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nolan_delaney

How to be good at stress | ideas.ted.com - 0 views

ideas.ted.com/how-to-be-good-at-stress

stress physiology brain science brain

shared by nolan_delaney on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • He dedicated his career to identifying what distinguishes people who thrive under stress from those who are defeated by it. The ones who thrive, he concluded, are those who view stress as inevitable, and rather than try to avoid it, they look for ways to engage with it, adapt to it, and learn from it.
  • what is new is how psychology and neuroscience have begun to examine this truism. Research is beginning to reveal not only why stress helps us learn and grow, but also what makes some people more likely to experience these benefits.
  • . But the stress response doesn’t end when your heart stops pounding. Other stress hormones are released to help you recover from the challenge. These stress-recovery hormones include DHEA and nerve growth factor, both of which increase neuroplasticity. In other words, they help your brain learn from experience
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  • . DHEA is classified as a neurosteroid; in the same way that steroids help your body grow stronger from physical exercise, DHEA helps your brain grow stronger from psychological challenges. For several hours after you have a strong stress response, the brain is rewiring itself to remember and learn from the experience. Stress leaves an imprint on your brain that prepares you to handle similar stress the next time you encounter it.
  • Psychologists call the process of learning and growing from a difficult experience stress inoculation. Going through the experience gives your brain and body a kind of stress vaccine. This is why putting people through practice stress is a key training technique for NASA astronauts, Navy SEALS, emergency responders and elite athletes, and others who have to thrive under high levels of stress.
  • . (This is part of what makes the science of stress so fascinating, and also so puzzling.
  • Higher levels of cortisol have been associated with worse outcomes, such as impaired immune function and depression. In contrast, higher levels of DHEA—the neurosteroid—have been linked to reduced risk of anxiety, depression, heart disease, neurodegeneration and other diseases we typically think of as stress-related.
  • An important question, then, is: How do you influence your own — or somebody else’s — growth index?
  • This mindset can actually shift your stress physiology toward a state that makes such a positive outcome more likely, for example by increasing your growth index and reducing harmful side effects of stress such as inflammation.
  • Other studies confirm that viewing a stressful situation as an opportunity to improve your skills, knowledge or strengths makes it more likely that you will experience stress inoculation or stress-related growth. Once you appreciate that going through stress makes you better at it, it gets easier to face each new challenge. And the expectation of growth sends a signal to your brain and body: get ready to learn something, because you can handle this.
  • nolan_delaney on 04 Jun 15
     
    Good timing for an article about stress considering we are taking exams this week.  New physiology studies suggest that your brain releases a growth hormone  after a stressful experience (that is like steroid for the brain) that temporarily increases your ability to learn.   Interesting to think just how this trait/hormone was evolved...
Javier E

A New Understanding of How Movement Decreases Stress - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...496679

stress research science psychology brain science neural nets psychosomatic

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • If stress is controlled by these few cortical areas—the part of the brain that deals in high-level executive functioning, our beliefs and existential understandings of ourselves—why would any sort of body movement play a part in decreasing stress?
  • Pittsburgh neuroscientists showed that they have discovered a discrete, elaborate network in the cerebral cortex that controls the adrenal medulla. It seems that the connections between the brain and the adrenal medulla are much more elaborate than previously understood. Complex networks throughout the primary sensory and motor cortices are tied directly to our stress responses.
  • “This is suggesting a much more decentralized process,” said Bruno of the findings. He was not involved in the study.“You have lots of different circuits built on top of one another, and they’re all feeding back to one of our most primitive and primordial response systems. They've really shown that stress is controlled by more than the traditional high-level cognitive areas. I think that’s a big deal.
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  • Rabies moves at a predictable rate, replicating every eight to 10 hours, moving rapidly through chains of neurons and revealing a network. The researchers could allow the virus to move up the nervous system and reach the brain but could sacrifice the monkey before it showed any symptoms of infection.
  • When the virus has had enough time to travel a predictable distance, the researchers anesthetize the animal, wash out its blood, perfuse the central nervous system with fixatives, and use antibodies to detect where the virus has spread. The kills were timed to various stages to create a map. By the time you’ve gone through several sets of synapses that mapping is an enormous task. There’s an exponential increase in the number of neurons.
  • the researchers were astounded at what they saw. The motor areas in the brain connect to the adrenal glands. In the primary motor cortex of the brain, there’s a map of the human body—areas that correspond to the face, arm, and leg area, as well as a region that controls the axial body muscles (known to many people now as “the core”).
  • “Something about axial control has an impact on stress responses,” Strick reasons. “There’s all this evidence that core strengthening has an impact on stress. And when you see somebody that's depressed or stressed out, you notice changes in their posture. When you stand up straight, it has an effect on how you project yourself and how you feel.  Well, lo and behold, core muscles have an impact on stress. And I suspect that if you activate core muscles inappropriately with poor posture, that’s going to have an impact on stress.”
  • “These neural pathways might explain our intuitive sense for why there are many different strategies for coping with stress,” said Bruno. “I like the examples they give in the paper—that maybe this is why yoga and pilates are so successful. But there are lots of other things where people talk about mental imagery and all sorts of other ways that people deal with stress. I think having so many neural pathways having direct lines to the stress control system, that’s really interesting.”
  • Bruno specializes more in sensory neuroscience, so he read a more into the findings in the primary somatosensory cortex. Some of these tactile areas in the brain seem to be providing as much input to the adrenal medulla as the cortical areas. “To me that's really new and interesting,” said Bruno. “It might explain why certain sensations we find very relaxing or stressful.”
  • “It's not clear to me—from our work, and from their work—that what we call motor cortex is really motor cortex,” he said. “Maybe the primary sensory cortex is doing something more than we thought. When I see results like these, I go, hm, maybe these areas aren’t so simple.”
  • With this come implications for what’s currently known as “psychosomatic illness”—how the mind has an impact over organ functions. The name tends to have a bad connotation. The notion that this mind-body connection isn’t really real; that psychosomatic illnesses are “all in your head.” Elaborate connections like this would explain that, yes, it is all in your head. The fact that cortical areas in the brain that have multi-synaptic connections that control organ function could strip the negative connotations
  • As he put it, “How we move, think, and feel have an impact on the stress response through real neural connections.”
sanderk

