Never Be Sick Again (29 page)

The Jekyll and Hyde of Stress

Stress has an upside and a downside. Stress can induce positive emotions—excitement, passion and positive arousal. Alternatively, stress can bring on negative emotions such as fear, anxiety and anger. In both cases, the same body systems are involved; both “good” excitement and “bad” fear can increase heart rate and blood pressure. With different mental outlooks, however, different results occur. In a positive mental outlook, health improves; with a negative mindset, cells are damaged and health is impaired. Meeting the stressful challenges that appear in our lives—the chance for a promotion at work, for instance—can help us to grow and develop. When chronic and negative, however, stress damages our cells and impairs our health.

Any perceived threat, such as an attacking predator, a crazy driver or an urgent deadline, causes your nervous system to stimulate both the pituitary and the adrenal glands, releasing stress hormones such as adrenaline. These hormones provide a “rush” necessary to prepare the body for sudden action—by increasing heart rate, breathing rate, blood flow to the muscles, blood pressure and other vital functions. This stress reaction was historically important for survival—part of the “fight or flight” response, which enables us to enhance performance through an increase in our physical and mental capacities for an immediate shift into “emergency mode.”

Production of these chemicals, however, was meant to be episodic; an emergency would come, and it would pass. Unfortunately for many people, stress is now chronic. People are working more and sleeping less, and the pace of daily living is accelerating. When chronically mobilized, stress chemicals build up in our system and damage our cells and tissues. Stress chemicals can lead to damaged immunity, increased susceptibility to infectious disease, damaged blood vessels, maldigestion, sleep disturbance, water retention, fat deposits, hypoglycemia, ulcers, anxiety, high blood pressure, cardiac irregularities, lower pain threshold, lower sperm count, reduced sexual performance, anxiety and depression.

• According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), stress is among the top-ten reasons Americans miss work.

• The American Medical Association (AMA) has estimated that up to 70 percent of all patients seen by general-practice physicians show symptoms directly related to stress.

• Job stress can chronically raise blood pressure, and stress from lack of control on the job can even increase the risk of heart disease (such as, for example, by changing the parameters of blood clotting factors).

• On a positive note, a 1997 study at Duke University showed that heart attack victims who learned to manage their stress levels could reduce the risk of a repeated heart attack by 74 percent.

Unfortunately, many of us now spend much time during the day in emergency mode as a result of all kinds of what should be nonemergency activities, such as catching buses, driving cars, attending meetings and doing daily work. As a result, we flood our systems with stress chemicals unnecessarily, and we do so on a chronic basis.

To minimize damage from chronic stress, we must find healthful ways to adapt. Adaptation is what stress management is all about. Our ability to adapt is part of what has allowed humankind to survive so well in diverse environments. We must learn how to choose and interpret today's challenges in ways that convert potentially dis-stressful situations to exciting, challenging ones, as well as learn productive coping strategies when dis-stress is unavoidable.

If you know of a certain person, situation or location that stresses you, choose to avoid putting that stress on yourself by avoiding that person, situation or location. Do not put pressure (stress) on yourself when doing so will likely have no effect on the outcome of a situation. You have the power to choose. If you are stuck in a traffic jam, you can either stress out, or you can seize the opportunity to breathe deeply and relax. Neither action makes the traffic move faster, but one approach makes you healthier and the other makes you sicker. If you become visibly irritated when standing in lines or following slow drivers, at those times you may want to evaluate the degree to which you allow life's little irritations to impact negatively on your health and well-being.

Many dis-stressful situations are impossible to avoid. In fact, we would not want to avoid all of them. As Robert Ornstein, M.D., and David Sobel, Ph.D., explain in their book
The Healing Brain,
“If we . . . tried to avoid [all] stressors no one would ever marry, have children, take a job, get divorced, or invent anything at all.” “The way we react to stress,” they say, “appears to be more important than the stress itself. . . . [T]he onset and course of disease are strongly linked to a person's ability and willingness to cope with stress. . . . Helplessness is worse than stress itself.”

Many effective techniques exist for reducing the stress in our lives, including counseling, prayer, meditation, therapy, exercise, yoga, self-hypnosis, keeping a journal, social support and other alternatives. Find what works for you and understand that your health is constantly affected by the way you respond to and interpret the stressful situations in your life; your levels of dis-stress are determined by your choices, not simply by the random happenings in your busy life.

Love Leads the Way

The “good” emotions—love, compassion, spiritual awareness— have extremely powerful implications for health, but they are often difficult to define, explain or measure. These complex and nontangible concepts remain perhaps the most “real” considerations in our lives. Understanding their power over health and disease is critical to understanding and practicing effective health care.

Strong social support—including family relationships, friendships, relationships with health practitioners, romantic relationships, and relationships with spiritual leaders and figures— is a critical component of health care. People are typically healthier and recover from diseases more effectively when they have strong social ties. Why? Perhaps people simply feel cared for and hopeful about their future. Or perhaps the bonds that people form transcend our traditional scientific understanding of health—even into realms of spirit and energy. However it works, people who relate with others do help each other through adversities, allowing for greater health and wellness than people who are isolated and alone.

Although relationships cannot be put onto a slide and examined under a microscope, many studies have cited the effects of relationships—or the lack of relationships—on health and disease:

• People who are single, separated, divorced or widowed are more than twice as likely to die than their married peers, and five to ten times more likely to be hospitalized for mental disorders.

