STRESS OUT
Dr Christopher Pitt
Contents
Chapter 2: What is stress anyway
Chapter 3: The physiological effects of stress
Chapter 4: Efficiency, The key to reducing stress
Copyright (c) 2010 Dr Christopher Pitt
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to abundancehc@me.com, or mailed to Pitt Medical Trust, PO Box 33, North Lakes Q 4509 Australia
This publication contains general medical advice. Specific application should be discussed with your physician.
Author: Dr Christopher Pitt
Edition: 1st
Published by Dr Christopher Pitt at Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com)
I wanted this section to be like my morning espresso - short and stimulating. But there are also a lot of people to thank. They have contributed to me as much as they have contributed to the book.
My life is dedicated to the service of God. It is through him that "we live, and move, and have our being." If it wasn't for the love and redemption of Jesus, I don't think I would be sane, possibly not even alive, today. He is the source of all of my life and productivity.
To my wife Sharon, for being the only person in the world who truly knows me, and is still married to me anyway. When I have been at my absolute lowest ebb, you kept me going by just accepting me without criticism.
To my boys, Lachlan and Alex, I love you both - you always make me smile. To Mum and Dad, your level of dedication and sacrifice to our family still sets a benchmark which one day I hope to attain. To Mel and Nic, for your editorial assistance and sisterly guidance. Adam, for helping me indulge my crazy dark sense of humour. You help me enjoy myself.
Thanks to Lynn Goldsmith for both editorial assistance, and your encouragement through this process of getting this book to publication. Alive Magazine: for publishing my work for almost ten years now. To Sean Taylor and the team at Wizard Academy Press, thanks for taking a chance on a virgin author and being my first ever book publisher.
Lastly, there are three people that have had an enormous influence on my life, yet I have never met them - Ps Bayless Conley of Cottonwood Christian Centre in LA, Ps Bill Johnson of Bethel Church, Redding, and Roy H. Williams, the Wizard of Ads. One day I'd love to have a coffee with them - their words have fed me every week for many years now, stimulating me mentally and spiritually.
"Stop the world, I want to get off" - T-shirt slogan
I hate the gym!
I know that's probably not the best way for a health coach to start off a book. It's not that gyms are bad per se, but I just don't like them. My personal trainer used to get me on the treadmill, and use it like a modern form of torture. I would just be getting into a rhythm and then she would hit a couple of buttons and it would get faster and steeper. I remember this one time when she was feeling a little more sadistic than usual, it felt like I was trying to sprint up Mt Everest. Eventually when I complained of crushing chest pain she eased it down, and I quietly collapsed by the side of the machine for the next 30 minutes, delirious and fighting for breath!
A night or two later I had a nightmare. It was of the treadmill, or as it was called in the dream, "The Dreadmill". It just kept getting faster and faster, no matter how much I begged and pleaded for mercy. Faster, faster, faster ... I couldn't grasp the balance handles anymore and I began to be dragged backwards as it raced me towards oblivion!
I woke up screaming, sweaty and cramping, clinging to the bed clothes like a drowning man to a lifeguard. I have never forgotten that dream. And I haven't been real keen about the gym since!
Many people are finding modern life becoming like my treadmill of terror. Everything just seems to be getting faster. We want it all, and we want it now. Twenty-four-seven fast food, ATM's, instant messaging and SMS! Blogs, download-able music, internet shopping, real-time news and weather, Blackberries so you can have your e-mail everywhere you go - the list is endless. The lust for speed currently touches every aspect of life in 21st century western culture. And like the "Dreadmill" life seems to be getting harder too, where getting ahead in life seems like a constant uphill battle.
Technology was supposed to be all about making our work more efficient, so we could spend more time relaxing. However, with technology permeating modern life, speed has become less of a luxury and more of a necessity. As time-saving technology has improved, our expectations have lifted, and we find we have even less time than before. Indeed, computers were once touted as a revolution that would automate our tasks, at work and at home, allowing us to have more recreation time than ever before. In fact the opposite is true. Australians work longer than any other Western country, at an average of 38.6 hours per week (this figure is also considered to be lower than the real figure as it is diluted by the high number of part-time workers in Australia). In comparison, workers in England and the U.S. only work 35 hours a week on average.(1)
The other effect of the speed revolution that is sweeping society is the time it takes to get things we want. Surveys reveal that one quarter of Americans get impatient after waiting in line for more than five minutes(2). We expect all our desires to be met immediately - once that desire has formed in our heart and mind.
