At this point in the book, it should go without saying that managing your stress response is a good thing—but the fact remains that most of us will not bother to follow that advice. However, incorporating some stress management into your life doesn't necessarily mean locking yourself in a dark room in order to get in touch with your inner self. Rather, it first involves understanding that you have stress in your life (easy) and accepting that stress will do "bad things" to your body and your health (also easy) unless you do something about it (easier than you think). Luckily, there are a great many techniques, several of them research-based, that you can use to help manage your body's stress response—and many of them don't even involve drastic lifestyle changes. For example, consider the following:
Change your e-mail program to check for new messages only once per hour. Most e-mail programs are set to check for new messages every five minutes. This means you're interrupted by the new-message beep ninety-six times in an eight-hour day! How do you expect to get any "real" work done? Also, consider (as I do) shutting off your e-mail program until the second half of your day, which will enable you to get your "important" work accomplished in the morning when you're mentally fresh.
Whenever possible, leave the cell phone behind. Even if you tell yourself that you won't answer it, there is a part of your mind that is waiting for the ring. You need to let that part of your brain relax and forget about the phone at least every now and then.
Read trash. Get a book or magazine that has no redeeming social value—and enjoy it. If this is too decadent for your tastes, then alternate a "good" book that might teach you something with a "junk" book that you can simply lose yourself in. Why? Because it allows your mind to "escape" and recharge, so it comes back even stronger, more creative, and more resilient to stress. On a recent cross-country flight I sat next to a woman who was reading a genetic research journal. (I was reading a bicycling magazine.) As a fellow scientist, I commented on her reading material, and she laughed because underneath her research journal she had one of those celebrity-gossip tabloids that you see at the grocery checkout stand. She explained that she couldn't wait to "get through" her genetics journal so she could "catch up" on the latest "dirt"—it was hilarious. It turns out that we were both headed to the same obesity research conference in Boston, and we both appreciated the importance of "getting away" for a few minutes in our magazines.
Take daily mini-vacations. I do a lot of sitting in front of a computer, but I also get up every hour or two for a quick stretch or walk around the office. You'll be amazed at how a quick flex of your muscles and a surge in your circulation can help to clear the cobwebs from your mind. One of the best ways to de-stress during your workday is to revive the lost art of lunch. Take it! Too may people skip lunch (bad metabolically and mentally) or gobble it down at their desks (which is even worse). Instead, take the hour to enjoy a healthy meal and relax your mind. Even better, use that hour to visit with friends or coworkers—you'll have a more productive second half of the day and likely accomplish even more high-quality work with improved creativity and efficiency than if you had worked through lunch.
Take a full day off each week. No work. No thoughts about work or worries about work. Take this day to rest and reflect and recharge (whether or not a "Sabbath" day has any religious connotations for you). Read a book. Take a walk. Luxuriate in the act of doing nothing. I guarantee that if you give yourself over to a solid month of "do-nothing Sundays," you will feel more physically and mentally refreshed than you could possible imagine. Doing nothing will give you back a lot.
Recreate to re-create. Giving yourself permission to relax does not mean that you're a slacker; it means that you're a step ahead of the nose-to-the-grindstone automatons who are on a fast road to burnout. As a long-time nutrition consultant to some of the world's top athletes, I can tell you without question that knowing when to go hard and when to ease off is what separates Olympic champions from also-rans. While your own life might be "too busy" most of the time, it is those moments of relaxation and decompression that allow you to keep jumping back in with renewed energy and creativity.
Get a massage. Australian researchers have shown that something as simple as a fifteen-minute weekly back massage reduced cortisol levels, blood pressure, and overall measures of anxiety in a group of high-stress nurses. Another study of massage conducted at the University of Miami School of Medicine showed a remarkable 31 percent reduction in cortisol levels following massage therapy, as well as a 28 percent increase in the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin.
Take a bath. Japanese scientists in Osaka have shown a significant reduction in cortisol levels in high-stress men following a relaxing hot bath. The men with the highest stress levels had the most dramatic reductions in cortisol levels.
