HW300 Unit 7 Stress, Alcohol and Connection Paper Example

Summer Stress, Saturday Beer, Sunday Church: A Unit 7 Paper on Stress, Substances and Social Connection for a Client With Fatty Liver

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HW300: Disease Prevention and Lifestyle Medicine

Unit 7 Stress, Substances and Connection Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The client, his family and congregation are composite; the studies and guidance cited are real.

Pillars That Share a Saturday

Lifestyle medicine treats stress management, avoidance of risky substances and positive social connection as separate pillars, but in most lives they are tangled. Stress drives drinking and overeating; drinking worsens sleep and mood; relationships either buffer stress or add to it. For Ruben, alcohol is also a direct threat to his liver, which makes the substances pillar urgent rather than optional.

Stress

From June to September, Ruben's company runs at capacity. He takes calls at night, juggles four technicians and worries about cash flow when customers pay late. He describes the season as "four months of holding my breath." Chronic stress raises cortisol and appetite, especially for sugary and fatty foods, and disrupts sleep. It also makes any new habit harder, because change needs attention that stress consumes.

Practical stress management for Ruben has to fit a 12-hour day. Three steps are realistic. First, a five-minute breathing break in the truck between calls, using slow breathing, which can lower arousal quickly. Second, a hard stop on business calls at 9:00 p.m., with after-hours emergencies routed to the technician on call, a scheduling change he can make as the owner. Third, the morning walk from the activity plan, which doubles as stress relief.

Substances: Alcohol

Ruben drinks six to eight beers over a typical weekend, mostly on Saturday with his brother while watching games. Federal alcohol guidance treats a man's drinking as heavy once it passes four drinks in a day or fourteen across a week (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, n.d.). Five or more on one Saturday meets the daily threshold for binge drinking even though his weekly total is under fourteen.

For his liver, the amount matters even more. The 2023 multisociety consensus that renamed fatty liver disease created a separate category for people with metabolic risk factors who also drink moderate to substantial amounts, recognizing that both causes act together (Rinella et al., 2023). Whatever his category, his physician is likely to advise cutting back a great deal or stopping. Alcohol also adds calories, about 150 in each regular beer, and fragments sleep.

A wellness professional cannot prescribe abstinence, but can help Ruben act on his physician's advice. Practical steps include switching to nonalcoholic beer for the second half of the game, setting a two-drink limit discussed with his brother in advance and replacing one Saturday game a month with an activity that does not involve drinking. If he finds he cannot cut back, that is a reason to talk with his physician about support.

Ruben does not drink alone; he drinks with his brother, so the plan has to include his brother.

Social Connection

Social relationships are strongly tied to health. Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010) combined 148 studies and found that people with strong social ties outlived those with weak ties by a margin they compared with the harm of smoking.

Ruben's relationships are a strength. His closest ties are his wife, their son and daughter and his older brother; he rarely misses Sunday services, and his crew looks up to him. The question is not whether he is connected but how his connections shape his habits. His brother is his drinking partner. His wife cooks the late dinners. His church hosts a monthly potluck. His technicians share sodas from the shop refrigerator.

How the Three Interact

Stress pushes Ruben toward the Saturday beer as a reward after a hard week. The beer shortens his sleep, which leaves him tired and more stressed on Monday. His relationships could break this loop or deepen it. If his brother and wife support the change, the Saturday ritual can stay social without centering on alcohol. If they do not, every step will feel like a sacrifice of time with people he loves.

Steps That Use His Relationships

1. Brother. Ruben tells his brother about his liver and asks him to try nonalcoholic beer during games for a month. His brother has his own blood pressure problem, so the change may suit them both.

2. Wife and children. The family agrees to move dinner earlier on weeknights when possible and to stop buying soda for the house.

3. Church. Ruben volunteers to bring a vegetable dish to the potluck and asks whether the congregation's men's group, which meets on Saturday mornings, would add a walk before the meeting.

4. Technicians. He replaces the shop's soda with sparkling water and offers a small monthly reward for anyone who joins the morning walk.

Signs It Is Working

When the busy season ends, the signs of progress would be that Ruben's Saturdays still include his brother and the game but center less on beer, that the shop refrigerator holds water rather than soda and that he takes at least a few breathing breaks a day without being reminded. It would also mean his family sees the changes as something they are doing together rather than rules imposed on them. These are modest markers, but they would show the three pillars working together.

A Note on Culture

In Ruben's family, as in many, food and drink are how affection is shown. A brother who brings beer to the game is offering company, and a wife who serves a full plate late at night is caring for a husband who worked twelve hours. A plan that treats these gestures as problems will meet resistance. A plan that keeps the gesture and changes its content, a different drink at the game, a lighter but still generous dinner, respects what the habits mean while changing what they do to his liver.

Limits

Changing shared habits can strain relationships, and some family members may resist. Stress during the busy season may overwhelm good intentions, which is why the plan sets smaller goals for summer. The evidence on social connection comes largely from observational studies, so it shows strong association rather than proof that changing relationships changes outcomes.

Conclusion

For Ruben, stress, alcohol and social connection form one cycle: a hard week leads to a Saturday of beer with his brother, which leads to poor sleep and a harder Monday. Breaking the cycle means short daily stress breaks, a business-hours limit, a clear alcohol plan aligned with his physician's advice and, most important, enlisting his brother, family, church and technicians as partners rather than obstacles.

References

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (n.d.). Drinking levels and patterns defined. National Institutes of Health. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/moderate-binge-drinking

Rinella, M. E., Lazarus, J. V., Ratziu, V., Francque, S. M., Sanyal, A. J., Kanwal, F., Romero, D., Abdelmalek, M. F., Anstee, Q. M., Arab, J. P., Arrese, M., Bataller, R., Beuers, U., Boursier, J., Bugianesi, E., Byrne, C. D., Castro Narro, G. E., Chowdhury, A., Cortez-Pinto, H., ... Newsome, P. N. (2023). A multisociety Delphi consensus statement on new fatty liver disease nomenclature. Journal of Hepatology, 79(6), 1542-1556. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2023.06.003