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Category Archives: Biomarkers for Stress

Post #66 – Optimal Health through Optimal Breathing

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Biomarkers for Stress, Breathing, Living to 120, meditation, Mental Health, Optimal Health, Optimal Sleep, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Uncategorized, Vigor, Vitality, wellness, Yoga

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There is an old joke. Question: How do you live long? Answer: Just keep breathing.

Joke aside, when was the last time you gave any thought to breathing?

Are you breathing too much? Too little? Just enough?

Are you breathing the right way?

Are you breathing optimally?  

What kind of impact breath can have on your health?

Can you cure chronic diseases by breathing in a certain way?

Can you cause chronic diseases by NOT breathing in a proper way?

Being a student of yoga and meditation, I have been quite aware of breath and different ways of breathing and subjectively feeling differently when breathing certain way. And I am always curious about finding other methods of breathing.

So, when I picked up James Nestor’s book: The New Science of Lost Art, I thought I might learn a few more distinctions about breathing. I was blown away by how much I did not know about breathing and how big an impact breathing can have on our health.

Nestor describes how the ancient wisdom of breathing, has been discovered and rediscovered over time by people he calls Pulmonauts, i.e., the breath explorers. He beautiful weaves this ancient wisdom with explanations we now know through science along with his personal exploration and experiences.

The book is well worth the read. I definitely learned a lot.

Here are some nuggets that I picked up from this book:

  1. Keep Your Mouth Shut – especially When Sleeping.  As Nestor explains:

“During the deepest, most restful stages of sleep, the pituitary gland, a pea-size ball at the base of the brain, secretes hormones that control the release of adrenaline, endorphins, growth hormone, and other substances, including vasopressin, which communicates with cells to store more water. This is how animals can sleep through the night without feeling thirsty or needing to relieve themselves.

But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. We get thirsty, and we need to pee more. A lack of vasopressin explains not only my own irritable bladder but the constant, seemingly unquenchable thirst I have every night.”

So, here is an interesting vicious circle: if you are not getting enough deep sleep, you would wake up more often due to inadequate vasopressin. And, if you wake up more often, you are probably not getting enough deep sleep.

Simple Solution: Tape you mouth shut when you are sleeping. Really!! It is that simple. And watch how you sleep and all biomarkers that good sleep brings improve. It may even improve or eliminate sleep apnea. From his own experience of trial and error, Nestor recommends 3M Nexcare Durapore “durable cloth” tape, to tape your mouth shut. It works great, I can vouch for it.

2. You Can Use Breathing to Activate Parasympathetic or Sympathetic nervous System: As Nestor explains:

“The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness.

The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety.”

Now how cool is that!

3. Carbon Dioxide is Even More Important Than Oxygen: I am sure you are saying, ”What?!” – just like I did when I read about this.  When you take a slow inhale followed by a very slow exhale or when you just slow down your breathing, if you feel calm settle over you that is due to increasing carbon content in your blood and tissues. If you are hyperventilating, it is the opposite – that is when you need to breath inside a paper bag to calm yourself down.

This is also how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide.

Simple Tip: Take long exhales and slow down your breathing. Basically, breathe but breathe less.

4. Optimal Breath: “It turns out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in to a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute.” This is the pattern of chanting of Om, rosary, chanting of common Buddhist mantras and many other ancient rituals.

5. Secret to Youthful Face is Chewing: “What?!”, you say again. This was definitely new one for me. Here is verbatim from Nestor’s book:

‘Unlike other bones in the body, the bone that makes up the center of the face, called the maxilla, is made of a membrane bone that’s highly plastic. The maxilla can remodel and grow more dense into our 70s, and likely longer. “You, me, whoever—we can grow bone at any age,” Belfor told me. All we need are stem cells. And the way we produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face is by engaging the masseter—by clamping down on the back molars over and over.’

Simple Tip: Find excuses to chew with back molar as often as you can. There you go – 32 chews per bite that mom told us is validated by science now.

6. Hold your Breath to Eliminate Anxiety and Fear:

“…All this suggests that for the past hundred years psychologists may have been treating chronic fears, and all the anxieties that come with them, in the wrong way. Fears weren’t just a mental problem, and they couldn’t be treated by simply getting patients to think differently. Fears and anxiety had a physical manifestation, too. They could be generated from outside the amygdalae, from within a more ancient part of the reptilian brain.