Under Pressure: Stress and Decision Making - Association for Psychological Science - APS - 1 views

www.psychologicalscience.org/...ure-stress-and-decision-making

stress pressure decision making brain science

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Many animals store food to use in times of scarcity, but humans are stockpilers too — individuals routinely keep money in the bank (or under their mattress) and cans in the pantry. However, in some individuals, this collecting behavior is taken to extremes in the form of compulsive hoarding — collecting excessive amounts of objects that have little or no value. Preston found that, across species, including humans, anxiety and threats appear to increase the motivation to acquire and collect food and goods
  • Responses to positive and negative feedback in the ventral striatum were greatly reduced under stress as compared to when there was no stress, suggesting that stress may dampen your perception of the subjective value of a decision.
  • Gaining a better understanding of how stress affects decision making is critical not only for psychological science, but has important, real-world implications
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    It is interesting how as humans we still have connections to less developed species. I found it fascinating that the reason why people hoard objects is due to anxiety or stress. People who hoard are stressed about the decision to get rid of an object because they think they may need it later on. I also found it interesting how stress can impair one's decision making by decreasing one's ability to see the value of a decision. This article applies to our class discussions and work because it shows how our emotions, specifically stress, can affect our reasoning.
sanderk

Being a Pilot is Even More Stressful Than Being a Passenger - VICE - 0 views

www.vice.com/...ressful-than-being-a-passenger

emotions stress education brain science psychology

shared by sanderk on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Pilot often tops the list of most stressful careers, both in the amount of perceived stress and on quantifiable metrics of stress, like rates of burnout and health issues
  • For pilots, the basic requirements of the job are a major source of stress. “Number one, it’s what we call a high-consequence industry,” Bowen says. “When pilots make mistakes, the consequences can be catastrophic.”
  • sychologists think about stress on a curve: At the bottom, without stress, it’s hard to perform with excellence. As stress and arousal start to creep up, performance does too.
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  • The day-to-day work of a pilot is unstable, and often unpredictable. They’re away from home, and from their families, for long stretches of time. The job isn’t a typical 9-to-5— instead, pilots fly overnight from timezone to timezone, at strange hours.
  • To reduce fatigue, which is linked to stress, rules and regulations from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) limit the number of hours a pilot can fly and how much rest they need. During a 24-hour period, a pilot flying alone can’t log more than eight hours, for example, and they have a ten-hour minimum rest period before taking off.
  • But if stress creeps past that midpoint, performance starts to drop off. Too-high levels of stress mean exhaustion, panic, and blunted brain power. That’s when mistakes happen.
  • CRM training is designed to help pilots and crew members develop efficiency communication and decision-making skills. “It was also saying, this is what fatigue looks like, and this is how to recognize it in your co-pilot,” Bowen says. From that point on, she says, the airlines worked to develop a culture where pilots would hold other pilots accountable when they weren’t fit to fly. “It was about not protecting their buddy, but protecting overall safety,” Bowen says.
  • Pilot mental health is another big issue to tackle, says Quay Snyder, a former Air Force flight surgeon and a member of the Aerospace Medical Association Working Group on Pilot Mental Health. Pilots are often reluctant to acknowledge the effect that emotional stressors might have on their ability to fly, he says.
  • “They’re slow to recognize mental health issues,” he says, “and they might think there’s a stigma against asking for help.”
  • “Pilots trust pilots,” he says. “Hearing from a peer could help a pilot recognize that they may not be fit to fly. Hearing it from a physician doesn’t carry much weight, but hearing it from a peer does.”
blythewallick

