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Casually flipping through a 2006 copy of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, I learned that exercise is the key to combating the stress of modern life.The authors, from the University of Ioannina in Greece, first explain (in regards to the fight-or-flight response) that "stress responses can be elicited by emotional stimuli or professional and social stress."

It takes just one negatively worded memo handed down from on high to get the glucocorticoids and catecholamines flowing, but these adrenal hormones go unused and are stored in visceral fat deposits, and this does bad things to you.

these stored adrenal hormones disturb gonadal function (no wonder Viagra is such a big seller), as well as growth hormone and thyroid function. They explain how these "metabolic disturbances" lead to "comorbidities including central obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and endothelial dysfunction." In other words, unrelieved stress turns you into an artery-clogged hippopotamus with Limbaugh-like blood pressure and a lousy immune system. Oh, and it's also hard on your brain.

According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping 75 percent of people in the United States feel stressed out. Almost half of us eat unhealthy because of it; 47 percent of us can't sleep because of it; it makes one in three of us depressed; and for 42 percent of us, it has gotten worse in the last year. There is so much making us anxious these days -- from big-picture problems like uncontrollable oil spills and a still-soft economy to garden-variety job, relationship, money, you-name-it woes -- that it's easy to think of chronic stress as the new normal.

the latest research reveals that revving up your body with exercise may be the most effective antidote. In lab studies, when scientists at Princeton put animals on a six-week aerobic conditioning program, then compared their brain cells with those of a group that remained sedentary, they found that the "brains on exercise" morphed over time into a biochemically calm state that remained steady even when the subjects were under stress. The nonexercising group's brain cells continued to react strongly to anxiety-inducing situations. This breakthrough discovery has scientists now saying that cardio workouts may actually remodel the brain to make it more resistant to stress hormones.

A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers.

Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness. Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.

cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.

Feeling stressed? Then try savoring the scent of lemon, mango, lavender, or other fragrant plants. Scientists in Japan are reporting the first scientific evidence that inhaling certain fragrances alter gene activity and blood chemistry in ways that can reduce stress levels. 

people have inhaled the scent of certain plants since ancient times to help reduce stress, fight inflammation and depression, and induce sleep. Aromatherapy, the use of fragrant plant oils to improve mood and health, has become a popular form of alternative medicine today. And linalool is one of the most widely used substances to soothe away emotional stress.

Linalool returned stress-elevated levels of neutrophils and lymphocytes — key parts of the immune system — to near-normal levels. Inhaling linalool also reduced the activity of more than 100 genes that go into overdrive in stressful situations.

"Research shows it's possible to cushion yourself against stress, and the tactics we're using with soldiers also apply to real folks and more common types of anxiety." Key to the recent breakthroughs is a much clearer picture of how destructive stress can be. Persistent anxiety can kill neurons in brain structures concerned with memory and decisionmaking, and such damage is even visible on brain scans.

Fortunately, experts are learning that all along the continuum—from severe anxiety disorders to garden-variety worry—coping and even prevention tactics are highly effective. Here's what new PTSD science can teach all of us about outsmarting stress. If these solutions work for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, they can certainly help the rest of us on the home front.

Researchers are learning that exercise doesn't just soothe stress, it also fortifies brain cells so they're less vulnerable to anxiety in the future.

Stress caused by social situations, such as giving a speech or going to a job interview, can affect some people's immune system in ways that harm their health, researchers have found.The study included 124 volunteers who were purposely put into awkward social situations. Those who exhibited greater neural sensitivity to social rejection also had greater increases in inflammatory activity when exposed to social stress.

The findings provide "further evidence of how closely our mind and body are connected. We have known for a long time that social stress can 'get under the skin' to increase risk for disease, but it's been unclear exactly how these effects occur. To our knowledge, this study is the first to identify the neurocognitive pathways that might be involved in inflammatory responses to acute social stress," Slavich said.

Inflammation is known to be boosted by stressful situations. But when yoga experts were exposed to stress (such as dipping their feet in ice water,) they experienced less of an increase in their inflammatory response than yoga novices did.

Yoga focuses on deep breathing and controlling breathing, which may slow down the body's "fight or flight" response — the body's reaction to stress, Kiecolt-Glaser said.

Yoga also involves meditation, which helps people learn to pay attention to how they are feeling. So yoga experts may be more aware of their stress and better able to control their response to it.

"Our findings suggest that daytime sleep may offer cardiovascular benefit by accelerating cardiovascular recovery following mental stressors," wrote the researchers, Ryan Brindle and Sarah Conklin of Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa.

Blood pressure and pulse rates increased in both groups of students when they took the stress test, but the average blood pressure of those who slept for at least 45 minutes was significantly lower after the stress test than it was for those who did not sleep.

