Unhealthy Habits Part 3 – Unmanaged Stress – Dr. Weil’s Weekend Tip.

Reduce Stress – Dr. Weil.

On behalf of those Tea Partiers et al:

How dare you cover the 30 million Americans that don’t have healthcare coverage?

How dare you remove loopholes that don’t allow denial for pre-existing conditions that have nothing to do with the current one?

How dare you tighten up on the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage in the middle of treatment?

How dare you stop thousands of Americans WHO ALREADY HAVE HEALTHCARE COVERAGE from being forced to go bankrupt?

How dare you?

I want my freedom back.

Want it back? Okay: please visit my previous post (I think Supersize Me has a lot to offer those with questions) and the previous one and the previous one,  and so on and so forth.  Come back and see if you end up with the same questions.

Numerous health experts, say the number one killer on the planet is stress. Most physical and nonphysical health problems have long-term, physiological stress as their origin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 80% of all health care dollars are spent on illnesses related to stress.

A story featured in The Chronicle Herald Newspaper on January 29, 2010 stated ‘In fact, doctors can’t find physical causes for pain suffered by one of every six people who comes to the emergency department, including three out of four patients who have chest pain and nine out of every 10 patients who have abdominal pain, he said. “It’s becoming more and more clear that a lot of these problems are based in emotional distress.”‘

Sounds like a dictionary’s definition of stress to me.  However, the danger is not just about conditions where no physical causes can be found but rather terrible physical conditions.

So what can you do about it?

Can you eliminate all stress from your life? No.  BUT you can eliminate it where it does not need to be. Example: if you have a day off and do not need to rush, don’t.  But there is much more: think about every aspect of your life where you don’t need to rush, don’t need to stress, write them down and ensure that you remove the stress from these situations.

Is that it? No but I think this is the essential starting point.  The next steps will follow once you perform this exercise and then make a commitment to focusing and implementing the steps that you can do to deal with stress and to enhance overall wellness.  Now this might seem simplistic and the truth is: it is.  However, I believe these things can do wonders if you them a try. But remember a previous post: don’t get caught in the trap of overlooking the importance of necessary maintenance.

I remember the above line from the movie The Shawshank Redemption from the character called Brooks. If you haven’t seen it then I highly recommend it. I have to say there is a lot of truth in this line. You know often people have a reason to rush but the real unfortunate thing about rushing is that often there is simply no need for it.

There is mounting evidence from a variety of sources correlating stress with a variety of negative health conditions. There are many credible sources of information out there suggesting the link between stress and both perceived physical conditions and real physical conditions. The evidence is mounting: stress can be bad.

I’m not saying you never have to be concerned about time but I am saying that always being in a mad rush, without taking time to slow down, will have consequences. You can be so much more productive, too, if you actually learn to slow down in many instances.  I think it’s very helpful to recognize the times in your life when you don’t need to rush or multi-task and to enjoy the moment. Slowly over time everyone can learn to adjust their internal time-clock.

*http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/quotes?qt0470752

However many of us do not often recognize how this principle operates in all other areas of our lives and instead assume that if results are not immediate or no improvements are noted then there is no point in doing something.

What areas am I talking about?

I’m talking about literally all areas of your life and mine.

One example is to look at the notion of taking supplements for your health. Now you might be taking supplements for your health but because you don’t see an improvement or notice a difference when you quit, you conclude that they must not have a benefit for you.  However going back to the example of maintaining your car.  You could have a brand new car, and you might be doing the regular maintenace on it and you wouldn’t be looking for an improvement in performance because you realize that you are merely maintaining your vehicle.  Well why would this be any different with regard to your health or any other area of your life?

If you want to be an empowered or healthy person you must recognize that the benefits of doing things regularly might be more of a maintenance function but this does not diminish the importance of doing them.  I will leave this as a general post without more specific examples because I think that you as an individual can easily fill in the blanks, so to speak, with respect to looking at the areas of your own life.  I hope you do so and this will help you to stay on track but also to start doing maintenance in areas where it is not happening.

CBC News – World – P.E.I.-born woman dies at 114 (Don’t worry this will open in a new window)  Come back when you’re done reading.

Something I’ve thought about on/off over the years is what lessons could someone who lives to 100+ teach us.  These lessons would certainly be helpful for anyone, I think, who wants to optimize their health.  So I wanted to include some observations on centenarians.

I tend to think that there must be more to becoming a centernariun than pure chance whether it’s intentional or not.  Because it is difficult to study centenariuns as a group we need to infer certain things from what we know about them.

One important feature is that they are hardly ever what could be called lazy people. Those who live more than a hundred years have nearly always been more mobile and physically active than the average. In particular, they have frequently been vigorous walkers or cyclists. I do not mean to imply that they were athletes it is a strange fact that athletes do not live longer than the rest of us. Violent exercise seems to take its toll on the human body. But the long-lived did take steady, relaxed exercise on an almost daily basis. Madame Calment, for example, was still riding her bicycle around Arles when she was 100.

Mental exercise seems to be as important as physical activity. Nearly all the centenarians retained a sharp interest in the world around them. They still had a zest for life, right to the end. My favourite example is Margaret Murray, the archaeologist, who wrote a book with the wonderful title of My First Hundred Years. Above all, the very long-lived lacked nostalgia. They didnt look back to the good old days they felt that the good days were still ahead of them.