Social media stress can lead to social media addiction -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...190827125559.htm

social media Technology research psychology brain science

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Instagram are known to cause stress in users, known as technostress from social media. However, when faced with such stress, instead of switching off or using them less, people are moving from one aspect of the social media platforms to another -- escaping the causes of their stress without leaving the medium on which it originated.
  • "While it might seem counter-intuitive, social media users are continuing to use the same platforms that are causing them stress rather than switching off from them, creating a blurring between the stress caused and the compulsive use."
  • "Even when users are stressed from SNS use, they are using the same platforms to cope with that stress, diverting themselves through other activities on the SNS, and ultimately building compulsive and excessive behaviour. As a result, they embed themselves in the social network environment rather than getting away from it, and an addiction is formed."
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  • They further examined two separate ways of coping with the stress. The first included users creating a diversion by partaking in other activities away from social media, which is the more obvious path. They would switch off, talk to friends or family about issues they were experiencing and spend less time on the platform.
  • "The idea of using the same environment that is causing the stress as means of coping with that stress is novel. It is an interesting phenomenon that seems distinctive to technostress from social media."
Javier E

How Social Status Affects Your Health - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tatus-affects-your-health.html

status social health control insurance stress hormone immune psychology

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • If you want to see how status affects health, you have to isolate status from material wealth. How to do that? The easiest way is to observe a society in which there is minimal material wealth to contest and where there are limited avenues for status competition.
  • For several years, we studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, a small, preindustrial, politically egalitarian society in which status confers no formal privileges (such as coercive authority).
  • we found that even among the Tsimane, higher status was associated with lower levels of stress and better health.
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  • Along the banks of the Maniqui River and in adjacent forests, the Tsimane people hunt, fish and plant plantains, rice and sweet manioc. They live in villages that range in size from 30 to 700 people. During village meetings, decision making is consensus-based. No individual has the right to coerce anyone else.
  • that doesn’t mean there are no status distinctions. When you attend a Tsimane village meeting, you soon notice that the opinions of certain men are more influential during the consensus-building process. These same men are often solicited to mediate disputes or to represent villagers’ interests with outsiders.
  • My colleagues and I measured the social status of all the men from four Tsimane villages (nearly 200 men between the ages of 18 and 83), by asking them to evaluate one another on their informal political influence. The men also provided urine samples and received medical examinations from physicians
  • We found that Tsimane men with less political influence had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has many important physiological functions. This result persisted after controlling for other factors that might affect stress levels, including age, body size and personality.
  • Those living just above the poverty line may resent welfare for those living just below it, and a millionaire may envy a multimillionaire more than he envies a billionaire.
  • Studying the same individuals over a four-year period, we also found that for men whose influence declined over time, greater declines were correlated with higher levels of cortisol and respiratory illness. Downward mobility is harmful, it seems, even in an egalitarian society.
  • Why might low status cause such stress for the Tsimane? One possibility is that status offers a greater sense of control.
  • Another is that status acts as a form of social insurance. Influential Tsimane men have more allies and food-production partners, who can be helpful in mitigating conflict, sickness and food shortage. The relative lack of such support may cause psychosocial stress.
  • It is interesting that even in industrialized societies, the status comparisons most consequential for psychosocial stress are often among individuals who live near one another or occupy the same social network, not individuals at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • In addition, we found that the less influential Tsimane men had a higher risk of respiratory infection, the most common cause of sickness and death in their society. Stress may contribute to this disparity in infection risk; when chronic, stress can dampen immune function.
  • The importance of relative status perceptions may have its roots in the small-scale societies of our ancestors, which were similar to that of the Tsimane. In such societies, both our political competitors and our cooperative partners were likely individuals with whom we interacted regularly.
  • As our society debates the effects of wealth inequality, the Tsimane help us understand why we care so deeply about relative social position — and why our health depends on it.
Javier E

Opinion | How to Be More Resilient - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...xiety-depression-research.html