A tech blog on MacWorld forums stated that Australians have the highest use of "bit torrents", per capita, in the world! Envisional (www.envisional.com) claimed, 'Despite making up only 0.3 % of the world's population, Australians account for 20% of BitTorrent traffic', and, 'Two thirds of all internet use is peer-to-peer network traffic - and most of that is related to piracy."(3) In other words, as a nation, Australians are so impatient that they could not wait until the end of the first season of Heroes or Lost to see the climax. Many Australians illegally downloaded, and then pirated, copies of the shows in large numbers. The Australian networks suddenly switched to "fast-tracking" the shows from the US, obviously to try and negate the surge of illegal download. One can only assume that the instantaneous, if not illegal, bit torrent growth caused a ratings nose-dive!
For some, the increasing speed in our lives is exciting, and is worthy of embracing. But for many others, either because of inefficiency or just plain dislike, they find that the speed of life is very stressful. Stress has become the modern pandemic. Stress (and "toxins") gets bandied about by the media as causing or contributing to almost every modern malady. From insomnia to cancer, flatulence to stroke, stress plays a part. It is estimated that stress and mental illness costs economies billions of dollars annually - the Australian economy, 4.3 billion dollars annually(4), or the European Union, 20 billion euros(5). That's not insignificant!
It's not only the increasing demands from the ever accelerating speed of our society that induces stress, but also the expectations on us - from family, society and ourselves. The fragmentation of our society, and the neglect of spirituality, can also impact on the stress levels of an individual.
Learning to manage our stress is important because our society is not going to slow down, and the expectations of our employers and our communities are here to stay. Ultimately, we are never going to run from stress. But handling the stress that's upon us is difficult, and often seems like just another imposition, to distract you from your already busy lives.
In this book, I am going to keep pure facts to a minimum. Let's face it you don't need much effort to find information on any subject in our modern world. Google "stress" and you get about 210,000,000 different sites! Information on stress is already out there. Most people have heard it all before through the web, the media or their doctor.
But Sophocles wrote, 'Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save through trial.'(6) Information is easy, but knowledge is only achieved by doing. Action can be especially difficult when you are up against external pressures, and your own thoughts and behaviours, most of which occur without your own conscious awareness.
Rather than touting the seven step panacea for all your stress, this book will provide meaningful and easy-to-action steps that will help you to take control. There is never an easy fix. Changing your life is like renovating. You have to take apart the old house piece by piece, and then rebuild it piece by piece. Slap-up renovations don't last. Neither do quick-fixes for your health. The aim of this book is to empower you - to give you techniques to unlock your inner strength so you can make the changes for yourself. Done properly, the positive changes that you make will last a lifetime.
This book will go through exactly what stress is, and why we need a little bit of it in our lives. We will go through some of the things that hinder us in reducing stress, and we will talk about the various stress management techniques that you may have heard of, and discuss just which of these are effective. Then we will get into the miniscule details of figuring out the practical goals and steps needed to fulfil those goals, to see real change in your stress levels, and in your working and personal lives.
We will also talk a little bit about failure, because failure often accompanies our attempts to make changes. The perfect home renovation is rare. Sometimes people have to redo whole rooms to get their house just right. Working out how to deal with failure in changing our lives is just as important.
Are you ready to make some renovations? Let's start from the very beginning.
'Everyone knows what stress is, but nobody really knows.' Hans Selye (Scientist responsible for coining the term "stress".)
So what is stress? I once read that stress is 'Going to the loo in someone else's house and finding it doesn't flush properly.' Whatever YOUR definition of stress happens to be, you can be guaranteed it is different to everyone else's. As the father of stress research so aptly pointed out, everyone knows what it is but we don't know what it is exactly.
But given that this is a book about stress, we should try and establish what stress is, as best we can. It's essential for the rest of the book, because we all have different ways of defining stress, different causes of our stress, and indeed, we all have different responses to that stress.
Is there one universal definition of "stress"? Well ... no! Unfortunately it's a little more complicated than that. However, stress occurs when a person believes that the demands placed upon them are greater than their ability to deal with those demands. This can be real (standing in front of a pack of hungry lions with nothing more than a small stick to defend yourself) or imagined (thinking about standing before hungry lions with only a small stick to defend yourself). To boil it down, stress occurs when a person feels out of control. This explains why situations that result in stress differ for every individual, because stress is directly related to feelings, which are very subjective and differ in all of us.
Some stress is bad for us, and this is the sort of stress that is discussed all of the time by TV news and celebrity shrinks. For the most part of this book, we will also be discussing this type of stress - maladaptive stress, or sometimes distress. But it's only half the story, because there is also the type of stress that is important - positive stress that helps us to perform in life-threatening situations that require increased strength or concentration - what many people often refer to as the "fight-or-flight reflex". If you really were confronted by a pack of hungry lions, I think that you would have a pretty good reason to be stressed at that point. In order to survive, you really only have two choices, stay and fight them off, or run away as fast as possible.