Eighteen percent of Americans suffer from some form of anxiety or panic, with these numbers rising every year. Perhaps the best step in treating them, and hundreds of millions of others around the world, was by first conditioning the central chemoreceptors and the rest of the brain to become more flexible to carbon dioxide levels. By teaching anxious people the art of holding their breath.”

Simple Tip: To calm your anxiety don’t just take a deep breath, HOLD your breath.

Bottom Line: The book has a lot more to offer, but here are some nuggets in summary:

  1. Tape you mouth shut when you are sleeping. Really!! It will improve your sleep and give you all benefits that good sleep does
  2. You can trigger sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems by simply breathing through your right nose or left nose
  3. Take long exhales and slow down your breathing. Basically, breathe but breathe less.
  4. Optimal breath is: 5.5-second inhales followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute.
  5. Find excuses to chew with back molar as often as you can.
  6. To calm your anxiety don’t just take a deep breath, HOLD your breath.

What do you think?

Have you explored different ways of breathing?

What worked or not worked for you?

What benefits or difficulties have you faced due to proper or improper breathing?

I and the readers of this blog would love to hear from you and learn from you.

Please click on Comment to leave your comments or question so others can benefit from your input.

Post #54 – How to Optimize Your Immune System? – Part IV – by Destressing

25 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Biomarkers for Stress, Living to 120, Optimal Health, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Stress, TM, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aging, Chronic diseases, living to 120, optimal health, Reversing Chronic Diseases

Post #54 – How to Optimize Your Immune System? –  Part IV – by Destressing

In Post #51, I discussed some basic terminology of the immune systems, how immune system works, and what kinds of issues happen when it does not work.

Things that are in our control to enhance our immunity and also so the immune system does not go haywire are the ones that you have heard about gazillions of time by now and are probably tired of hearing about: Nutrition, Exercise and Lifestyle.

In Posts #52 and #53, we discussed how to boost your immune system with nutrition and exercise.   In this final post of this series, let’s focus on the last item Lifestyle. Specifically, we will explore what role stress plays in diminishing our immune system and what we can do about it.

Pathways between Stress and the Immune System

We have all heard or intuitively know that when you are stressed you are more susceptible to illness because your immune system is not fully functioning.  But how does that really happen?

A meta-analysis report by Suzanne Segerstrom and Gregory Miller pulls together results from 300 different studies and does a beautiful job of explaining our understanding of this biological connection between mental stress and components of our immune system. The following explanation is based on their paper.

There are three different ways stress in the mind “get inside the body” to affect the immune response:

First, sympathetic fibers descend from the brain into both primary (bone marrow and thymus) and secondary (spleen and lymph nodes) lymphoid tissues. These fibers can release a wide variety of substances that influence immune responses by binding to receptors on white blood cells.

Second, the hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal, sympathetic, medullary, ovarian glands respond to stress and secrete the adrenal hormones epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol; the pituitary hormones prolactin and growth hormone; and the brain peptides melatonin, β-endorphin, and enkephalin. These substances bind to specific receptors on white blood cells and have diverse regulatory effects on their distribution and function.

Third, people’s efforts to manage the demands of stressful experience sometimes lead them to engage in behaviors—such as alcohol use or changes in sleeping patterns—that also could modify immune system processes. Thus, behavior represents a potentially important pathway linking stress with the immune system.

Is Stress always bad?

The results of various studies have demonstrated that stressors with the fight-or-flight situations faced by humans’ evolutionary ancestors elicited potentially beneficial changes in the immune system. The more a stressor deviated from those parameters by becoming more chronic, however, the more components of the immune system were affected in a potentially detrimental way.

So, in other words, the way our ancestors’ bodies reacted to an encounter with a saber-tooth tiger was good for our immune system.  Stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies.  So, the effect on our immune systems is very negative when we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.

Deep Rest for reversing impact of stress on our immune systems

Deepak Chopra, MD and David Simon, MD in their book Grow YoungDeepak Chopra Grow Youngerer, Live Longer: Ten Steps to Reverse Aging, beautifully describe the two antidotes to stress: Restful Awareness and Restful Sleep.

Restful Awareness is a natural mind/body response, as natural as the stress response. The most direct way to experience restful awareness is through meditation. During meditation, breathing slows, blood pressure decreases and stress hormones level off.

