 25. Self‑Regulatory Processes, Stress, and Coping  549
strong resemblance to the distinction made 
earlier between continued effort and disen -
gagement in the self-  regulatory principles 
on which this chapter is based. This further 
illustrates our main theme about stress and 
coping: that coping is self-  regulation under 
conditions of adversity.
Threat, Loss, Disruption,  
and Normative Life  Processes
We outlined in the first section of this chap -
ter a set of principles as a model of self- 
regulation. In the second section, we indi -
cated some broad similarities between that 
model and two views on the nature of stress. 
We now turn to a different point. Here we 
consider the pervasiveness of stress in life, 
and some of the diverse ways in which it can 
arise and be dealt with.
Although it is certainly possible to think 
of stress in terms of such events as natu -
ral disasters, life-  threatening illnesses, and 
human-  inflicted cruelties, not all of what 
gets termed stress  is so distinct from the nor -
mal flow of behavior. Much of the stress in 
life arises from being boxed into corners or 
experiencing conflict within oneself. These 
experiences have the same structure as we 
earlier argued underlies stress in general; 
that is, in each case, there is an impediment 
to forward movement toward desired goals 
or away from threats.
As a way of illustrating the breadth of 
applicability of this idea, in this section we 
consider several sorts of impediments that 
originate fairly commonly in the flow of or -
dinary behavior. We do so within the frame -
work of self-  regulation we outlined earlier 
(Carver & Scheier, 1998; for related views, 
see Vohs & Baumeister, 2016; Fitzsimons et 
al., 2015). This is largely a conceptual anal -
ysis, as research on most of these points is 
relatively sparse.
Problems as  Conflicts among  Goals
One way in which stress can arise follows 
from the fact that the goal structures that 
people adopt often contain the potential for 
conflict. One circumstance in which con -
flict occurs is when you are committed to 
two or more goals that cannot be attained easily at the same time (e.g., being a suc -
cessful physician while being an involved 
wife and mother; having a close relationship 
while being emotionally independent). You 
cannot do two mutually exclusive things at 
once. The very act of making a strong effort 
to attain one goal can constitute an impedi -
ment to attaining the other goal, by virtue 
of slowing down progress toward it and 
sometimes even literally reversing progress. 
To the extent that this unintended side effect 
is salient, the person may experience stress.
There is evidence that conflict among 
goals does create stress. Emmons and King 
(1988) had people report the personal striv -
ings that motivate their lives, then rate those 
strivings. This included rating the extent to 
which success in one striving tended to cre -
ate problems for another one. The research -
ers found that conflicts between personal 
goals were tied to psychological distress and 
physical symptoms. In contrast, people who 
value their strivings and see them as impor -
tant express greater satisfaction with their 
lives (Emmons, 1986; see also Lecci, Okun, 
& Karoly, 1994).
Given the distress produced by goal con -
flict, people often try to avoid its occur -
rence. One strategy is to alternate between 
conflicting goals, addressing first one goal, 
then the other. Jumping back and forth can 
be exhausting, however, and it is inefficient 
(e.g., Altmann, Trafton, & Hambrick, 2014; 
Pashler, 1994). It is also hard to keep the 
conflict from reemerging. Another solution 
is to conclude that one goal matters more to 
your higher-  order values than the other, and 
to reorganize or reweight your hierarchy ac -
cordingly. But this is not easy to do, either. 
The self as an organization of values is rela -
tively stable. Still, although reorganization 
of the self is hard and painful (and thus re -
sisted), it does sometimes happen (cf. Crock -
er & Major, 1989; Heatherton & Nichols, 
1994; Kling, Ryff, & Essex, 1997).
Automatic  Doubts
Another source of stress is the residue of 
doubt that can build up in people’s minds 
from extended experiences of adverse out -
comes in some domain. As noted earlier, 
encountering difficulty while acting induces 
a hazy sense of doubt, which may promote 