Posts Tagged ‘stress’

Quiet acts of kindness

Posted: November 5, 2015 in Humour, Popular Culture et al
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hugs

Most of them you never see, or notice. Yet everywhere you go, quiet acts of kindness surround you.

Every day, good people live their lives with strength, with purpose, with compassion and integrity. Every day, the whole world is lifted by people who are happy to have the opportunity to make a difference.

Usually, those who boast about it or make grand promises are not the ones who are actually advancing life’s goodness. It’s the quiet, sincere kindness, from folks who have no interest in taking credit, that gives each day its special shine.

It’s hard to remember sometimes, with the relentless miserableness of the news, but the world is actually filled with good, caring people who never find themselves in the headlines and who never care to, either.

The magnitude of their cumulative kindness each day is too large and far too widespread to ever be calculated. It is the perfect tonic to those who are toxic in our life – people who should know better but are nevertheless happy to offload their personal stresses onto us, to be angry, unreasonable, venial or just plain bad.

Life is good today because so many people choose to see it as good. And in every small moment, each in his or her own way, they humbly give life to the goodness.

Quiet acts of kindness surround you, even now. So feel the goodness and quietly pass it on.

A word. A gentle gesture. A task done for someone who can’t manage it themselves. A little encouragement. Or just some simple unforced friendliness.

Feelgood psycho-babble? Nope. This isn’t just “fluffy stuff”. Living in a close-knit community and having good neighbours could have hidden health benefits and may even reduce people’s risk of suffering a heart attack, new research has claimed.

getting onResearchers in the USA said that the social support and reduction in stress levels afforded by getting on well with the people in your community could be of benefit, particularly for elderly people more likely to suffer a health crisis.

Thy found, based on a four-year study of more than 5,000 Americans over 50, that people who said they trusted and liked their neighbours, felt part of the community, and expected their neighbours would help them in a difficulty, were less likely to go on to have a heart attack.

Levels of social cohesion were rated one to seven based on people’s responses. Each one point on the scale represented a 17 per cent lower risk of heart attack, the researchers from the University of Michigan said.

Well, yesterday Mrs Wellthisiswhatithink and I were at the races in the afternoon. We were having a wonderful day – our mare Khutulun won with a huge surge at the end of her race and a great time was had by all.

photo finish

But it was somewhat spoiled by the fact that all the way to the racecourse, about an hour and a half, the car had been busily flashing warning lights at us (and plenty of things that go ping were ping-ping-pinging for all they were worth) and after Khutulun had duly saluted (at 14-1 no less, thank you very much) we called the Roadside Assist guy.

He picked us up from the back of the grandstand, which was very nice of him, as by then there was the mother of all thunderstorms breaking over our head, and to find us he had to weave his way through thousands of pie-eyed drunken revellers and then take us from the track to our car which was miles away in the car park. He didn’t have to say yes to doing that, he just did. And he was chirpy, and cheery, and made us feel better because of his relentless enthusiasm.

He duly got us going, chatting cheerfully all the time dispensing little jokes and bits of folk wisdom, although the car did play up all the way home and finally conked out altogether about three streets from our house, but that’s another story.

What really struck me apart from Mr Happy Car Fixer was the little guy in his 60s sitting in his car waiting for the traffic to clear leaving the course, who got chatting to us as we piled out of the mechanic’s van – that’s when we eventually made it back to our car after narrowly avoiding running down half a dozen young ladies who obviously thought that drinking four bottles of cheap champagne in the hospitality tent somehow makes you invulnerable if hit by a truck.

He was an immigrant from somewhere or other – I am guessing Serbia or Croatia or somewhere like that from his thick accent – and as soon as he worked out we were in a fix he said “Well, I can take you to Melbourne, no problem.” He just smiled an encouraging cracked-tooth, unshaven smile and said it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to drive someone you’ve met 30 seconds before 125 kilometres down the freeway.

We didn’t need his help in the end, but what a generous thing to say? Fair bucked us up.

As we limped cautiously out of the car park a cheerfully sloshed guy making his way through the puddles back to town called out to us “Any chance of a lift?” and Mrs Wellthisiswhatithink, entirely unsure that the car would keep going for a hundred yards let alone an hour and a half answered “No, sorry.” and I felt a little guilty after the kindness that had been shown to us.