Imagine creative solutions. Japanese researchers in Kyoto have shown that guided-imagery exercises (relaxing by imagining solutions to stress) can reduce cortisol levels after the very first session. In a series of studies, subjects practiced replacing unpleasant mental images of stressful events with comfortable thoughts, resulting in a displacement of stress, a shift toward a balanced emotional state, and a significant drop in cortisol exposure. Psychology researchers at UCLA have also shown that stressed patients who perform a "value affirmation task" (mentally reciting their personal values) in reaction to stressful events are able to reduce their cortisol responses to stress. Remember The Little Engine That Could? Well, little children show the same resilience to stress when they apply the "I think I can" approach to school stressors. In a study by Swedish researchers, school kids had lower cortisol levels when they approached stressful situations with mental imagery that affirmed, "I can solve this task."
Take a long weekend. Even short periods of getting away can result in a significant drop in cortisol levels. In one study, a three-day, two-night weekend resulted in a decrease in cortisol levels and overall stress markers as well as a boost in immune-system function.
Take a yoga class. Swedish psychologists have recently shown that ten sessions of yoga over four weeks results in significant benefits in psychology and physiology in both men and women. Participants in the yoga sessions had improvements in cortisol, stress, anger, exhaustion, and blood pressure levels.
Pray. Research on religion at Arizona State University has shown that people who are more spiritual and pray more often have lower cortisol levels and lower blood pressure.
Get a pet. Scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University want you to get a dog. Based on their findings, high-stress health-care professionals were able to significantly lower their cortisol levels after as little as five minutes of "dog therapy." Though there were no measures of cortisol levels in the pooches, we can imagine that they also benefited from playing with the health-care workers.
Crank up the tunes. French scientists showed that relaxing music was able to significantly reduce cortisol levels following a stressful event (as compared to silence).
Get some sleep. Getting enough sleep is far and away the most effective stress-management technique that we have available to us. Did you know that as little as a night or two of good, sound, restful sleep may do more for controlling your cortisol levels and reducing your long-term risk for many chronic diseases than a whole lifetime of stress-management classes? The importance of adequate sleep for controlling your stress response, helping you lose weight, boosting your energy levels, and improving your mood cannot be overemphasized Here's why.
When you were just a few months old, a mere babe, your brain had you programmed to sleep about eighteen hours a day—not a very stressful existence. Upon reaching adulthood—at say about twenty years of age—your nightly allotment of sleep had been slashed to less than seven hours (six hours and fifty-four minutes, according to the National Sleep Foundation). That's approximately two hours less than the eight to nine hours recommended by sleep experts for optimal physical and mental health. Progressive changes in your brain's internal clock (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), combined with alterations in your patterns of hormone secretion, have you going to bed later and waking up earlier with each successive decade, resulting in nearly thirty minutes less sleep per night with every ten years you age. By the time we reach our thirties and forties, we're getting 80 percent less time in the most restful "slow-wave" period of sleep (as compared to our teenage years), and by the time we hit our fifties and sixties, we get almost no uninterrupted deep sleep. (We still get some deep sleep, but it tends to come in short fragments that do little in terms of recovery and repair for mind and body.)
What does this lack of sleep mean for your cortisol levels? It means that the average fifty-year-old has nighttime cortisol levels more than twelve times higher than the average thirty-year-old—yikes! Perhaps the worst piece of news is that not only will an inadequate quality or quantity of sleep result in elevated cortisol levels, but high cortisol will also limit both your ability to fall asleep and the amount of time that your mind spends in the most restful stages of deep sleep. This sets you up for a vicious cycle of poor sleep, elevated cortisol, and subtle changes in metabolism that leads you down the path toward chronic diseases.
A study from Yale University of 1,709 men found that those who regularly got less than six hours of shut-eye doubled their risk of weight gain and diabetes because of excess cortisol exposure and its interference with insulin metabolism and blood-sugar control. A similar study at Columbia University showed that sleeping less than five hours nightly was associated with twice the risk of high blood pressure.
