Welcome
Stress is known to play a key role in many chronic illnesses including heart disease, diabetes, and some forms of cancer. But there has been relatively little research on how people manage their response to stress by engaging in behaviors that worsen their health, such as smoking, excessive use of alcohol, and over eating.
The cost to society of these maladaptive behaviors is more than 600 billion dollars annually in healthcare expenditures. They are the top three causes of preventable death and disease in the United States.
The Yale Stress Center conducts cutting edge, interdisciplinary research to examine the mechanisms underlying human response to stress, the role of self-control, and how compulsion drives addictive behavior. Our goal is to develop new prevention and treatment strategies to decrease the harmful impact of stress on health and increase our ability to regulate stress and have better self-control over addictive behavior.
The Yale Interdisciplinary Research Consortium on Stress, Self-Control and Addiction is one of nine interdisciplinary research consortia funded by the National Institutes of Health's Roadmap for Medical Research.
Dr. Rajita Sinha, director of the Yale Stress Center, talks about the interplay of stress, self-control and problems with alcohol, tobacco and food addiction. You can