Jun
3
One thing, I think, that often puts people off starting exercise is the idea that they need to exercise like a professional athlete in order to get any benefit: Join a gym, go jogging every morning at 5am, fill the garage with exercise machines, or do a Marine-style “boot camp” programme.
If your state of health and motivation are such that those things are appropriate for you, go right ahead, of course, but if you’re a sedentary person who hasn’t done much exercise, if any, for years, and the idea of starting just seems way too large, here are some suggestions for an easy lead-in. Once you build up a degree of fitness and start to feel the benefits of exercise, you may well want to do more, which is great. Start out gently, though, with these simple ideas:
- If you live or work in a multistory building, take the stairs instead of the lift. Look for opportunities to go upstairs and downstairs, rather than avoiding them. For example, I work in the lower story of a two-story house. There’s a bathroom downstairs, but I often use the one upstairs instead.
- If you live within walking distance of the shops or even the postbox, start taking opportunities to walk down there to post your letters or pick up a bottle of milk or a newspaper, rather than driving. (It’ll save you money as well.)
- If you drive to work, look for opportunities to park a little further away from work and walk (assuming that this is safe given the hours you work and the location).
- If you take the bus to work, get off one or two stops earlier, at each end if you can.
 photo credit: TheeErin
- Go for a walk at lunchtime. Get colleagues to join you.
- Join in your kids’ games, if you have kids. If you don’t, consider borrowing someone else’s that you know.
- Put on some vigorous music and clean the house. Extra points if you move furniture (carefully – lift with a straight back).
- Weed the garden. If you don’t have one, offer to weed someone else’s.
I blogged a little while back about a study done in Denmark in which participants were told to follow essentially the reverse of the advice above – they reduced their daily steps from 6000 to 1400, driving and using elevators whenever possible. Within two weeks the speed at which they cleared fat and glucose from their bloodstream had dropped markedly. Slow rates of clearing these substances from the bloodstream is one predictor of chronic disease. So it appears that even doing a little exercise can have a significant health effect.
For more advice in the same vein, see the National Heart Foundation’s publication on Physical Activity, which gives guidance on how to build up gradually.
What’s your plan to become more active for better health?
Technorati Tags: health, physical activity, exercise, sedentary, training, tips, lifehacks, gtd, motivation
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Jun
5
worry 1 by xymonau
I’ve been reading John Medina’s book Brain Rules, which is excellent. He’s engaging, often entertaining, writes well and clearly, and talks about a subject I know fairly well for a layman (brain science) but is always telling me things I hadn’t heard before.
I can see why he got a major teaching award: He uses his knowledge of how people learn to keep your interest and make his points memorable.
I want to do a little miniseries here on just one of his chapters, the one on stress. I’ll start with the definition.
Researchers Jeansok Kim and David Diamond came up with this three-part definition of stress:
- There is an aroused physiological response, measurable by an outside party.
- The stress is perceived as aversive (the person feeling it dislikes it).
- The stressed person does not feel in control of the stressor.
If you have all three together, you have stress (by the Kim/Diamond definition).
It’s just this moment struck me that many smokers are experiencing their smoking as stressful by this definition.
Aroused physiological response – definitely. Nicotine causes the body to kick into fight-or-flight mode and release adrenalin, boosting the blood sugar level, and at the same time interferes with the insulin response which would normally lower it again. (This is one reason why people who are giving up smoking crave sweets; they are used to a high blood sugar level.) The adrenalin boost also increases heart rate, blood pressure and the rate of breathing. All of this is easily observed.
The stressed person dislikes it – not universally, but many smokers do actually dislike their habit. They dislike the taste, the smell, the cost, and even the feelings they get.
And the stressed person does not feel in control – very much the case with many smokers. No wonder a British study found that smoking was associated with reduced quality of life.
distraught by greekgod
Anyway, what I started out to say was that this definition immediately implies several possible approaches to dealing with stress.
First is the physiological approach. By the use of calming techniques such as breathing, biofeedback, progressive relaxation and the like, you can deliberately calm your body during periods of stress. The Relaxation Response Practice is one such technique, using your mind to calm your body down in order to reverse the physiological changes that occur during an episode of stress. (More on these changes and what they do to your body in Part 2 of this miniseries.) Since it was your mind which got your body wound up in the first instance, this is highly effective and relatively straightforward with a little practice.
Second is the reframing approach, in which you restate the stressor to yourself in terms which diminish its aversiveness – in other words, you take an experience you dislike and, by looking at it differently, make it neutral or even positive. This cognitive technique is essentially what is described in my post “Don’t suppress emotions – think“. It has been known to advanced Buddhist meditators for a very long time. For example, Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young teaches his students to distinguish between pain (which is a sensation like other sensations) and resistance to pain (which is what causes suffering). This mindfulness technique is similar to some cognitive psychology and hypnotherapy techniques for pain management.
Think about using this for procrastination. Some jobs are stressful because we make them stressful in our minds; we don’t want to do them, we resist. If we let go of the resistance and allow ourselves to do the jobs, we often find that they’re not so bad after all.