resilient toughness happiness psychology brain science stress

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • As a psychiatrist, I’ve long wondered why some people get ill in the face of stress and adversity — either mentally or physically — while others rarely succumb.
  • not everyone gets PTSD after exposure to extreme trauma, while some people get disabling depression with minimal or no stress
  • What makes people resilient, and is it something they are born with or can it be acquired later in life?
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  • New research suggests that one possible answer can be found in the brain’s so-called central executive network, which helps regulate emotions, thinking and behavior
  • used M.R.I. to study the brains of a racially diverse group of 218 people, ages 12 to 14, living in violent neighborhoods in Chicago
  • the youths who had higher levels of functional connectivity in the central executive network had better cardiac and metabolic health than their peers with lower levels of connectivity
  • when neighborhood homicide rates went up, the young people’s cardiometabolic risk — as measured by obesity, blood-pressure and insulin levels, among other variables — also increased, but only in youths who showed lower activity in this brain network
  • “Active resilience happens when people who are vulnerable find resources to cope with stress and bounce back, and do so in a way that leaves them stronger, ready to handle additional stress, in more adaptive ways.”
  • the more medically hardy young people were no less anxious or depressed than their less fortunate peers, which suggests that while being more resilient makes you less vulnerable to adversity, it doesn’t guarantee happiness — or even an awareness of being resilient.
  • there is good reason to believe the link may be causal because other studies have found that we can change the activity in the self-control network, and increase healthy behaviors, with simple behavioral interventions
  • For example, mindfulness training, which involves attention control, emotion regulation and increased self-awareness, can increase connectivity within this network and help people to quit smoking.
  • n one study, two weeks of mindfulness training produced a 60 percent reduction in smoking, compared with no reduction in a control group that focused on relaxation. An M.R.I. following mindfulness training showed increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex, key brain areas in the executive self-control network
  • Clearly self-control is one critical component of resilience that can be easily fostered. But there are others.
  • One plausible explanation is that greater activity in this network increases self-control, which most likely reduces some unhealthy behaviors people often use to cope with stress, like eating junk food or smoking
  • she and colleagues studied the brains of depressed patients who died. They found that the most disrupted genes were those for growth factors, proteins that act like a kind of brain fertilizer.
  • “We came to realize that depressed people have lost their power to remodel their brains. And that is in fact devastating because brain remodeling is something we need to do all the time — we are constantly rewiring our brains based on past experience and the expectation of how we need to use them in the future,
  • one growth factor that is depleted in depressed brains, called fibroblast growth factor 2, also plays a role in resilience. When they gave it to stressed animals, they bounced back faster and acted less depressed. And when they gave it just once after birth to animals that had been bred for high levels of anxiety and inhibition, they were hardier for the rest of their lives.
  • The good news is that we have some control over our own brain BDNF levels: Getting more physical exercise and social support, for example, has been shown to increase BDNF.
  • Perhaps someday we might be able to protect young people exposed to violence and adversity by supplementing them with neuroprotective growth factors. We know enough now to help them by fortifying their brains through exercise, mindfulness training and support systems
  • Some people have won the genetic sweepstakes and are naturally tough. But there is plenty the rest of us can do to be more resilient and healthier.
Javier E

How stress weathers our bodies, causing illness and premature aging - Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...stress-chronic-illness-aging

stress despair health inequality psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Stress is a physiological reaction that is part of the body’s innate programming to protect against external threats.
  • When danger appears, an alarm goes off in the brain, activating the body’s sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated. Hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, flood the bloodstream from the adrenal glands.
  • The heart beats faster. Breathing quickens. Blood vessels dilate. More oxygen reaches large muscles. Blood pressure and glucose levels rise. The immune system’s inflammatory response activates, promoting quick healing.
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  • Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.
  • The body produces too much cortisol and other stress hormones, straining to bring itself back to normal. Eventually, the body’s machinery malfunctions.
  • The constant strain — the chronic sources of stress — resets what is “normal,” and the body begins to change.
  • t is the repeated triggering of this process year after year — the persistence of striving to overcome barriers — that leads to poor health.
  • Blood pressure remains high. Inflammation turns chronic. In the arteries, plaque forms, causing the linings of blood vessels to thicken and stiffen. That forces the heart to work harder. It doesn’t stop there. Other organs begin to fail.
  • , that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”
  • It isn’t just living in an unequal society that makes people sick. It’s the day-in, day-out effort of trying to be equal that wears bodies down.
  • Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.
  • It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small.
  • The argument weathering is trying to make is these are things we can change, but we have to understand them in their complexity,” Geronimus said. “This has to be a societal project, not the new app on your phone that will remind you to take deep breaths when you’re feeling stress.”
Javier E

Can We End the Meditation Madness? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-the-meditation-madness.html

meditation psychology research

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • we ought to ask why meditation is useful. So I polled a group of meditation researchers, teachers and practitioners on why they recommend it. I liked their answers, but none of them were unique to meditation. Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities.
  • it may reduce stress. Fine. But so does quality sleep and exercise
  • you can reduce stress simply by changing the way you think about it.
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  • when people had only 10 minutes to prepare a charismatic speech, simply reframing the stress response as healthy was enough to relax them and reduce their physiological responses, if they tended to be highly reactive.
  • adults who reported a lot of stress in their lives were more likely to die, but only if they thought stress was harmful. Over a hundred thousand Americans may have died prematurely, “not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you,
  • You don’t need to meditate to achieve mindfulness either.
  • you can become more mindful by thinking in conditionals instead of absolutes. In one experiment, when people made a mistake with a pencil, they had one of several different objects, like a rubber band, sitting on the table. When they were told, “This is a rubber band,” only 3 percent realized it could also be used as an eraser. When they had been told “This could be a rubber band,” 40 percent figured out that it could erase their mistake.
  • Change “is” to “could be,” and you become more mindful. The same is true when you look for an answer rather than the answer.
kushnerha

Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-making-our-children-sick.html

new york times mental health stress education

shared by kushnerha on 03 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.
  • “This is so far beyond what you would typically see in an adolescent population,” he told the school’s faculty at a meeting just before the fall semester began. “It’s unprecedented.” Worse, those alarming figures were probably an underestimation; some students had missed the survey while taking Advanced Placement exams.
  • What Dr. Slavin saw at Irvington is a microcosm of a nationwide epidemic of school-related stress. We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum.
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  • Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Children living in poverty who aspire to college face the same daunting admissions arms race, as well as the burden of competing for scholarships, with less support than their privileged peers.
  • Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.
  • Nearly one in three teenagers told the American Psychological Association that stress drove them to sadness or depression — and their single biggest source of stress was school. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vast majority of American teenagers get at least two hours less sleep each night than recommended — and research shows the more homework they do, the fewer hours they sleep. At the university level, 94 percent of college counseling directors in a survey from last year said they were seeing rising numbers of students with severe psychological problems.
  • At the other end of the age spectrum, doctors increasingly see children in early elementary school suffering from migraine headaches and ulcers. Many physicians see a clear connection to performance pressure.
  • chosen to start making a change. Teachers are re-examining their homework demands, in some cases reviving the school district’s forgotten homework guideline — no more than 20 minutes per class per night, and none on weekends. In fact, research supports limits on homework. Students have started a task force to promote healthy habits and balanced schedules.
  • A growing body of medical evidence suggests that long-term childhood stress is linked not only with a higher risk of adult depression and anxiety, but with poor physical health outcomes, as well.
  • Paradoxically, the pressure cooker is hurting, not helping, our kids’ prospects for success. Many college students struggle with critical thinking, a fact that hasn’t escaped their professors, only 14 percent of whom believe that their students are prepared for college work, according to a 2015 report.
  • At Irvington, it’s too early to gauge the impact of new reforms, but educators see promising signs. Calls to school counselors to help students having emotional episodes in class have dropped from routine to nearly nonexistent. The A.P. class failure rate dropped by half. Irvington students continue to be accepted at respected colleges.
margogramiak

COVID-19 anxiety linked to body image issues: Study finds association between stress an... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201022201407.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A new study has found that anxiety and stress directly linked to COVID-19 could be causing a number of body image issues amongst women and men.
  • A new study has found that anxiety and stress directly linked to COVID-19 could be causing a number of body image issues amongst women and men.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we've talked countless times about how weird the brain is, and how there are so many things that simply don't make sense. Simply reading this description and title, this seems like ones of those things.
  • Amongst women, the study found that feelings of anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 were associated with a greater desire for thinness
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I need an explanation for this.
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  • Amongst the male participants, the study found that COVID-19-related anxiety and stress was associated with greater desire for muscularity, with anxiety also associated with body fat dissatisfaction.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Wow, that's so interesting.
  • COVID-19, and the consequences of the restrictions introduced to help tackle it, could be contributing to a number of serious mental health issues.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Yikes. So getting covid is a health issue, yet so is the worry of getting it.
  • In some cases, these issues can have very serious repercussions, including triggering eating disorders.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      What is it that connects the two?
  • Certainly during the initial spring lockdown period, our screen time increased, meaning that we were more likely to be exposed to thin or athletic ideals through the media, while decreased physical activity may have heightened negative thoughts about weight or shape. At the same time, it is possible that the additional anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 may have diminished the coping mechanisms we typically use to help manage negative thoughts.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Ahhhhh. This makes sense. So it's quarantine's fault more than anything. People who have covid anxiety tend be more responsible, and tend to stay home more, This leads to more screen time which leads to body image issues.
  • uring lockdown, women may have felt under greater pressure to conform to traditionally feminine roles and norms
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      oh, really?
  • iven that masculinity typically emphasises the value of toughness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of status, COVID-19-related stress and anxiety may be leading men to place greater value on the importance of being muscular."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Make sense.
dpittenger

Social Media Is Not Making You a Ball of Stress - 1 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...king-you-ball-stress-180953900

stress science Technology brain science social media

shared by dpittenger on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • “This awareness and sharing can have positive impacts on our psychosocial lives," says Murthy. "Specifically, if we—in our very busy and increasingly individualized lives—become more social via social media, this could reduce our stress levels, as sharing and more communal behaviors have historically been tied to better mental health.”
  • However, the Pew report suggests that social media can make users more aware of negative events in the lives of friends and family. And when users learn about deaths, illness, job loss or other problems among their circle of friends, they in turn feel additional stress they might have otherwise avoided.
  • No matter the platform, though, the work supports the notion that stress can act like a contagion, and it seems social media can facilitate its spread: “Increased social awareness can of course be double edged,” Murthy says.
Javier E

What Cookies and Meth Have in Common - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-and-meth-have-in-common.html