But we had been told in no uncertain terms not to stop if we wanted to get home, so we spluttered and lurched onwards.

Sorry mate. Hit us up again next time. Just let me get the car fixed first. Which I have no doubt will cost every penny we won on Khutulun.

Funny old life. And often, a kind one.

Stress. You may pass it on genetically to your kids.

Posted: August 24, 2015 in Science
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  • Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes
  • New finding is first example in humans of the theory of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children
  • The team’s work is the clearest sign yet that life experience can affect the genes of subsequent generations.

In a fascinating study discussed in the Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, it seems that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors are capable of being passed on to their children, the clearest sign yet that one person’s life experience can affect subsequent generations.

holocaustThe conclusion from a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital led by Rachel Yehuda stems from the genetic study of 32 Jewish men and women who had either been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, witnessed or experienced torture or who had had to hide during the second world war.

They also analysed the genes of their children, who are known to have increased likelihood of stress disorders, and compared the results with Jewish families who were living outside of Europe during the war. “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents,” said Yehuda.

Her team’s work is the clearest example in humans of the transmission of trauma to a child via what is called “epigenetic inheritance” – the idea that environmental influences such as smoking, diet and stress can affect the genes of your children and possibly even grandchildren.

The idea is still highly controversial, as scientific convention states that genes contained in DNA are the only way to transmit biological information between generations. However, our genes are modified by the environment all the time, through chemical tags that attach themselves to our DNA, switching genes on and off. Recent studies suggest that some of these tags might somehow be passed through generations, meaning our environment could have and impact on our children’s health. If so, it will provide a whole new area of preventative health care.

Other studies have proposed a more tentative connection between one generation’s experience and the next. For example, girls born to Dutch women who were pregnant during a severe famine at the end of the second world war had an above-average risk of developing schizophrenia. Likewise, another study has showed that men who smoked before puberty fathered heavier sons than those who smoked after.

GenesThe team were specifically interested in one region of a gene associated with the regulation of stress hormones, which is known to be affected by trauma. “It makes sense to look at this gene,” said Yehuda. “If there’s a transmitted effect of trauma, it would be in a stress-related gene that shapes the way we cope with our environment.”

They found epigenetic tags on the very same part of this gene in both the Holocaust survivors and their offspring, the same correlation was not found in any of the control group and their children. Through further genetic analysis, the team ruled out the possibility that the epigenetic changes were a result of trauma that the children had experienced themselves.

“To our knowledge, this provides the first demonstration of transmission of pre-conception stress effects resulting in epigenetic changes in both the exposed parents and their offspring in humans,” said Yehuda, whose work was published in Biological Psychiatry.

It’s still not clear how these tags might be passed from parent to child. Genetic information in sperm and eggs is not supposed to be affected by the environment – any epigenetic tags on DNA had been thought to be wiped clean soon after fertilisation occurs.

However, research by Azim Surani at Cambridge University and colleagues, has recently shown that some epigenetic tags escape the cleaning process at fertilisation, slipping through the net. It’s not clear whether the gene changes found in the study would permanently affect the children’s health, nor do the results upend any of our theories of evolution.

Whether the gene in question is switched on or off could have a tremendous impact on how much stress hormone is made and how we cope with stress, said Yehuda. “It’s a lot to wrap our heads around. It’s certainly an opportunity to learn a lot of important things about how we adapt to our environment and how we might pass on environmental resilience.”

The impact of Holocaust survival on the next generation has been investigated for years – the challenge has been to show intergenerational effects are not just transmitted by social influences from the parents or regular genetic inheritance, said Marcus Pembrey, emeritus professor of paediatric genetics at University College London.

“Yehuda’s paper makes some useful progress. What we’re getting here is the very beginnings of a understanding of how one generation responds to the experiences of the previous generation. It’s fine-tuning the way your genes respond to the world.”

Can you inherit a memory of trauma?

Researchers have already shown that certain fears might be inherited through generations, at least in animals.

Scientists at Emory University in Atlanta trained male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossom by pairing the smell with a small electric shock. Eventually the mice shuddered at the smell even when it was delivered on its own.