In this state while all the metabolic processes slow down, brain stays fully alert and awake. In his book Transcendence: Healing and Transformation Through Transcendental Meditation, Transcendence BookNorman Rosenthal, MD describes in great details this fourth state of consciousness many others call Restful Awareness.  He also lays out in great deal the research that backs up beneficial effects of Transcendental Meditation.

There are of course other types of meditations and techniques through which you can manage stress. A lot of work has been done and ongoing in the Mindful-based Stress Reduction techniques.  These studies describe how performing mindful meditation and living in mindful way reduce conditioned fight-flight response and allows one to make more conscious choices. Such conscious or mindful living thus overrides the biological processes that damage our immune system.

Restful Sleep is equally important in managing stress for optimal immune function. Restful Sleep of minimum six to eight hours is necessary. More recent studies have called out 7.5 hours of daily restful sleep as the optimal.

Restful sleep means that your drift off easily once you turn off the light and sleep soundly through the night. If you have to get up to go to the bathroom during the night, you are able to easily get back to sleep. You will know you have restful sleep if upon awakening you feel energetic, alert and vibrant.  If you feel tired and unenthusiastic when you wake up in the morning, you have not had a night of restful sleep.

To get the best sleep usually requires that you develop a regular routine transitioning from activity to sleep. Chopra and Simon describe very good routines that allow you to transition from the daily activity to deep sleep.

Bottom Line

To optimize immune systems, stress management can play a critical role. In the 30 years since work in the field of psychoneuroimmunology began, studies have convincingly established that stressful experiences alter features of the immune response as well as make one vulnerable to adverse medical outcomes.

Practicing Restful Awareness through Transcendental Meditation, Mindful Meditation, Mindful living or other technique are critical to minimizing stress. The benefits of these techniques are now well established.

Daily Restful Sleep is also required to manage stress.  Practicing daily routines to help transition from daily activity to restful sleep is the best method to achieving daily restful sleep.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

Would love to hear from you and learn from you.

Please click on Comment to leave your comments or question so others can benefit from your input.

 

Post #20 – So, how much muscle can you gain in a short period and why you may want to?

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Bikram Yoga, Biomarkers for Stress, Ideal Body Weight, Lean Mass, Life-Span, Living to 120, Optimal Health, Percent Body Fat, Vitality, wellness, Yoga

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In most health literature, one thing I find repeated over and over again is that muscle or lean body mass is a very important factor for health and longevity.

When I heard from Joe Dillon about 15 months ago a concrete technique to lose body fat and gain muscle mass, I got inspired. Although, I had generally been keeping track of my weight, up until then I had never really thought of tracking or targeting body fat and lean mass directly.

More I studied this topic, the more it all made sense. Weight and Body Mass Index (BMI) are just proxy for tracking body fat and lean mass, which are what really count. It is the body fat that is harmful and it is the lean mass that is helpful – and both in so many different ways. And, at times BMI and body fat can be very poor approximation of body fat and lean mass.

If in the process of losing weight, you lose muscle mass rather than fat, that is not a good thing at all. In fact, that can be very harmful to your health. Mark Hyman, MD talks about a term call skinny fat to describe someone who looks quite skinning, has good weight, but the weight is very disproportionately fat mass.

William Evans, Ph.D. and Irwin Rosenberg, MD in their seminal work, Biomarkers, The 10 Determinants of Aging You Can Control,” coined the term Sarcopenia, to describe a “disease” when someone lacks adequate lean body mass.

Jim Karas, in his book, The Business Plan for the Body”, calls lean mass the net worth. When he talks to business people, who understand financials, he explains weight, muscle and fat this way: weight is your total assets, fat is total debt and lean muscle mass is your equity or net worth. And, if you do nothing, starting with age 30, you lose muscle mass, about 7 lbs. per decade for men and women, and accelerating to one pound per year after menopause for women. So, if you do nothing to counteract, by the age of 60, you will have lost 21 lbs. of muscle mass and replaced with 21 plus your weight gained, since the age of 30, in body fat. Is that 31 lbs. or 41 lbs. or more of additional body fat? Yikes!

You get the idea.