A sense of humour also appeared to be an important ingredient. Most centenarians managed to keep a twinkle in their eyes even if their vision was not as good as it used to be. This twinkle not only reflected that fact that they still found life entertaining, but also revealed that the endorphins released by laughter were still helping to flood their aged bodies with natures in-built pain-killers.

Other qualities that appeared time and again among the centenarians were: a degree of self-discipline a tendency to organise their lives and to impose a pattern on their daily routines; moderation in eating most of them avoided over-eating and under-eating and fad diets were nowhere to be found; moderation in drinking many of them enjoyed alcohol, but only in small, regular amounts; a focus on things outside themselves without too much introspection or self-examination; and finally, and most importantly, a calm, even-tempered nature.

If these are the qualities that are typical of the 100+ survivors, then they must surely give us some clues as to how we, who have not yet reached that extraordinary age, can best increase our chance of getting there.

I tend to think that there must be more to becoming a centernariun than pure chance whether it’s intentional or not.  Because it is difficult to study centenariuns as a group we need to infer certain things from what we know about them.

One important feature is that they are hardly ever what could be called lazy people. Those who live more than a hundred years have nearly always been more mobile and physically active than the average. In particular, they have frequently been vigorous walkers or cyclists. I do not mean to imply that they were athletes it is a strange fact that athletes do not live longer than the rest of us. Violent exercise seems to take its toll on the human body. But the long-lived did take steady, relaxed exercise on an almost daily basis. Madame Calment, for example, was still riding her bicycle around Arles when she was 100.

Mental exercise seems to be as important as physical activity. Nearly all the centenarians retained a sharp interest in the world around them. They still had a zest for life, right to the end. My favourite example is Margaret Murray, the archaeologist, who wrote a book with the wonderful title of My First Hundred Years. Above all, the very long-lived lacked nostalgia. They didn’t look back to the good old days they felt that the good days were still ahead of them.

A sense of humour also appeared to be an important ingredient. Most centenarians managed to keep a twinkle in their eyes even if their vision was not as good as it used to be. This twinkle not only reflected that fact that they still found life entertaining, but also revealed that the endorphins released by laughter were still helping to flood their aged bodies with natures in-built pain-killers.

Other qualities that appeared time and again among the centenarians were: a degree of self-discipline a tendency to organise their lives and to impose a pattern on their daily routines; moderation in eating most of them avoided over-eating and under-eating and fad diets were nowhere to be found; moderation in drinking many of them enjoyed alcohol, but only in small, regular amounts; a focus on things outside themselves without too much introspection or self-examination; and finally, and most importantly, a calm, even-tempered nature.

If these are the qualities that are typical of the 100+ survivors, then they must surely give us some clues as to how we, who have not yet reached that extraordinary age, can best increase our chance of getting there.

There are additional lessons to be learned here:

1. We can play a proactive role in our health as individuals
2. We can form a positive influence on others
3. Adequate health is necessary for parts of a proper functioning society
4. Everyone / everything has a role to play

It’s amazing how some people become so engaged in the political scene as bystanders. Yes it’s good to be informed and obviously concerned and it’s important to vote.

However we needn’t stress ourselves over things we see in the media when we can do nothing about them.

Election time, like anything in life, is a time of much passion for many people. It’s also a time of intense stress for many. As is the case with any stressful event, people can benefit from learning to let go of things outside of their control.

The bottom line is that once you’ve done all you can do, you need to stop stressing yourself further. As simple as this sounds, I think it’s something we all need to hear from time to time, especially those of us stressed out by elections.

Of course you do need to ensure that you exercise your right to vote at every opportunity, before in my mind, you can rest soundly. But then you can do so.

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You’ll recall me discussing (about a week ago) Gary Taubes and his book concerning obesity research.  It was fascinating because it demonstrated that the evidence favouring many of the dietary approaches advocated today do not work  and why.  I think his book really indicates that a shift in paradigm is warranted (or at least in the research trials) of today’s weight loss approaches.

In particular the keys that Gary recommends (and I think if you really look at his reasoning it seems more sound than the other research of the ineffective approaches) are: eating a diet lower in carbohydrates, not consuming refined carbohydrates or sugar, as these foods cause the body to produce insulin which does not fat to be mobilized – so it collects in the body.  Although this may seem counterintuitive once you see what evidence is really exists (and what the so called healthy diets have been based on) to support the notion that such an approach is counterintuitve, you’ll see that the research is much more scant than you likely thought.   Many approaches have commonly suggested that lack of exercise and lack of portion control were the root cause.

Many researches discouted that fact that there was any hormonal connection. The following article, which you can click on for more informaiton, has finally shown that a hormonal link has been found which would seem to suggest that merely portion control and lack of exercise are not at the healm.

I will include the first link concerning the article and then am also including some videos.

1. Article re the hormonal link is below

Canadian, U.S. scientists win $1M Shaw prize for obesity work.

2.A video is below that provides a very useful points about Gary’s information.

3. Another video with a little more depth into the issue.

Stay tuned for more posts about these concepts and more videos and information.

All the best,

Matthew