Despite never having encountered the smell of cherry blossom, the offspring of these mice had the same fearful response to the smell – shuddering when they came in contact with it. So too did some of their own offspring.

On the other hand, offspring of mice that had been conditioned to fear another smell, or mice who’d had no such conditioning had no fear of cherry blossom.

The fearful mice produced sperm which had fewer epigenetic tags on the gene responsible for producing receptors that sense cherry blossom. The pups themselves had an increased number of cherry blossom smell receptors in their brain, although how this led to them associating the smell with fear is still a mystery.

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The implications of this study are surely enormous. One can only imagine the impact on children of parents living in vicious war zones like Syria and Iraq. The children of parents suffering the horrors of famine in Africa. What changes are we wreaking in our gene pool from the modern day stress of living in overcrowded urban environments, especially those that are grindingly poor, such as in Mexico, Brazil, the Phillipines, India and elsewhere?

And very close to home, what are the impacts on the eventual descendants of the poor people trapped in seemingly never-ending detention in the Australian  immigration system: people who have already suffered the trauma of leaving their homes as refugees, escaping persecution.

We have often heard “the sins of the fathers are vested in the children”. Now it seems their innocent suffering may be, too.

The 10 best ever anxiety management techniques

Posted: January 27, 2015 in Popular Culture et al
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The commonest illness on earth that turns lives into misery. Yet in many cases, we can make a huge contribution to our own recovery.

The commonest illness on earth that turns lives into misery. Yet in many cases, we can make a huge contribution to our own recovery.

At various stages in the last 56 years, I, like most people, have been prone to anxiety.

In my case, facing a dreadful crisis at one point in my life, it tipped over into full-blown Obsessional Compulsive Disorder and Depression. (Search for either of those terms on this blog for more information.)

Nowadays, perhaps with the benefit of middle aged perspective, (the clear realisation that one will survive most things and come out stronger, given time, and therefore it can be excellent practice to just to try and “roll with the punches” – indeed, the greatest gift of middle age is patience) I am less likely to fall prone to the misery of anxiety.

Perhaps, also, my brain chemistry is more stable, (it is notoriously less so for teenagers and young adults), or I have just learned to recognise anxiety faster, and deal with it more effectively.

In any event, now that I have taken the decision to be open about my own brushes with “mental illness” (which should, of course, be called “physical illness affecting the brain” – I am no more “nuts” than the next person) I am constantly meeting other people who struggle with anxiety disorders of one sort or another, and who often ask my advice when I pipe up about them.

Sadly, I am not an expert.

Or rather, I am expert in what the bloody illness feels like, but not really an expert in how to solve it.

What worked for me, or someone else, might not work for you. So I went looking for some help online, and found this excellent article from the Australian National University, which is well worth a read.

I have made the occasional comment myself in italics. The rest is from ANU. It’s chock full of good commonsense.

I hope you, or someone you know, finds it helpful.

The 10 best ever anxiety management techniques

These techniques fall into three typical clusters:

  • the physical arousal that constitutes the terror of panic
  • the ‘wired’ feelings of tension that correlate with being ‘stressed out’
  • the mental anguish of rumination – a brain that won’t stop thinking distressing thoughts

Cluster One: Physical Arousal

Distressing Physical Arousal – sympathetic arousal causes the heart thumping, pulse-racing, dizzy, tingly, shortness of breath physical symptoms, that can come out of the blue and are intolerable when not understood.

Even low levels of anxiety can cause physical tension in the jaw, neck and back as well as an emotional somatic feeling of doom or dread in the pit of the stomach, which will set off a mental search for what might be causing it.

Method 1: Manage your body.