Through all this studying, I found a new way to articulate that object of the game (or obsession) of weight loss, i.e., to simply target and measure percent body fat. And, Joe Dillon provided ideal targets. He feels that for optimal health men should have no more than 15% body fat, while woman should have no more than 22%. Further, he says, that the world class male athletes have body fat percent in the range of 6 to 12% and female athletes in the range of 12% to 18%.

So, instead of looking up on the BMI tables to estimate what ideal body weight should be, a precise method is:

Ideal weight = Body Fat Weight/0.15 for 15% body fat target.

Where, Body Fat Weight = Current Weight * Current % body fat

Current % body fat is measureable by taking seven different measurements with calipers and them plugging into calculator.

With all this knowledge in hand, I started my journey. On May 17, 2013, started with these measurements:

Table 4

Notice that in May 2013, at 23.9% body fat, my ideal weight was150.0 lbs. And, as it generally happens if I were to lose 17.5 lbs to get to 150.0, it will prTable 1obably not all be body fat. So, as more weight I lost lower my ideal body weight would need to be. No wonder this is a sucker’s game (or obsession)!

My goal was to lose body fat, while at the same time gain lean mass!

I changed my diet per Joe Dillon’s recommendations. Basically, took breads and sweets totally out of my meals and all processed foods, added more raw fruits and vegetables, decreased quantity of what I would eat and added about 150 grams of proteins through Whey concentrate and isolate shakes. I kept to my then most recent routine of one fitness/resistance training workout and two to three Bikram Yoga sessions a week.

I progressed along pretty well as you can see in the table below, especially through the end of the year.

Table 5

Every month I was losing about a pound of fat and gaining a pound of lean mass. That seemed very encouraging. After a few months of watching that trend, I even raised my target. I started to ask, “Wouldn’t it be cool to get six-pack at sixty?” I have never had six-pack abs before. Why not? May be 12% body fat would do it.

And, then starting beginning of year, the progress sort of plateaued. In April, I added to my weekly workout routine Joe Dillon’s power walks with weights about three days a week. And, I started to make a very gentle progress again.

About then, I did some blood work and found out that my testosterone was low. Aha, may be that was the reason my progress had stalled! I theorized. Low-T and elevated estradiol wreaks havoc on lean mass for muscle. “Man boobs” are signs of low-T and elevated estradiol in men. Health literature is quite sure about this, e.g., check out, Testosterone for Life: Recharge Your Vitality, Sex Drive, Muscle Mass, and Overall Health by Abraham Morgentaler, MD.

So, I started to work on that through herbal supplements, which is still work-in-progress and another story for another day. Joe Dillon recommends getting that test up-front, which I did not do, so I did not really have any baseline numbers to compare.

About a month ago, I saw an exercise program by Shawn Phillips, who is a world class body sculptor. He called this program, Muscle Mania – a program made up of intense workouts, one muscle a day, every single day for 21 days. His promise was add 4 pound of muscle mass in 21 days.

I talked to our trainer Saleem and my wife Kimberly. Both were encouraging and we went for it. Starting July 16th, for the next 21 mornings, under Saleem’s coaching Kimberly and I worked out. (Actually on day 20, I did not feel well, so we skipped a day and finished the program in 22 days). For 21 days, we bombed one muscle group every morning: chest, biceps/triceps, legs, back, shoulders in whatever order and with whatever exercises the program recommended. Some days, I felt totally exhausted, some days very energized. But we pushed through it and finished the program as intended.

My right shoulder stiffened up a little during one of the bench press exercises. So, I started using the foam roller for rolling. Found it to be incredible beneficial. From then on, I incorporated about 10 minute of rolling as part of the warm up routine. Jeffry S. Life, MD Ph.D. in his book, “The Life Plan: How Any Man Can Achieve Lasting Health, Great Sex, and a Stronger, Leaner Body” recommends rolling for warm-ups and flexibility by working on the fascia.

So, here is the result.

Table 6

As of August 9, if I am measuring, it correctly (Kimberly did the measuring wherever I can’t reach), I have achieved 15.1% body fat! And, as the table shows my weight of 161.0 is the same as ideal weight of 160.9 at 15% body fat.

I did not really do the measurements before and after the 21-day program. But no doubt, I made most of this progress between May and August during the 21-day program. During this period, I lost 4 lbs. of body fat and gained 2 lbs. lean mass.

And, I can see hints of my six-pack! It seems like 12% body fat will surely make my abs visible.

