STRESS!!

The following article is comprised of excerpts from http://www.nih.gov/news/WordonHealth/oct2000. Although it may seem to be a little unrelated to exercise or fitness, it's actually very related. Along with the negative effects listed below, when you are over stressed you will also experience decreased recovery from exercise, fat gain, and muscle loss. So checkout the following, and get the stress in your life under control.

Some ways to control stress:
-Identify areas of stress
-Seek support from family and friends
-Meditation and Prayer have been shown to help reduce stress levels
-Schedual quite times around meals. Eating while stressed may be twice as bad for you
-Look into support groups for stress areas that can't be eliminated (divorce, death of a loved one, etc.)
-Use your stress to make you more productive when it helps (see article), then let go of it when it is not usefull (meditation or prayer before bed time)
-Get plenty of sleep (most adults function best on 8 to 9 hours per night)


For thousands of years, people believed that stress made you sick. Many were told by their doctors to go to spas or seaside resorts when they were ill. Gradually these ideas lost favor as more concrete causes and cures were found for illnesses. But in the last decade, scientists like Dr. Esther Sternberg, director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, have been discovering the links between the brain and the immune system.

The brain and the immune system have a cycle of communication that allows each of them to talk to the other. These waves of communication go into effect when you have an infection or something else that causes inflammation, such as a burn or injury.

According to Dr. Sternberg, if you’re chronically stressed, the part of the brain that controls the stress response is going to be constantly pumping out a lot of stress hormones. The immune cells are being bathed in molecules which are essentially telling them to stop fighting. And so in situations of chronic stress your immune cells are less able to respond to an invader like a bacteria or a virus.

This theory holds up in studies looking at high-levels of shorter term stress or chronic stress: in caregivers like those taking care of relatives with Alzheimer’s, medical students undergoing exam stress, Army Rangers undergoing extremely grueling physical stress and couples with marital stress. People in these situations, Dr. Sternberg says, show a prolonged healing time, a decreased ability of their immune systems to respond to vaccination, and an increased susceptibility to viral infections like the common cold.

You do have to take into consideration that some stress is good for you. Dr. Sternberg says, “I have to get my stress response to a certain optimal level so I can perform in front of an audience when I give a talk.” Otherwise she may come across as lethargic and listless.

But while some stress is good, too much is not good. “If you’re too stressed, your performance falls off,” Dr. Sternberg says. “The objective should be not to get rid of stress completely because you can’t get rid of stress – stress is life, life is stress. Rather, you need to be able to use your stress response optimally. “The key is to learn to move yourself to that optimal peak point so that you’re not underperforming but you’re also not so stressed that you’re unable to perform.

The other thing to think about is control. “Control is a very important part of whether or not we feel stressed,” says Dr. Sternberg. “So if you can learn to feel that you’re in control or actually take control of certain aspects of the situation that you’re in, you can reduce your stress response.”