  • Eat right
  • Avoid alcohol, nicotine, sugar and caffeine
    Certainly in excess. The temptation to self-medicate with alcohol particularly is a curse for those who suffer from anxiety, because it is an utterly transitory solution. As soon as the buzz wears off, one is just as (or often more) depressed, and now dealing with a hangover as well.The most intelligent comment I have ever heard about booze was “I used to drink to drown my sorrows. Then one day I woke up and discovered they’d learned how to swim.” However, in my experience, one or two drinks, especially in the late afternoon or early evening, can be helpful in “switching off” the day and settling down for an evening’s relaxation and a night’s rest. I am also advised that a good session on a treadmill in the spare room or at the gym has a similar relaxing effect.
  • Exercise
  • On going self care
    This needs to be active and deliberate. Looking after yourself is often the lowest priority for people with anxiety or depression. It should be the first.
  • Sleep
    I always rely on the rule “an hour before midnight is worth two after”. I have no idea if that has any scientific basis, but it’s true for me. Similarly, sleeping at the wrong time of the day (eg during daylight hours) can leave one with a sense of worthlessness, or having “wasted time”. That said, I think I am convinced that a short “Nanna Nap” (eg 30-60 mins) in the mid-late afternoon can be health-enhancing and lead to more productive evenings.
  • Consider hormonal changes

Method 2: Breathe

Breathing deeply and being aware of the process will slow down or stop the stress response.

I don’t know why this simple fact is so hard for stressed people to get hold of. Close your eyes. Decide to ignore, momentarily at least, whatever is troubling you. Breathe in, hold the breath momentarily, breathe out through your mouth. Empty your lungs. Repeat. Do it for 60 seconds and you can feel control of your emotions returning. It’s infallible.

Do the conscious, deep breathing for about 1 minute at a time, and do it when you are not stressed, at least 10-15 times per day – just do it every time you are waiting for something eg., the phone to ring, an appointment, the kettle to boil, waiting in a line etc.

Method 3: Mindful Awareness

Close your eyes and breathe; notice the body, how the intake of air feels, how the heart beats, what you can feel in the gut.

Breathe. Just breathe.

Breathe. Just breathe.

  • With eyes still closed, purposefully shift your awareness away from your body to everything you can hear or smell or feel through your skin
  • Shift awareness back and forth from your body to what’s going on around you

You will learn in a physical way that you can control what aspects of the world – internal or external – you’ll notice, giving you an internal locus of control and learning that when you can ignore physical sensations, you can overcome them.

Above all, resist the temptation to make catastrophic interpretations of events that bring on panic or worry. Keeping things “in perspective” allows you to feel more in control and mindful of the present.

Very few things are catastrophic in life, and even catastrophic things can be overcome.

Just decide to stop “blowing things out of proportion”.

Stop luxuriating in fear.

It isn’t good for you, and it never solves the problem.

Cluster Two: Tension, Stress and Dread

Many people with anxiety search frantically for the reasons behind their symptoms in the hope that they can ‘solve’ whatever problem it is,

But since much of their heightened tension isn’t about a real problem, they are actually wasting their time running around an inner maze of perpetual worry.

Even if the tension stems from psychological or other causes, there are ways to eliminate the symptoms of worry.

These methods are most helpful for diminishing chronic tension.

Method 4: Don’t listen when worry calls your name

This feeling of dread and tension comprises a state of low grade fear, which can also cause other physical symptoms, like headache, joint pain and ulcers. The feeling of dread is just the emotional manifestation of physical tension.

You must first learn that worry is a habit with a neurobiological underpinning. Then apply relaxation to counteract the tension that is building up.

Nothing real is causing it, so get rid of the symptoms, and enjoy life without them.

This ‘Don’t Listen’ method decreases the tension by combining a decision to simply ignore the voice of worry with a cue for the relaxation state.

To stop listening to the command to worry, you can say to yourself: “This is just my anxious brain firing wrong”. This is the cue to begin relaxation breathing (as described earlier) which will stop the physical sensations of dread that trigger the radar.

Method 5: Knowing, Not Showing, Anger

When you fear anger because of past experience, (which may be very real, and justified) the very feeling of anger, even though it remains unconscious, can produce anxiety, which does no good to you at all. To know you’re angry doesn’t require you to show you’re angry.

A simple technique: Next time you feel stricken with anxiety, you should sit down and write as many answers as possible to this question, “If I were angry, what might I be angry about?” Restrict answers to single words or brief phrases.

This may open the door to get some insight into the connection between your anger and your anxiety.

Method 6: Have a Little Fun

Laughing is a great way to increase good feelings and discharge tension. Getting in touch with fun and play isn’t easy for the serious, tense worrier.

A therapy goal could be simply to re-learn what you had fun doing in the past and prescribe yourself some fun.