So, there you have it – the story of my chase for 15% body fat and in turn for my ideal weight.

I definitely, feel more energized. This has also brought my cholesterol in line. I quit taking Lipitor last year in May, the same time I started this journey. And, the most recent blood work showed total cholesterol of 145, LDL of 88, HDL 43 and Triglycerides of 69. That is the best it has been even with Lipitor!

To continue the progress, for the near future, Kimberly and I are planning on two days of strength/resistance training, two days of some aerobics including power walks and two days of Bikram Yoga for flexibility, balance and cleansing the internal organs.

What are your thoughts or comments on this whole endeavor?

If any of this helps you or inspires you to take on some health challenge, I would love to hear about it and/or answer any questions you may have.

Post #17 – Is meditation an effective antidote to stress?

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Biomarkers for Stress, Living to 120, meditation, Optimal Health, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Stress, TM

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30 years ago when I co-founded A&T Systems, Inc., I would passionately talk to others in general conversations about the company and its future possibilities. Which, of course, I still do today. No surprise there. But one thing I found surprising were the comments I would get pretty frequently in response, such as: So how would you handle stress of running a business?, or you want to have a heart attack at young age?

So, when one day in 1986, I saw a commercial on a local TV station, about Transcendental Meditation (TM) and how that was an indispensable tool for managing stress, I quickly signed up for an introductory meeting. At the meeting, the organizers served up lots of evidence on how TM helps manage and reduce stress.

My wife, Kimberly, and I were both sold. We signed up right there. That weekend, we learned the TM technique and were told to do the meditation for 20 minutes twice a day. There were three follow up sessions on the following three days in which the teacher explained the theory behind the practice and answered the questions as they arose through the experience of actually doing the meditation. In these sessions, the teacher also did ‘checking’, a process whereby the teacher makes sure that we are practicing the meditation correctly.

After these initial sessions, we went for checking after a couple of weeks, then couple of months and then once a year and then every few years.

We immediately started to notice some changes in our lifestyle. Before learning TM, after work, I used to come home and grab a beer, turn on the TV and unwind. Now, I would come home, do TM and find that I no longer felt the need or desire for a beer. For Kimberly it was not as much beer in the evening, but a cup of coffee first thing in the morning to get going. After starting TM, she would wake up, do TM and then not feel the need or desire for a cup of coffee. She also noticed that the number of cups of coffee she used to drink in a day went down dramatically.

Along the way, we learned that TM is one of the most researched meditation techniques. There are over 350 peer-reviewed research studies. Through this research, there is plenty evidence of the efficacy of the TM for managing stress and a host of other biomarkers for stress, many of those I discussed in the last post. The following are just a couple of examples from the TM website page, Proven effective for stress and anxiety.

Effective for Stress and Anxiety v2

Decresed Cortisol

Recently, many celebrities have started to talk about and promote TM, e.g., Oprah, Seinfeld, Ellen Degeneres, some of them from their personal experience of having practiced TM for many years.

But I am an experiential kind of guy, always asking the question, “But will it work for me?” From my personal experience, I can unequivocally say that it is an indispensable tool to be able to handle stress.

There are days that I get home from work in the evening, when just looking at me Kimberly would says, “You look tired and hungry. Why don’t you eat something right away?” And, I would tell her that I need TM worse than I need food. I just do a 20 minute of TM and then I am refreshed and good to go until bed time.

If anyone talks of being under stress all the time, they usually hear from me about the TM. I recommend TM without any reservations. Because of my proselytizing, In my immediate and extended family, everyone has learned TM – our sons, my brothers, my sister, and their children. I am not sure everyone does TM as regularly as I do, but they all have this tool that they can fall back upon. Our sons and nieces have mentioned of TM being very helpful in dealng with their  college stress.

I have been so impressed with the TM that I have actually gone and learned advanced methods, beyond the basic TM technique that I learned in 1985. I learned what is called Advanced Technique. I have also learned a process of TM that is called TM Sidhi, which requires much more commitment of time and money. TM Sidhi learning culminates into techniques for Yogic Flying, where you offer intention and your body lifts off from the ground.

Of course, there are many other types of mediation. However, I have only incidental or superficial knowledge and experience of these, especially their role in stress management. I am not really able to talk about those with any authority or offer any guidance.