A daytime nap of at least 45 minutes may help stressed-out people lower their blood pressure and protect their heart, a new study suggests.The finding comes from a study that involved 85 healthy university students, divided into two groups. One group had an hour-long period during the day to sleep, and the others had no time to sleep.

Stress has been cited frequently as a factor in autoimmune diseases, including alopecia areata.

A study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Oxford supports the widespread belief that stress may reduce a woman's chance of becoming pregnant. The study is the first of its kind to document, among women without a history of fertility problems, an association between high levels of a substance indicative of stress and a reduced chance of becoming pregnant.

The researchers found that, all other factors being equal, women with high alpha-amylase levels were less likely to conceive than were women with low levels, during the fertile window -- the six days when conception is most likely to occur.

“Exercise is a form of stress,” she pointed out. So is social isolation. Each, independently, induces the release of stress hormones (primarily corticosterone in rodents and cortisol in people). These hormones have been found, in multiple studies, to reduce neurogenesis. Except after exercise; then, despite increased levels of the hormones, neurogenesis booms. It’s possible, Dr. Stranahan said, that social connections provide a physiological buffer, a calming, that helps neurogenesis to proceed despite the stressful nature of exercise. Social isolation removes that protection and simultaneously pumps more stress hormones into the system, blunting exercise’s positive effects on brainpower.

Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

People with a history of heart disease who are prone to negative thinking, gloom, and inhibition -- a personality profile known as Type D (for "distressed") -- are nearly four times more likely to experience heart attack, heart failure, heart rhythm disorders, death, and other negative outcomes compared to heart patients with a different personality profile, the study found.

"There is a clear connection between heart risk and psychological risk factors, and those people who have this personality and lack social support have higher risk of health problems,"

Type D personalities are "characterized by negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, and anger, and at the same time score high on social inhibition, meaning that they are less likely to disclose emotions," Denollet says.

Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, studies anxiety's effects on decision-making. "Under certain circumstances anxious people are more sensitive in detecting potentially bad outcomes associated with choices. They do avoid harm, so, as a consequence, it may be useful to be anxious," he says.

Paulus and his team have found that anxious people tend to take a "bottom-up" approach to life—their emotional reactions to events are stronger, while their ability to reason and intellectually interpret events is weaker. "Chronically anxious peoples' brains experience everything as aversive," he says. Less anxious people, in contrast, take more of a "top-down" approach—the rational parts of their brain take over when they experience something potentially anxiety inducing, and they essentially talk themselves into not getting worked up.

Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes.

During a strength workout, the heart's muscle tissue contracts forcefully to push the blood out. Like all muscles, stress causes small tears in the muscle fibers. When the body repairs those tears, muscles grow. The result is a stronger heart, not just one that's more efficient at pumping. Another big advantage of working out with weights is improving glucose metabolism, which can reduce the risk of diabetes. Strength training boosts the number of proteins that take glucose out of the blood and transport it into the skeletal muscle, giving the muscles more energy and lowering overall blood-glucose levels.

A 2010 study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology suggested that people on dialysis can benefit from building muscle. Researchers found that kidney dialysis patients who had the most lean muscle mass — a measurement derived from the circumference of the mid-arm muscle — were 37% less likely to die than the patients who had the least.

A growing body of research shows that working out with weights has health benefits beyond simply bulking up one's muscles and strengthening bones. Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes. "Muscle is our largest metabolically active organ, and that's the backdrop that people usually forget," said Kent Adams, director of the exercise physiology lab at Cal State Monterey Bay. Strengthening the muscles "has a ripple effect throughout the body on things like metabolic syndrome and obesity."

Strength training often takes a back seat to cardiovascular training, but it can benefit the heart in ways that its more popular cousin can't. During cardio exercise, the heart loads up with blood and pumps it out to the rest of the body: As a result, Potteiger said, "the heart gets better and more efficient at pumping." But during resistance training, muscles generate more force than they do during endurance exercises, and the heart is no exception, Potteiger said. During a strength workout, the heart's muscle tissue contracts forcefully to push the blood out. Like all muscles, stress causes small tears in the muscle fibers. When the body repairs those tears, muscles grow. The result is a stronger heart, not just one that's more efficient at pumping. Another big advantage of working out with weights is improving glucose metabolism, which can reduce the risk of diabetes. Strength training boosts the number of proteins that take glucose out of the blood and transport it into the skeletal muscle, giving the muscles more energy and lowering overall blood-glucose levels. "If you have uncontrolled glucose levels," Potteiger said, "that can lead to kidney damage, damage to the circulatory system and loss of eyesight."

The brain may get a boost from the body's extra muscle as well. A 2010 study in Archives of Internal Medicine found that women ages 65 to 75 who did resistance training sessions once or twice a week over the course of a year improved their cognitive performance, while those who focused on balance and tone training declined slightly. One reason for the improvement, researchers believe, may be that strength training triggers the production of a protein beneficial for brain growth.