Researchers from the University of Virginia have found that jet lag—and the elevated stress and cortisol that come from sleep deprivation and altered body-clock cycles—is not just bad for health, but can lead to higher death rates as well (at least in older mice). The increased death rates are thought to be due to a suppression of immune-system function caused by elevated cortisol levels (but the simple fact that sleep-deprived mice die sooner probably comes as no surprise to exhausted, globe-trotting business executives or stretched-to-the-limit soccer moms).
Researchers at Brown University Medical School have recently shown that sleep quality (how restful your sleep is), but not necessarily sleep quantity (how many hours of sleep you get), is closely related to cortisol exposure. As you might imagine, subjects with lower levels of sleep quality (including children and teenagers) also had the highest cortisol exposure and a higher degree of overall stress. In a related series of experiments by researchers at the National Institute for Psychosocial Medicine, in Stockholm, Sweden, total sleep time was significantly decreased (and sleepiness and cortisol increased) in workers during their most stressful workweeks (no surprise there). The stress at work in these subjects also led to daytime sleepiness—but even though the workers were tired, they were still too stressed to sleep at night.
Stanford University's Sleep Disorders Clinic has recently shown that cortisol can affect "slow-wave" sleep, interrupting the deeper (most restful) stages of sleep and setting the stage for increased risk of developing diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, insomnia, and obesity later in life. A related sleep study from UCLA suggests that cortisol overexposure reduces deep-sleep delta waves and in doing so further increases cortisol levels and sets the stage for higher risk of PTSD in susceptible individuals.
Swedish sleep researchers in Stockholm have recently shown that the number of "micro-arousals" (quick wakeups that you might not even be aware of) from sleep is closely related to cortisol levels—with more arousals increasing cortisol exposure. The researchers found that the number of micro-arousals was related to the degree of work-related stress—with more work stress related to a higher number of nightly micro-arousals. As with other forms of sleep loss and sleep fragmentation, micro-arousals were associated with metabolic indicators suggestive of a higher risk for obesity and diabetes. In a related series of sleep experiments by German scientists, helicopter pilots with reduced sleep levels (cutting sleep time from 7.8 hours to 6 hours or less nightly) were found to have elevations in cortisol exposure amounting to up to 80 percent—with elevated levels persisting even after two nights of full-duration sleep.
Some of the most disturbing evidence citing sleep deprivation as a major source of stress comes from University of Chicago sleep researchers. In a study presented at the American Diabetes Association Annual Scientific Conference, the Chicago group found that inadequate sleep leads to increased cortisol levels, insulin resistance and higher blood-sugar levels, elevated appetite, and weight gain. The scariest part of the study was that the "normal" sleepers averaged 7.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep per night, while the sleep-deprived "short" sleepers were only missing out on an hour or two of nightly shut-eye (averaging about 6.5 hours of sleep per night). Simply losing a few hours of sleep resulted in a 50 percent increase in cortisol exposure and a 40 percent reduction in insulin function.
How many of us feel lucky to get seven hours of sleep? I know I do—yet I know this is not enough sleep to keep my cortisol exposure as low as I want it to be. I also know that some of the best ways to ensure a restful night of sleep are to avoid caffeine after noon (yet I sit here writing this at 3:00 P.M. with a cup of java next to the laptop), leave work at the office (yet I'm writing this from my home office), and skip the late-night TV (yet my Tivo lets me watch primetime shows after I put the kids to bed)—so that's three strikes for me. How many strikes do you have against your ability to get enough restful shut-eye? (See Chapter 9 for some specific pointers that will help you get more sleep.)
I tell you all of this because it is important for you to understand that following the SENSE program is not an "all or nothing" proposition. Sometimes you'll have lots of stress, and sometimes you'll have less. Some of the time you might get adequate sleep; much of the time you won't. On certain days you'll be able to exercise hard and eat right—and on other days you'll hit the drive-through and feel like you live at the office. The point here is not to strive to be perfect in your approach to making SENSE out of your stressful life, but rather to do as much as you can whenever you can without the program becoming yet another source of stress in your life.
The next three sections of this chapter concern exercise, nutrition, and supplements—and it is these aspects that represent the heart of the program. Concentrate on these components to generate the most dramatic effects on your weight, mood, and energy levels.
by Shawn M Talbott, PhD