Recently, I have been exposed to a type of meditation called Mindful Meditation. This type of meditation is being taken up in medical schools and universities such as UCLA, and is subject of research for stress reduction and management.

What is your experience with meditation?

Have you found meditation useful method for managing stress?

 

Post #16 – What is stress really and why is it bad for longevity and health?

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Biomarkers for Stress, Life-Span, Optimal Health, Stress

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Biomarkers, Cholesterol, Chronic Disease, Health Span, Life Span, Stress

Stress has become such a common buzz word. We all talk about it. We generally know it is bad for us. It is constantly in the news.

There are exceptions though. Some believe that stress is good, arguing that if you take away the stress you take away the motivation and drive.

But whenever I get into conversation with someone and start to dig a little deeper with questions like, “So, what do you think is stress?” “Why do you think that stress is bad?” Why do you think it is good?” Or, “How do you deal with stress?” The subject becomes very squishy, very quickly.

Even Hans Selye, the person who originally coined the term stress in 1936 in the context of health and spent life-time studying it, at one time threw up his hands and declared, “Everyone knows what stress is, but no one really knows.”

So, let us take the first question first, what is stress, any ways.

Webster’s Dictionary defines Stress as “a state of mental or worry caused by problems in your life, work, etc.”; or, “something that causes strong feelings of worry or anxiety”

According to the American Institute of Stress, another popular definition of stress is, “a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.”

Few useful concepts, while talking about stress are:

Acute Stress: Fight or flight. The body prepares to defend itself. It takes about 90 minutes for the metabolism to return to normal when the response is over.

Chronic Stress: The cost of daily living: bills, kids, jobs…This is the stress we tend to ignore or push down. Left uncontrolled this stress affects our health- our body and our immune system. This is the type of stress that causes wear and tear on our bodies and can impact health and longevity.

Eustress: “Good stress” in daily life that has positive connotations, e.g., marriage, promotion, child birth, winning money, new friends, graduation

Distress: “Bad stress” in daily life that has negative connotations, e.g., divorce, punishment, injury, negative feelings, financial problems, work difficulties.

So, from  the point of view of theses definitions, the stress is really a subjective concept, based on how we perceive a thing or an event. The same event or activity, say a roller coaster ride, could be a eustress (good stress) for one person and distress for another. This is why psychologists or mental health practitioners often get involved in diagnosing and helping cope with chronic stress.

Although stress is a subjective concept, the impact on our bodies is often very objective and real. We have all experienced the rising of hairs on the back of the neck, the sweats, tension in our gut, racing of heart, dilating of pupils, and pumping of blood in our face, arms and legs.

As the following figure shows, stress starting in mind, causes, a chain reaction of neurological, chemical and biological processes. (Figure is taken from a presentation,Why Stress Is A Far More Important Cause Of Coronary Disease Than Cholesterol, by Paul J. Rosch, M.D., F.A.C.P. President, The American Institute of Stress)

Effects of Stress

Physiological effects of most acute stress events subside about 90 minutes after the conclusion of the stress event. Body returns to normal homeostasis or biological equilibrium.

However, it is the repeated acute stress events or chronic stress that are real cause for concern and take toll on our bodies. The results of such chronic stress can be objectively measured from a host of biomarkers that include (from Biomarkers of Chronic Stress, by Laalithya Konduru):

  • Metabolic Biomarkers: Cholesterol, Albumin, Waist-to-Hip Ratio, Glycosylated Hemoglobin
  • Immunological Biomarkers: IL-6, TNF-α, CRP, IGF-1
  • Neuroendocrine Biomarkers: Cortisol, DHEA, Adrenaline, Noradrenaline, Dopamine, Aldosterone
  • Certain Metabolites, chemical figure prints of cellular processes
  • Modifications in Mitochondria
  • Induction in the Brain of DRR1, a tumor suppressor gene

Most of us recognize some of these biomarkers. Others are quite esoteric. In any case, from this list, it does not take a neuroscientist to figure out that chronic stress can mess with a number of things that are key to our health: insulin, cholesterol, hormones, our immune system, can cause inflammation, reduce energy level in the body and impact working of our brain.

Looks like a real important subject to me, if we want to live healthy life free of chronic diseases for an optimal life span.

What do you think? How do you fee about stress?

In a future post, I would like to explore some anti-dotes to chronic stress

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