food addiction drug stress plasticity reward environment psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Why would anyone continue to use recreational drugs despite the medical consequences and social condemnation? What makes someone eat more and more in the face of poor health?
  • modern humans have designed the perfect environment to create both of these addictions.
  • Drug exposure also contributes to a loss of self-control. Dr. Volkow found that low D2 was linked with lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, which would impair one’s ability to think critically and exercise restraint
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  • Now we have a body of research that makes the connection between stress and addiction definitive. More surprising, it shows that we can change the path to addiction by changing our environment.
  • Neuroscientists have found that food and recreational drugs have a common target in the “reward circuit” of the brain, and that the brains of humans and other animals who are stressed undergo biological changes that can make them more susceptible to addiction.
  • In a 2010 study, Diana Martinez and colleagues at Columbia scanned the brains of a group of healthy controls and found that lower social status and a lower degree of perceived social support — both presumed to be proxies for stress — were correlated with fewer dopamine receptors, called D2s, in the brain’s reward circuit
  • The reward circuit evolved to help us survive by driving us to locate food or sex in our environment
  • Today, the more D2 receptors you have, the higher your natural level of stimulation and pleasure — and the less likely you are to seek out recreational drugs or comfort food to compensate
  • people addicted to cocaine, heroin, alcohol and methamphetamines experience a significant reduction in their D2 receptor levels that persists long after drug use has stopped. These people are far less sensitive to rewards, are less motivated and may find the world dull, once again making them prone to seek a chemical means to enhance their everyday life.
  • the myth has persisted that addiction is either a moral failure or a hard-wired behavior — that addicts are either completely in command or literally out of their minds
  • The processed food industry has transformed our food into a quasi-drug, while the drug industry has synthesized ever more powerful drugs that have been diverted for recreational use.
  • At this point you may be wondering: What controls the reward circuit in the first place? Some of it is genetic. We know that certain gene variations elevate the risk of addiction to various drugs. But studies of monkeys suggest that our environment can trump genetics and rewire the brain.
  • simply by changing the environment, you can increase or decrease the likelihood of an animal becoming a drug addict.
  • The same appears true for humans. Even people who are not hard-wired for addiction can be made dependent on drugs if they are stressed
  • Is it any wonder, then, that the economically frightening situation that so many Americans experience could make them into addicts? You will literally have a different brain depending on your ZIP code, social circumstances and stress level.
  • In 1990, no state in our country had an adult obesity rate above 15 percent; by 2015, 44 states had obesity rates of 25 percent or higher. What changed?
  • What happened is that cheap, calorie-dense foods that are highly rewarding to your brain are now ubiquitous.
  • Nothing in our evolution has prepared us for the double whammy of caloric modern food and potent recreational drugs. Their power to activate our reward circuit, rewire our brain and nudge us in the direction of compulsive consumption is unprecedented.
  • Food, like drugs, stimulates the brain’s reward circuit. Chronic exposure to high-fat and sugary foods is similarly linked with lower D2 levels, and people with lower D2 levels are also more likely to crave such foods. It’s a vicious cycle in which more exposure begets more craving.
  • Fortunately, our brains are remarkably plastic and sensitive to experience. Although it’s far easier said than done, just limiting exposure to high-calorie foods and recreational drugs would naturally reset our brains to find pleasure in healthier foods and life without drugs.
charlottedonoho

Harvard neuroscientist: Meditation not only reduces stress, here's how it changes your ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-literally-changes-your-brain

brain cognition meditation fight or flight

shared by charlottedonoho on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain.
  • I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others’ points of view. I thought, maybe it was just the placebo response. But then I did a literature search of the science, and saw evidence that meditation had been associated with decreased stress, decreased depression, anxiety, pain and insomnia, and an increased quality of life.
  • The first study looked at long term meditators vs a control group. We found long-term meditators have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex. Which makes sense. When you’re mindful, you’re paying attention to your breathing, to sounds, to the present moment experience, and shutting cognition down. It stands to reason your senses would be enhanced.
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  • The amygdala, the fight or flight part of the brain which is important for anxiety, fear and stress in general. That area got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program.
  • Studies by other scientists have shown that meditation can help enhance attention and emotion regulation skills. But most were not neuroimaging studies. So now we’re hoping to bring that behavioral and neuroimaging science together.
cvanderloo

Broken New Year's Resolutions? Time To Reframe Your Health Goals : Shots - Health News ... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ts-ok-to-give-yourself-a-break

newyears goals covid stress mentalhealth

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This year, it's OK to give ourselves a break, says Dr. Rachelle Scott, director of psychiatry at Eden Health, a concierge-style health care start-up with offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
  • "There are days we're just getting up and showering and, you know, just doing basic activities of daily living. And that's OK,"
  • A Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll conducted in mid-July 2020 found 53% of adults in the U.S. reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted due to stress over COVID-19. That's up from 32% in March.
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  • And then there's the added stress of recent racial unrest and political riots at the U.S. Capitol. "You've got the chronic COVID-19 [stress] response and then you've got the acute layer on top of that,"
  • a lot of Millennials who define themselves by their productivity and their ability to hustle. Because of the pandemic, many of them are now isolated from family members, out of work, or juggling small children who are learning from home.
  • Science suggests that small acts of kindness — like actually listening to someone else — can make them feel loved and supported.
  • Try practicing gratitude, which improves our relationships and is good for our hearts.
  • If you've got a big goal, consider breaking it down into smaller parts. "Break it down into 12 steps so that the beginning of each month is an opportunity to continue to work on that goal,"
  • Choose something specific, short-term and positive, agrees Randi Kofsky
  • "Goals are not a program we follow," Kofsky adds "They are not a task master. They are a destination. When we map out the path to take one step at a time, goals become our guide in the process."
  • With all the stress we're carrying right now, "just meeting ourselves where we're at is important,"
sanderk

