with a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and others do not, despite going through the same event? The simple answer is because we are not the same. The long answer is because of mediating factors that we cannot necessarily see on the outside. These factors are worth talking about because they help us understand ourselves better and our relationship with stress. So without further ado, let’s meet some mediating factors related to stress.
Perceived Stress and our Cognitive Appraisal
Believe it or not we don’t all view stress the same way. How we each understand or experience a situation or event matters. One person may see an event as highly stressful while another may see it as only mildly stressful or maybe even not at all. When someone experiences an event as highly stressful, the relationship between the external pressure, for example, is more likely to lead to experiences of anxiety or depression (Gomes et al., 2013).
Rumination or Repetitive Thinking
Some of us have the propensity to brood or repeatedly focus on negative events and emotions. This is what is frequently called rumination or repetitive thinking. This type of thinking can act as a mediator between stress and emotional experiences like depression, anger, or anxiety (Hong et al., 2025). Think about why this would be. If we stay fixated on something that we know is stressful we are asking our minds and bodies to stay in that stressful space, thus exacerbating the experience.
Coping Strategies
Yes, coping strategies! Simply stated, do we have effective coping strategies? If we have the ability to cope with stress then we don’t experience as strong of an impact and are able to work with our stress more effectively (Ruiz-Camacho et al., 2025). Let’s look at a few examples of active coping strategies. Active coping strategies are concrete behaviors that mediate the impact of stressors. These include using positive reappraisal, social support seeking, or the oldie but goodie, planning to help solve the underlying concern.
Recovery and Sleep
Taking the time to recover, sleep, and rest cannot be underestimated. Our bodies and minds need this time. Our ability to bounce back from stress can be impacted by sleep quality, for example (Zhang et al., 2024). When we don’t recover well, our ability to bounce back is lessened and the effects of negative stress can even be exacerbated.
Work-Home Interactions
Many of us have different commitments like work or school, for example, in addition to our personal lives. While we may do our best to leave our work or school commitments there when we come home for the day, the demands of work can spill over into our personal lives, thus exacerbating our ability to handle stress because we are not allowing ourselves to relax (van Schaaijk et al., 2020). We, instead, are just bringing the stress with us. In a similar vein, when we feel in control of our personal life, we have the ability to counteract the impact of occupational stress, which helps with mediating the dynamic between stress and future performance (van Schaaijk et al., 2020).
Psychological Flexibility
Psychological flexibility is an important factor, even just as a topic, in psychology. But, what is psychological flexibility? It is our ability to be present and open to our emotions and thoughts, and then be able to make choices based on our values, even when we are faced with challenges. This sounds great, but can be easier said than done. Often we get stuck in negative thoughts, for example. When we are able to find psychological flexibility, it helps mediate the relationship between stress and mental health (Machulska & Klucken, 2025).
Ability to Make Meaning
Our brains are naturally wired to make stories out of our experience. While this has its challenges in some situations, it also has its positives. Focusing on the positives rather than challenges, which could be a whole other discussion, when we are able to find meaning in our stressful experiences, we can potentially adapt more positively which helps reduce the long-term negative impacts of stress (Chen et al., 2025; Horiuchi et al., 2018).
Resilience!
Resilience is a topic that we will cover more in the next blog post, but we can’t leave it out of the discussion here because of how important it is. Resilience is our ability to bounce back from stressful situations, which helps buffer the impacts of stress (Bajaj et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022). More to come on this topic. This is just a teaser. Come back next week!
Maladaptive Behavior
Sometimes people reach for substances, disengage behaviorally, or find another type of addiction or vice that then become mediators (Pillai et al., 2014). While these choices may temporarily provide some relief, they actually exacerbate the long-term negative impacts of stress, not to mention the other potential implications with health and safety.
The above is not all encompassing. It just touches the surface of what factors play a role in mediating stress. We didn’t even get into the roles that personality, gender, or social support (Acoba, 2024) play into the topic. Simply said, our relationship with stress is complicated. With that, these mediating factors can also give us hope! There are things that we can do when it comes to stress. We are not helpless. Next week we will explore the idea of resilience and stress relief to help give us ideas on how we can engage with stress for better mental health.
A multicolored background with the colors of white, black, two shades of pink, two shades of blue, and yellow. There are black dots and the word stress is written out in orange, yellow, white, pink, and white. There are two human bodies in drawn in black that look like they are stressed.
take action today moment:
Take some to reflect on your life. Do you recognize any of these factors in your life? If so, how are they showing up? Which ones would you like to challenge and change and which ones would you like to keep in your life like psychological flexibility? When we take the time to reflect on what is directly impacting our stress levels we can take steps to adjust for better mental health.
Learn More About Stress and Mediating Factors:
Stress Symptoms, Signs, and Causes
Stressed - A Documentary Film | 4K OFFICIAL
References
Acoba, E. F. (2024). Social support and mental health: The mediating role of perceived stress. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1330720. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1330720
Bajaj, B., Khoury, B., & Sengupta, S. (2022). Resilience and stress as mediators in the relationship of mindfulness and happiness. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 771263. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.771263
Chen, S. Y., Yan, S. R., Zhao, W. W., Gao, Y., Zong, W., Bian, C., Cheng, Y., & Zhang, Y. H. (2022). The mediating and moderating role of psychological resilience between occupational stress and mental health of psychiatric nurses: A multicenter cross-sectional study. BMC Psychiatry, 22(1), 823. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-022-04485-y
Chen, Y., Zheng, L., Ma, J., Zhu, H., & Gan, Y. (2025). The mediating role of meaning-making in the relationship between mental time travel and positive emotions in stress-related blogs: Big data text analysis research. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 27, e63407. doi: 10.2196/63407
Gomes, A. R., Faria, S., & Gonçalves, A. M. (2013). Cognitive appraisal as a mediator in the relationship between stress and burnout. Work & Stress, 27(4), 351-367. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2013.840341
Hong, Y., Luo, L., Li, Z., Wu, S., & Bao, X. (2025). Associations of perceived stress with depression in medical students: the mediating role of rumination and the moderating role of emotional intelligence. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1620067. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1620067
Horiuchi, S., Tsuda, A., Yoneda, K., & Aoki, S. (2018). Mediating effects of perceived stress on the relationship of positivity with negative and positive affect. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 11, 299–303. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S164761
Machulska, A., & Klucken, T. (2025). The interplay between perceived stress, psychological flexibility, and interpretation biases in undergraduate mental health. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 38992. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-26492-1
Pillai, V., Roth, T., Mullins, H. M., & Drake, C. L. (2014). Moderators and mediators of the relationship between stress and insomnia: stressor chronicity, cognitive intrusion, and coping. Sleep, 37(7), 1199–1208. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.3838
Ruiz-Camacho, C., Gozalo, M., & Sánchez Casado, I. (2025). The mediating role of active coping strategies in the relationship between academic stressors and stress responses among university students. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 13(14), 1674. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare13141674
van Schaaijk, A., Noor Baloch, A., Thomée, S., Frings-Dresen, M., Hagberg, M., & Nieuwenhuijsen, K. (2020). Mediating factors for the relationship between stress and work ability over time in young adults. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(7), 2530. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17072530
Zhang, J., Xiang, S., Li, X., Tang, Y., & Hu, Q. (2024). The impact of stress on sleep quality: A mediation analysis based on longitudinal data. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1431234. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1431234