In order to do either, you need a lot of extra energy to fuel your muscles, so adrenaline and cortisol surge from your adrenal glands. That flood of stress hormones diverts blood away from your skin and intestines, and towards your muscles to boost their supply of nutrients and oxygen. It also causes a surge of glucose to pour into the blood stream from the liver's stores of glycogen for that extra boost of energy. That extra boost of glucose also helps feed the brain cells, increasing concentration and mental activity. The blood also becomes more adhesive, to help stop the bleeding quickly if there are any injuries.
This stress response is also very useful in modern "combat" situations, such as natural disasters, or in traffic accidents, or even in situations which require a lot of mental energy quickly, like arguments or high-pressure business situations.
So, there exists both positive and negative stress, side by side. It is interesting that the Chinese characters used to form the word "stress" have the character representing "danger" on top and the character representing "opportunity" below it. The amount of stress we face is important in how we will react. In classical psychology and business teaching, there is the stress-productivity curve. In the shape of an upside down "U", the graph shows that with no stress, there is no productivity. However, with maximum stress, there is also no productivity. The point with the highest productivity is classically the point of medium stress - "not too heavy, not too light".
The same goes for other types of stress as well. When looking for different definitions of stress, I came across one definition from the Microsoft Office dictionary, 'Force exerted on a body and results in deformation or strain.'(7) So, if you take a rubber band and tie it like a sling-shot, but leave it lying on a table, you have an object under no stress. It doesn't really produce anything useful, it just sits there. However, if you stretch it, the rubber band comes under strain, and if you let it go, it can propel an object. With too much stretching, the rubber begins to tear, and while it can still propel an object, it becomes weaker and hence less productive. Once stretched too far, the rubber band snaps, and there is no more productivity from that rubber band again. It has reached breaking point.
We are a lot like that rubber band. We can do so much with our lives, but we need to be stretched a little. Being stretched sometimes can be a little uncomfortable, but ultimately it is when we are well stretched that we are at our most productive. As long as we know our limits though - too much stress and we begin to falter, and if we continue to stress ourselves, we will break.
One can make a similar analogy with a guitar string. If we aren't stretched at all, we are good for nothing, but once we become overstretched, we go out of tune, and too much constant stress causes us to break. We have to remember that just like the guitar string we too can break if we aren't careful.
Being at that peak of the U-curve is very important to our effectiveness in everything we do - at home, in our jobs, where we volunteer. For most of us, that means reducing our stress rather than increasing our motivation.
The first key is learning to know when we are going "out of tune" - to hear the change in pitch when you are beginning to get overstretched, so that you can do something about it. We need to know what the negative effects of stress are so we can recognise them in ourselves. Let's look at the effects of negative stress on your body.
The Physiological Effects of Stress
'Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.' - Frederick Saunders, Author and Librarian (c1800's)
In the mid 1980's, a link between what was classically labeled as the "Type-A personality" and the rate of heart attacks, began to be popularized. The classic type-A personality was the stereotypical workaholic - impatient, excessively time-conscious, insecure about their status, highly competitive, hostile and aggressive, and incapable of relaxation. Friedman and Rosenman, two cardiologists from America, had been working on the theory that type-A personality contributed to heart attacks since the late 1950's. Throughout the 80's and 90's, their hypothesis was basically unquestioned. Later, psychologists would debunk the Type A and B personalities, putting the link between heart disease and personality into doubt.
Friedman and Rosenman weren't far off though. Work over the last decade or so has increased the weight of evidence that stress really does impact heart health, and for that matter, cancers, depression, and almost every other form of human ailment.
Heart disease is a good example of the impact of stress on our health. The peak period for heart attacks is Monday morning, so "Monday-itis" is real! For so long just the office joke, but it is true - work can be bad for you. Workers who did not feel they received fair rewards for their efforts at work were more likely to have heart disease than those who felt they were fairly rewarded(8).
But it is not just work stress that can induce a heart attack. On the 30th of June 1998, England lost a World Cup soccer game to Argentina in a penalty shoot-out, after 120 minutes of a very tense game. The loss saw England make an early and unexpected exit to the World Cup that year. For that night, and for two days afterward, the number of heart attacks presenting to the English hospitals increased. The British Medical Journal published a study that estimated that for those three days surrounding the loss, the 'risk of admission for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) increased by 25%.'(9)
In contrast, those people who take more vacations are less likely to have heart attacks. Over a nine-year period, middle aged men at risk of heart disease were followed with regular surveys. Those who took regular vacations were about 50% less likely to have a heart attack than those who didn't have any R&R(10).