Finally, there is the aspect of control. Many, many animal experiments (some of them quite cruel) have established that the perception of choice or control is a key element of stress. This is why the famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People includes an exercise in thinking about what you can and can’t control, and concentrating on the things you can, the things within your “circle of influence”. Steven Covey recommends trying to shrink your “circle of concern” – the things you worry about – until it fits within your “circle of influence”, and this is excellent counter-stress advice. Worrying – thinking intensely and with emotional engagement – about things we can control can help us to make important changes. Worrying about things we can’t control can only harm us.
If an element of your stress is a situation you feel you can’t change, spend some time thinking about whether that’s really true. If it isn’t, weigh up the cost of changing it and make a change plan. For example, if your job is stressing you excessively, consider what you would need to do to get one that didn’t, or to adjust the one you have so that it doesn’t.
If your stressor really is outside your control, though, the control you still have is to choose your response to it. This is where you can use strategy 2 (re-think the situation so that it isn’t aversive) or, failing that, strategy 1 (calming yourself physiologically so that the stress doesn’t harm you so much).
Next time: what’s happening to your body when you’re stressed over a long period.
(For much, much more on stress, including useful techniques to deal with it both quickly and for the long term, get my free course Simple Stress Management Techniques.)
Technorati Tags: stress, worry, coping, brain, brain science, smoking, calming, mindfulness, techniques, relaxation, relaxation response, reframing, cognitive, resistance, procrastination, control, influence, circle of influence, circle of concern, change, personal change, mental attitude, rethinking
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Jun
6
Following on from my previous post on what stress is and how you can deal with it, here’s part 2 of my miniseries based on John Medina’s Brain Rules chapter on stress.
Stress, Medina points out, is an adaptive reaction which in our not-so-distant ancestors’ time lasted just long enough to get us out of physical danger. We saw the tiger, we ran from the tiger, we either got away or got eaten.
photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar
Modern life isn’t like that. The things that trigger off our stress response are often in our environment for years, because our stress response is triggered just as much by things that we perceive to be social threats as by things that we perceive to be physical threats. (Because we’re social creatures, a social threat ultimately is a physical threat. If you’re low-status in the group, you don’t get access to the best food or the best mates.)
Here are three systems that Medina discusses, and the short-term and long-term effects of stress on each.
First, the arousal system, the key hormone of which is adrenaline. In the short term, adrenaline boosts cardiovascular performance. My sister, a moderately fit, not especially large or strong woman then aged in her early 50s, once pulled a large ride-on mower off our nephew after it rolled on him. This is the kind of feat that adrenaline is there for. It boosts blood pressure and heart rate, increasing blood flow to the limbs up to five times the normal level, and turns you briefly into a superhero.
photo credit: Olaf
(Before you ask: No, that’s not my sister.)
Long-term, however, if your system stays awash with adrenaline it stops regulating blood pressure surges, which lead to scarring on the artery surfaces. This, in turn, leads to clots as various substances build up. The consequence can be a stroke or a heart attack, as the clot cuts off blood flow to either part of the brain (stroke) or heart (heart attack).
(An odd thing I noticed, by the way, browsing the National Heart Foundation’s site: They do not mention stress as a risk factor for heart disease. It most definitely is one.)
Meanwhile, in the immune system, short-term stress boosts immunity and raises the white blood cell count, as you’d expect. If you’re under threat, your chance of injury, and hence infection, is going to increase. Long-term, though, stress reduces immunity and white blood cell count – so stressed people get sick more.
It can also cause the immune system to fire at non-threats. The same thing happens to police or soldiers who have been on duty in threatening circumstances for too long; they are liable to shoot civilians or their fellows by accident. When this effect occurs in the body, it results in allergies (the immune system responding to substances in the environment as threats) and autoimmune disorders (responding to parts of the body itself as threats).
photo credit: Kyle May
Medina reports an interesting experiment done at UCLA with the cooperation of the drama department. Actors were divided into two groups and told to use “method” acting to summon up the emotions portrayed in the scripts they were given. One group got happy scripts and the other sad scripts. At the end of the day, blood samples already showed reduced immune response in the “sad” group.
Finally, the memory. Under short-term stress, memory is more vivid and recall quicker and more accurate, again as you’d expect. You want to be able to remember danger, recognize it again, and quickly and accurately remember not only what it looks like but what happened last time, what worked and what didn’t work to get you out of it.
Again, though, long-term stress reverses the effect, and more. It harms processing of mathematics, language, memory (short and long-term), the ability to generalize and adapt old information to new situations, concentration, declarative memory (memory for facts) and executive function (the ability to organize, prioritize and shift attention from one task to another). In other words, just about everything that you need to function well in your work, and for that matter your daily life.
Just to take one example, I remember, at a time when I was very stressed, being given something, putting it in my pocket, and immediately forgetting that I had done so. I would have sworn in court that it hadn’t been given to me, had it not been sitting there in my pocket where I had obviously put it.
Photo credit: abominable_eagle
If you’re suffering from the effects of long-term stress, or if you think you might be, right now is a good time to review my previous post on how to deal with stress, only one of a number of posts on stress on this site. And some therapeutic relaxation using my free hypnotherapy script is likely to do you some good.
And if you’re in Auckland, I run a course called “Befriend Your Stress” which may be of benefit.
Technorati Tags: stress, relaxation, work stress, stress effects, brain rules, adrenaline, heart disease, immune system, memory, performance
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