Why Getting Too Little Sleep Could Lead To Risky Decision Making - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...-lead-to-risky-decision-making

decision making sleep social media phones

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The list of physical and mental problems that we know come from sleeping too little is getting longer.  A new study suggests another: shorting ourselves on sleep may lead to making riskier decisions, and we may not even realize we’re doing it.
  • The researchers were also interested in how the participants perceived their decisions—if they saw them as more risky than they’d otherwise be, given a few more hours of sleep. Most of the participants said they didn’t see any difference. “We therefore do not notice that we are acting riskier when suffering from a lack of sleep," said Christian Baumann
  • The good news is that for most of us this is a problem with a solution, although we’re up against some tough distractions to reach it. A diet of streaming, social media and video games is eating up more of our evening hours, along with the traditional sleep erasers like stress.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    Until I read this article I never knew that the lack of sleep actually leads to riskier decision making. I always thought that the lack of sleep would just cause people to become easily irritable and groggy. There is a very simple solution to this problem and it is just getting more sleep. However, I feel that it is very difficult for students to get enough sleep because of stress and schoolwork. Some of this stress can be eliminated by not using your phone as much. Also, by not using your phone as much, you will have more time in your day to accomplish work. This applies to our class discussions because we allow our phones to influence much of our day. Also, we need to be able to make good decisions in our everyday lives without taking too many unnecessary risks.
Javier E

How Depression and Anxiety Affect Your Physical Health - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-anxiety-physical-health.html

depression anxiety health effect mental health psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • It’s no surprise that when a person gets a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer or some other life-limiting or life-threatening physical ailment, they become anxious or depressed.
  • But the reverse can also be true: Undue anxiety or depression can foster the development of a serious physical disease, and even impede the ability to withstand or recover from one.
  • The human organism does not recognize the medical profession’s artificial separation of mental and physical ills. Rather, mind and body form a two-way street.
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  • What happens inside a person’s head can have damaging effects throughout the body, as well as the other way around. An untreated mental illness can significantly increase the risk of becoming physically ill, and physical disorders may result in behaviors that make mental conditions worse.
  • In studies that tracked how patients with breast cancer fared, for example, Dr. David Spiegel and his colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine showed decades ago that women whose depression was easing lived longer than those whose depression was getting worse. His research and other studies have clearly shown that “the brain is intimately connected to the body and the body to the brain,”
  • “The body tends to react to mental stress as if it was a physical stress.”
  • Anxiety disorders affect nearly 20 percent of American adults. That means millions are beset by an overabundance of the fight-or-flight response that primes the body for action.
  • “We often talk about depression as a complication of chronic illness,” Dr. Frownfelter wrote in Medpage Today in July. “But what we don’t talk about enough is how depression can lead to chronic disease. Patients with depression may not have the motivation to exercise regularly or cook healthy meals. Many also have trouble getting adequate sleep.”
  • These protective actions stem from the neurotransmitters epinephrine and norepinephrine, which stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and put the body on high alert. But when they are invoked too often and indiscriminately, the chronic overstimulation can result in all manner of physical ills, including digestive symptoms like indigestion, cramps, diarrhea or constipation, and an increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
  • While it’s normal to feel depressed from time to time, more than 6 percent of adults have such persistent feelings of depression that it disrupts personal relationships, interferes with work and play, and impairs their ability to cope with the challenges of daily life
  • “Depression diminishes a person’s capacity to analyze and respond rationally to stress,” Dr. Spiegel said. “They end up on a vicious cycle with limited capacity to get out of a negative mental state.”
  • Although persistent anxiety and depression are highly treatable with medications, cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy, without treatment these conditions tend to get worse.
  • When you’re stressed, the brain responds by prompting the release of cortisol, nature’s built-in alarm system. It evolved to help animals facing physical threats by increasing respiration, raising the heart rate and redirecting blood flow from abdominal organs to muscles that assist in confronting or escaping danger.
  • Improving sleep is especially helpful, Dr. Spiegel said, because “it enhances a person’s ability to regulate the stress response system and not get stuck in a mental rut.”
Javier E

How to Accept the Things You Can't Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620876