Stress is linked to a weaker, malfunctioning immune system, because of the stress hormone, cortisol. People who are stressed are more likely to get sick, more likely to stay sick for longer or have more severe infections, and are more likely to relapse. Autoimmune conditions and allergies are also worse in people who are stressed.
For example, Cohen and his researchers gave healthy volunteers nasal drops containing respiratory viruses (like those that cause the common cold)(11). The researchers compared the number of infections to the stress levels of those volunteers, and they found that the rate of infection directly correlated to the level of stress that was reported by their subjects. The effect held true even when factors like personality or demographics were taken into account.
Stress also impairs the body's ability to repair its DNA, which increases the risk of cancers. Medical students had blood taken in the middle of an exam block and then three weeks into their vacation. Scientists tested the blood and found that there was a direct correlation between their DNA repair capacity and their stress levels(12). With a reduced ability to repair DNA, a person is more prone to cancers, because damage from free-radicals remains unchecked.
Chronic stress also makes people more prone to depression and anxiety disorders. Serotonin is one of the main chemical transmitters in the brain. It is responsible in part for appetite, sleep, and your moods. With the right amount of serotonin, the different parts of your brain can talk to each other and co-ordinate your daily routines. But the nerve cells that secrete serotonin are placed into overdrive by stress. Eventually they wear out and can't keep up their production of serotonin. Depending on which part of the brain goes first, the symptoms can be different, but commonly present with poor concentration, no motivation, and the overwhelming feeling of sadness or hopelessness, or overwhelming panic and the feeling of impending doom.
There is a fair degree of individual variability in this effect, so some people can be under a lot of stress and still not get sick. It is partly related to the perceived control that a person has on their life and environment (those who feel in control have less stress-related immune problems than those who feel out of control). There is also a degree of biology too. Some people don't have as great a rise in their stress hormones when stressed, or might have a stronger immune system to start with. But overall, stress wears out your immune system, increasing your risk of heart disease, cancers and infections, as well as mental illness.
Wow, all of that is enough to make you stressed! The main point of this chapter is that your mental attitude is linked directly to the physical function of your most vital organs like your heart and brain, and your immune system. It is a scientific fact, not just pop-psychology. In the next chapter, we will look to a cure - ways that again have been scientifically proven to help decrease stress and improve your health and productivity.
Efficiency: The Key To Reducing Stress.
'Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem' - Lex parsimoniae
How's your latin? In case it's a little rusty, the quote is translated as, 'Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.' This is the "law of parsimony," most commonly called Occam's razor.
William of Ockham was a 14th century English Franciscan friar and logician. He came up with this law based on simple logic. Paraphrased, Occam's razor says that, 'All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.' If you need to do something, the best way of doing it will involve the least number of steps. Of course this makes great sense. The more steps that are involved, the harder it will be to make them all work correctly. The other way of looking at this is the "path of least resistance". Everything, from water to traffic, follows the easiest path to get to where it needs to go.
Occam's razor is important to us in terms of stress, because so often we make things harder than they are. When we move away from the simplest solution and add more and more complications, our lives become more and more stressful.
For example, take the classic family road trip. Whoever said that, 'It isn't the destination that matters, it's the journey,'obviously hasn't travelled with kids. They add stress to any form of travel. So if you needed to go for a drive to the beach, you could do one of two things. You could take the highway, and get there quickly, with minimal stops for traffic lights, rest breaks, other traffic. You would get there quicker because the highway is the most direct route, you can drive faster on the highway, and there isn't anything else to slow you down like red lights or traffic jams. Or you could take the scenic route along the back roads. You could frequently stop for photos, bathroom breaks, coffee and directions, all slowing the journey down. While this maybe what you are after, you can bet that your kids will have almost killed each other by the time you get to your final destination at the beach!
Back to Occam's razor! The simplest solution - skipping the stops, and increasing the speed - is the least stressful. And so it is with most things in our lives. We often add complications to our lives that slow us down, and add to the frustration. This chapter is going to be devoted to efficiency and simplicity. If you want to reduce stress in your life, you need to know where you're going, and how to get there.
A whole chapter on efficiency seems to be a little excessive to some, but I believe that this is the foundation. What we discuss in the rest of the book will be very useful, but efficiency and simplicity have an exponential effect on all other techniques. You can reduce your stress with meditation, but if you have less stress because you have fewer demands upon you, the meditation will be even more effective!
So, the crux of this book is the question ... Where are you going? Like the road trip, if you don't know where you're going, it is going to be a long and complicated road to get there. A lot of driving around, covering the same ground as you go around in circles, waiting for your destiny to find you. Once you have a destination, you can actually find your way there. Of course, the next step is to have the map - to be able to plot your course and pilot yourself there as easily as possible. Knowing where you need to go is the most important step, but without a map, you can take a lot of unnecessary turns.