In my experience, this can involve choosing to be around people who are fun, and spending less time with people who “bring you down”. When you are more on an even keel, you can deal with less cheerful people more easily. In the meantime, there’s good reason to avoid them. Seek out positive, gentle, funny people.

Cluster Three: The Mental Anguish of Rumination

These methods deal with the difficult problem of a brain that won’t stop thinking about distressing thoughts or where worry suffocates your mental and emotional life. These worries hum along in the background, generating tension or sick feelings, destroying concentration and diminishing the capacity to pay attention to the good things in life.

Therapy does not need to focus on any specific worry, but rather on the act of worrying itself – the following methods are the most effective in eliminating rumination.

Method 7: Turning it Off

If a ruminating brain is like an engine stuck in gear and over-heating, then slowing or stopping it gives it a chance to cool off. The goal of ‘turning it off’ is to give the ruminative mind a chance to rest and calm down.

Sit quietly with eyes closed and focus on an image of an open container ready to receive every issue on your mind. See and name each issue or worry and imagine putting it into the container.

When no more issues come to mind, ‘put a lid’ on the container and place it on a shelf or in some other out of the way place until you need to go back to get something from it.

Once you have the container on the shelf, you invite into the space that is left in your mind whatever is the most important current thought or feeling.

At night, right before sleep, invite in a peaceful or happy thought to focus on while drifting off.

Method 8: Persistent Interruption of Rumination

Ruminative worry has a life of its own, consistently interfering with every other thought in your mind.

The key to changing this pattern is to be persistent with your attempts to use thought stopping and thought replacement. Its important to attempt to interrupt the pattern every time you catch yourself ruminating – be aware that you’ve spent a long time establishing this pattern and it will take persistence to wear it down.

Work on having a good five minutes without worry … then another .. then a day … and so on. Be patient. Change takes time.

Thought stopping – use the command “Stop” and/or a visual image to remind yourself that you are going into an old thinking habit that just leaves you feeling uptight.

Thought replacement – substitute a reassuring, assertive or self-accepting statement after you have managed to stop the thought. You may need to develop a set of these statements that you can look at or recall from memory.

Method 9: Worry Well, but Only Once

Some worries just have to be faced head-on, and worrying about them the right way can help eliminate secondary, unnecessary worrying. When you feel that your worries are out of control try this next method:

  1. Worry through all the issues within a time limit of 10-20 mins and cover all the bases
  2. Do anything that must be done at the present time. Set a time when it’ll be necessary to think about the worry again.
  3. Write that time on a calendar.
  4. Whenever the thought pops up again say, “Stop! I already worried!” and divert your thoughts as quickly as possible to another activity – you may need to make a list of these possible diversions beforehand. Until it’s time to tackle the issue again, forget it.
    You may find, in the meantime, it quietly resolves itself.

Method 10: Learn to Plan Instead of Worry

A big difference between planning and worrying is that a good plan doesn’t need constant review.

An anxious brain, however, will reconsider a plan over and over to be sure it’s the right plan.

This is all just ruminating worry disguising itself as making a plan and then seeking constant reassurance.

It is important to learn the fundamentals of planning as it can make a big difference in calming a ruminative mind. These include:

  1. Concretely identifying the problem
  2. Listing the problem solving options
  3. Picking one of the options
  4. Writing out a plan of action
Fail to plan, and you plan to fail. Never was a truer word spoken, and especially for people who are inclined to be anxious.

Fail to plan, and you plan to fail. Never was a truer word spoken, and especially for people who are inclined to be anxious.

To be successful in this approach, you must also have learned to apply the thought-stopping/thought-replacing tools or you can turn planning into endless cycles of re-planning.

Once a plan has been made you can use the fact that you have the plan as a concrete reassurance to prevent the round-robin of ruminative re-planning.

The plan becomes part of the thought-stopping statement:

“Stop! I have a plan!”

It also helps the endless reassurance-seeking, because it provides written solutions even to problems the ruminator considers hopelessly complex.

Conclusion

These skills do require patience and determination. However, once learnt, people gain a lasting sense of their own power and competence in working actively with their own symptoms to conquer anxiety through their own efforts.

Getting control of yourself. It’s a wonderfully liberating feeling. Good luck!