sadness depression victim feelings stoicism buddhism attitude

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Everyone—even the most privileged among us—has circumstances they would like to change in their life.
  • How might you improve the situation? Your answer might be, “I should move, get a new job, and meet new people.” In other words, you should change the outside world to make it better for you.
  • Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.
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  • Sometimes, changing your circumstances is difficult but absolutely necessary, such as in cases of abuse or violence. And sometimes, changing your circumstances is fairly easy: If you are lethargic every morning, start going to bed earlier.
  • But in the gray areas in between, fighting against reality can be impossible, or incredibly inefficient. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a chronic illness for which there are no promising treatment options. Perhaps your romantic partner has left you against your wishes and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
  • In these sorts of situations, changing how you feel can actually be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural.
  • No surprise, then, that chronic stress often leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms in modern life. These include the misuse of drugs and alcohol, rumination on the sources of stress, self-harm, and self-blaming
  • That can be blamed in part on biology. Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger.
  • In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.
  • But in the modern world, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.
  • you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.
  • Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis
  • Similarly, the Stoics believed that human reason, practiced studiously, could override knee-jerk emotions.
  • Buddhism posits that our minds are habitually unbalanced, but not intrinsically so; the key is to build new habits of thinking.
  • These ideas (especially the last) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy, such as rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies for changing our reactions to negative situations in our life—and thus becoming happier.
  • 4. Give more.
  • you can follow four steps to arrive at a happier frame of mind:
  • 1. Notice your feelings.
  • Self-observation requires that you be mindful of what you are feeling in the moment and approach your emotions with detached curiosity.
  • Say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless Zoom meetings and no real human contact. Rather than fantasizing about quitting, spend some time dissecting your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day are they worst?
  • Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, I started taking virtual meetings while out for a walk. It made a big difference.
  • 2. Accept your feelings.
  • in much of life, negative feelings are part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Furthermore, ample research shows that negative emotions and experiences help us find life’s meaning and purpose.
  • In the journal you started in Step 1 above, ponder the things that you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they spark in you. Ask what you are learning about yourself from each of these feelings, and how you might grow as a result.
  • 3. Lower your expectations.
  • Once, as a young man, I told my father over the phone that I planned to quit my job. “Why?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I told him. He paused for a long time, and finally said, “What makes you so special?
  • My problem—and it’s a common one—was that I had set unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.
  • Calmly ask yourself whether you’re asking the world for something it can’t or won’t give you. If you are, you might be looking in the wrong place for your bliss
  • you shouldn’t assume that all your happiness can come from any single romance, material object, or activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others.
  • Ancient thinkers recognized this difficulty but believed that we can manage our reactions effectively if we have the right tools.
  • Research from the INSEAD business school in France shows that people who consider themselves a victim of circumstances don’t feel like they have any responsibility for them. They are also likely to be victimizers themselves, hurting the people who try to help them.
  • One way to break this cycle is to help others voluntarily and charitably. Not only is serving others one of the most effective ways to raise one’s own happiness; maintaining the two opposing ideas that you are both a victim and a helper is very difficult.
Javier E

Addressing climate change concerns in practice - 0 views

www.apa.org/...ce-climate-change

climate change concerns psychology stress response

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • An APA survey released in February 2020 found that 56% of U.S. adults said that climate change is the most important issue facing the world today
  • More than two-thirds (68%) of the adults APA surveyed said they had “at least a little ‘eco-anxiety,’” or anxiety or worry about climate change and its effects.
  • Nearly half (48%) of young adults ages 18 to 34 said they felt stress over climate change in their daily lives.
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  • The Lancet and the University College London Institute for Global Health Commission called climate change the biggest threat to global health—and mental health in particular—of the 21st century (The Lancet, Vol. 373, No. 9676, 2009).
  • Humans have evolved to adjust to some environmental stressors, researchers have found, through allostasis, the system by which the body responds to stress.
  • The greater the stressors and the longer we are exposed to them, the more likely our response systems are to fail—and those stress responses may remain elevated for the rest of our lives (Crews, D. E., et al., Annals of Human Biology , Vol. 46, No. 1, 2019)
  • In 2017, for example, APA and ecoAmerica defined “eco-anxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” (APA and ecoAmerica, 2017).
  • It’s not just those directly affected by a disaster who suffer. Often, simply knowing that others are in the path of disaster can trigger anxiety or depression, says Amy Lykins, PhD, an American clinical psychologist and researcher working in Australia and in South Pacific islands such as Fiji
  • It is normal for people to be worried about environmental issues—it isn’t a disorder to be stressed by stressors. “We certainly don’t want to pathologize someone’s reasonable distress about climate and environmental threats,” Doherty says. “But we also don’t want to minimize issues that are causing significant impairment to a person’s life.”
  • According to the February 2020 APA poll, 4 in 10 people have not changed their behavior in light of climate change, but 7 in 10 say they wish they could do more, while 5 in 10 say they don’t know where to begin
  • Other research bears this out: Even when people are concerned about climate change and the environment, they may feel paralyzed or useless when it comes to taking action (Landry, N., et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology , Vol. 55, 2018).
anonymous

Men Respond To Stress With 'Fight Or Flight' While Women 'Tend And Befriend,' Say Scien... - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...friend-sry-gene_n_1345075.html

flight or fight human science brain science

shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When faced with a stressful or dangerous situation, human beings have only two options, “fight” or “flight.” Right? Not if you’re a woman, says a new study.
  • men tend to respond to stressful situations more aggressively than women do
  • “The aggressive fight-or-flight reaction is more dominant in men, while women predominantly adopt a less aggressive tend-and-befriend response,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The researchers suggested that this difference might all come down to one gene that only men have, called the SRY gene
  • Though the claims laid out by Lee and Harley are by no means certain,
  • Though the claims laid out by Lee and Harley are by no means certain,
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