• Social isolation is as big a risk factor for disease as smoking.

• People with minimal social connections, such as those with few friends or family and people who tend not to participate in their communities, are two to five times more likely to die prematurely than those with more extensive social ties. These differences are independent of age, sex, and ethnic or cultural background.

• Studies of medical students during stressful exam periods found that the biggest drop in immunity occurred in students who reported being lonely.

• When experimental subjects were injected with cold viruses, individuals with fewer social ties were four to six times more likely to develop colds as those who had more social ties.

• The death rate among Russian men increased by nearly 40 percent following the fall of communism, attributed to social instability.

Love is a deep and vital part of ourselves and a critical aspect of the psychological pathway. There is love for oneself, for other people, for pets, love in spiritual practice and much more. True love, of course, is unconditional, existing for its own sake because you choose it and want it in your life.

Finding and feeling love, however, can be a challenge. Anger, frustration, fear, jealousy, apathy—all can interfere with our ability to love ourselves and those dear to us. Part of being able to love is being able to have compassion both for yourself and for the people around you. Understanding the obstacles that you face in your life makes it possible and easier to understand the obstacles others face. Within this perspective, you can have compassion for anyone, even someone who mistreats you. Likewise, having compassion for yourself is not only possible but essential! Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail; facing life's obstacles is challenging, as we all know, but without compassion and love, obstacles may seem insurmountable.

If we do not fill our lives with love and compassion, then we make room for their opposites, such as anger and hostility, which are incredibly harmful to our health and happiness. As Redford Williams, M.D., author of the book
Anger Kills,
wrote: “Getting angry is like taking a small dose of some slow-acting poison every day of your life.” At the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Duke University, Williams has researched the effects of anger, particularly how stress chemicals cause heart disease. He found that chemicals released by the body during periods of anger and hostility damage the lining of arteries. Another study reported in a 1980 issue of
Psychosomatic Medicine
found that people who are cynical, who have hostile attitudes and who have suppressed anger have more atherosclerosis and blockage of coronary arteries and are more likely to have heart attacks.

The Power of Prayer

Perhaps the best way to maintain love and compassion in your life is to consciously seek and practice it. Enlightened leaders and global spiritual traditions advocate spiritual practice as the essential foundation of comprehensive health and vitality, including all aspects of a sound mind and body. This book does not advocate any specific religion or spiritual practice, but does recommend some type of practice. Why? Because being self-involved, self-centered and “stuck in your own head” is so easy. Only when body, mind and spirit are fully integrated can you truly optimize your health.

Spiritual practice brings about measurable changes in the brain and in overall health. Larry Dossey, M.D., in his book
Healing Words,
described “one of the best kept secrets in medical science”: the benefits of prayer. Dr. Dossey defines prayerfulness as “a feeling of love, compassion and empathy toward another,” and he explains that prayer is “a powerful and legitimate (if often overlooked) method of healing.” Dossey uses an impressive array of evidence to show that prayer can have a positive effect on health. A 1988 study conducted in San Francisco investigated the effects of prayer on the cardiovascular health of 393 coronary-care patients. Unknown to the patients involved, one group was prayed for and the other was not. At the end of the ten-month study, the prayed-for group was five times less likely to require antibiotics and three times less likely to develop a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid. Dr. Dossey's research also found that prayer can have beneficial effects on various living cells and organisms, including mice, chicks, fungi, yeast, bacteria and enzymes. In the October 2001 issue of the
Journal of Reproductive Health,
researchers at Columbia University—expressing great surprise at their own profound findings—announced that when complete strangers prayed for women who went to a fertility clinic, the women had twice the pregnancy rate as women for whom prayers were not given.

How does spirituality influence health and performance, and how do we integrate it into health-care promotion and practice as professionals and as individuals? No one scientifically understands the mechanisms. Nonetheless, the scientific data prove that spirituality does work. Such data pose profound questions. Perhaps these precise questions are the ones we need to be asking in order to develop a more complete understanding of health. Even if we don't have all the answers, we can still benefit from the power of spiritual practice.

A Great Opportunity

While health generally is measured and understood at the physical level, as we have discussed, psychological health and physical health are indivisibly one and the same. What goes on in your mind is also going on in your body, and the good news is that you have a wide menu of practical, productive, self-empowering and exciting options to promote psychological— and, therefore, physical—well-being.

Too many people fall into self-defeating lifestyle patterns. If you want to move yourself in the right direction on the psychological pathway and improve your health for the better, you cannot continue to do the same negative things and expect to obtain different and positive results. Changing one's patterns of behavior, belief, thinking, feeling, perception and physical response is the goal of the psychological pathway. Such changes take practice and commitment.

The first step is to notice and identify the feelings associated with stress, then to implement strategies consciously to take care of yourself. Beyond mental techniques—such as prayer, biofeedback, therapy, meditation and numerous self-regulation techniques—physical activities also can be helpful, including exercise, breathing techniques, yoga, massage, saunas and hot baths. Understanding how the mind affects the function (or malfunction) of our cells enables us to make the positive choices that enable us to maintain or improve health.

Keeping a healthy outlook is both one of life's great challenges and one of life's great opportunities. Having a purpose, a higher meaning to your life than mere existence, is a critical part of the whole picture of health.