stressed out

As I was getting dinner, I heard an essay read on NPR by its author, Christian McBride a jazz bass player. McBride says, “I believe it pays to be cool. Most people in this day and age are always terribly stressed… They will age quickly. Cool people stay young forever.” Listen to the audio file and be cool.

This post is inspired by my resent cold. Over the years, I have learned from my and my clients’ colds that our immune system’s strength is directly related out our stress level. Researchers for last ten years have used the immune system as the interface between our minds and our bodies. When our lifestyle or behavior affects our bodies or health - it is the immune system that often first demonstrates this relationship. This is no truer than with the common cold.

I can remember my mother saying decades ago, yes I am old man – “your resistance is down” when I caught a cold. We all know that we don’t “catch a cold” when we are strong. It is when our immune systems have been dealing with the effects of stress and our resources are spent, that is when we develop a cold. It is simple – you want less colds, strengthen your immune system by removing the stress from your body.

Here are 9 simple suggestions to reduce your stress and increase your resistance:

1. Sleep and rest. Our bodies need time every day to renew themselves. Sleep is when we rebuild from the day. It is not the quantity, but the quality of sleep that determines the renewal.

2. Vacations. I learned years ago that a cold is a forced vacation. I saw with myself and my clients that if we don’t take time off and replenish our bodies would make sure we had time off. On a few occasions, I have seen how things appear fine until we are on vacation. Clients would ask why this would occur. I would tell them that your vacation was the first time in a long time you could slow down. Once you were able to slow down, your body just let loose.

3. Express your emotions. In Chinese medicine, the lungs represent the emotion of sadness and grief. In keeping with the mind/body interplay, when our emotions get backed up the body takes over expressing that stress. Years ago, I had a student that came down with a bad cold. Knowing she had some old emotions backed up, I suggested that she go out and rent a movie for each of the five main emotions – fear, sadness, anger, worry and pretense. She called me two days later feeling great.

4. Friends. Having regular social interaction becomes a venue to express emotions and have fun. Studies have shown that friends literally strengthen our immune systems. In stress reductions terms friends create “stress hardiness.”

5. Balance work. It is all too easy to have work consume us. When we can view work from the prospective of return on investment we may start to see that to receive more out of the investment we need to balance work with other activities. These could be more vacations or applying the suggestions of this blog.

Over the years, I have seen hundreds of client who have literary run themselves down. Yes, they feel the runner’s high from going out for a run. Yet, over time, these runners would be using resources that they did not have. Their bodies would be breaking down quicker than rebuilding. Recently research institutions and the media began discussing the consequences of over exercising.

6. Enjoy life. It may be a trite statement, yet in it is a huge secret to avoiding colds. My experience with clients as well as current research demonstrates that people who have a positive view of life are healthier. Negative individuals are four times more likely to develop a cold.   Dr. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Epidemiology at Carnegie Mellon University studied how our attitudes are predetermines to our health. He specifically discovered that individuals with neurotic personalities compared with positive and extroverted personalities develop more colds. Even more at risk was those who believed they were under stress.

In a later study, he found that chronic stress, being a month or more, increased the risk of catching a cold. A good overview of Dr. Cohen’s work can be found here. Our bodies don’t lie, if we are not having fun – they will eventually show it. Enjoyment must be more than thinking we are happy, it must be experiencing it regularly.

7. Develop a healthy lifestyle. For many this means limiting the substances that take more energy from our bodies than give energy. A breakfast of two donuts is not nourishing our bodies. Neither are the three morning cups of coffee. Caffeine over time robs Peter to pay Paul – we get short term energy at the cost of long term vitality. Most of us know what a better lifestyle would be. The questions becomes why are we not moving towards that goal. Often the answer is stress. Stress psychologically and physiologically draws us to unhealthy behaviors. We crave the caffeine and sugar for the quick energy because under stress (the survival response) we want the most energy we can have to “fight or flight.”

8. Stop the irritation. Before we have a cold, we have an irritation. It may be an irritation in your throat. If the irritation persists, it will often develop into an infection. I know one of my warnings of a cold coming on is that pre-sore throat condition. When I heal the irritation, I never get a cold. This phenomenon holds true psychologically. An ongoing little irritant frequently develops into a stressor which can add to wearing me down making me more susceptible to a cold.

That one last stressor may trigger a cold. The true problem is not that last straw; it is all the others which accumulated. I suggest you take a stress test to see how many straws are piling on your back.

9. Get help. My first recommendation is to use the resources of this blog. We all are masters of accumulating stress. Most of us need assistance in reducing the chronic stress that we acquired and also learn not to reproduce it. Start with taking a mini-vacation. This could be for a weekend or it could be for an hour massage. You could also look at ways to strengthen your immune system by increasing you vital energy or as they call in Chinese medicine, your chi.

Colds occur when we are weakened, when we have spent our resources on other things. Either we decrease what is draining us, or we increase the activities that truly renew us. All these suggestions will work best in the context of reducing our overall stress level. Years ago, I use to get several colds every year. In the last twenty years, I average less than one a year and as you know – I am now an old man.