stressed out

It’s inevitable. Like death and taxes. Back pain.

Second to colds, the most likely reason you’ll visit a healthcare provider will be back pain. Fifty percent of Americans report back pain each year.

Are you in pain right now? Is your movement limited? Are you reducing your activities because of the pain or the fear of the pain? Let’s look at why.

A lot of back pain comes from overexertion. If that’s you, you’re lucky. Your pain will go away once your body recovers from being pushed. And there’s a good chance it won’t return—unless you overdo it again. In time, you’ll be fine.

For pain due to overexertion, traditional remedies work well. Cold compresses can reduce swelling. Warm, moist heat helps muscles that feel tight. Alternating the two can be beneficial. And of course, massage and gentle stretching relax the tightness, and the movement prevents further stiffness. Rest always supports the body in healing, and topical ointments will give you warmth and local pain relief.

Chronic Back Pain
Chronic back pain is a different animal. Pain often occurs without physical exertion; it just shows up. As the frequency and intensity of episodes increase, each incident leaves a tension residue that sets up the next attack of pain. Pain pills and muscles relaxers can help, but many people don’t like their side effects. One thing is clear: just treating the symptom is not enough—particularly when the problem is likely to return.

Prevention and Treatment
The best way to treat chronic back pain is to prevent it. Learn to lift using your legs. Sit on your sits bones. Stop slouching! It will all reduce back strain. Use ergonomic furniture that adjusts to your unique body, instead of forcing your body to adapt to the furniture. Moving helps, too – get up and walk around, take breaks.

And the most critical behavior—the one we never think—about is breathing. I know, you are breathing. The question is how well.

When I taught Mindfulness Stress Reduction courses in Scottsdale, AZ, the principal reason people came to us was back pain. At the time, we were the largest company offering these courses in the country. Most of our students for the 8-week course were referrals from hospital networks or corporate clients.

We taught the students to breath. As easy as it might sound, the first few weeks were tough. Doing very simple relaxation exercises would actually create stress. The students’ old habits prevented them from relaxing and breathing fully. Once they realized how tense they were, they saw and how much they were limiting their breath—even when they believed they were relaxed. With daily homework and coming to the weekly class, their awareness and breathing increased as their stress and pain declined.

What does this mean for you? If these very tense people can dramatically change their stress and pain in 8-weeks, so can you. The first step is to become aware of how you hold your body and your breath. If you are holding one, you are holding the other. As your breath becomes fuller, slower and more relaxed you begin to train your body not to hold stress, but to release it.

In keeping with letting go, I suggest to my clients that they do not do “back strengthening” exercises. I have not seen a back that was muscularly weak; I see many that are structurally weak. Our bigger back muscles are not meant to be posture muscles, they are designed to move us, not hold us. The constant holding makes them tighter. Rather than getting stronger form sit-ups or back extensions, practice breathing and stretching.

Your body often becomes the depository for your anger. When an emotion is not fully expressed, some of that energy or charge can transform itself into physical tension. Clenched jaws don’t happen overnight, they happen from years of holding frustration in your body. After a while, these tight jaws can increase your reaction through, enhancing the feeling of anger. It is as if the tension in your body starts to act as a computer virus running the system on its own.

The converse is also true – if you release the body, you will release old emotions. Thirty years ago, when I discovered Rolfing, a respected form of bodywork, I had no idea how much my emotions would let go. Stalking out good bodywork will significantly enhance any lake draining. The bonus is that the bodywork will aid you in increasing your body/mind awareness, thereby thwarting the rage attacks.

Psychotherapy and anger

Good therapy can be a useful tool to transforming rage. Psychotherapy that integrates the body into its process is generally quicker. Going further into your head or learning more coping skills will not heal the rage. “People who have a lot of anger invest a lot of energy in trying to control it, and that kind of friction is likely to increase the probability of a heart attack,” says Charles Spielberger, Ph.D., a University of South Florida psychologist who developed the leading test to measure anger. True control comes when you shift from attempting to repress the anger, which eventually explodes, to allowing your natural responses to take over in their smaller increments of expression.

If you are to go the therapy route, you need to find a therapist who is not afraid of his or her anger. Interview therapists; push them about how they deal with anger. You are not looking for someone who will placate your anger. What you are looking for is someone who will teach your new skills of being fully expressive. Trust your gut here.

As you learn to express all your emotions, the tension will not erupt into rage. You will start to identify patterns; you can begin alerting rage response earlier in the process.

Don’t become one of the statistics

More than 30,000 heart attacks each year are triggered by transitory anger, according to a 2004 Harvard study. These heart attacks occur because an acute anger episode actually builds on many previous episodes. These same men are part of the group that are three times more likely to develop premature cardiovascular disease, or a stroke, and six times more likely to have an early heart attack. Charles Spielberger, Ph.D claims, “The more intense the anger, the more likely the heart attack.”

You can reduce your anger intensity to a point where you express anger appropriately for the situation. You can stop having anger rule you. When anger is primarily making sure your boundaries are honored, your anger returns to acting asa servant for you.

The macho archetype of a man who does not express vulnerable emotions yet can explode on a moment’s notice is outdated. Also gone is the archetype of the sensitive man who serves women only to repress his aggressive side going to work. As men, we are beginning to learn to express our feelings and to receive love. Converting our rage into an anger ally can bring healing to our heart as well as our gender.

We lose over $300 billion a year in productivity due to stress. What we lose in quality of life is much harder to put a figure to. 

We don’t know what we are missing in terms of lost opportunity costs. A work team that is burnt out is not likely to be the first to jump on a new opportunity or create one. A family who is stressed out that takes a vacation is likely to neither renew them nor fully allow them to enjoy their time together. 

The stress response, as a survival mechanism, is a reactive response.  Even chronic stress puts you in a place where you are reacting and not creating. If you just worked your second 60-hour week and your son has a soccer tournament through the weekend, do you think you will be fully present for it? Or maybe you and your partner are attempting to find the time to sit down and design your new house. You finally find the time, but you are exhausted – how creative will you be? How much fun will it be? 

Stress tends to put you in a mode where you are attempting to just keep up and not mess up. You are more likely to be planning from a position of covering your butt versus creating what could be the next breakthrough. 

Some Solutions 

Don’t buy into stress. I am not saying deny it. You need to acknowledge it and its effect on you. However, you don’t need to accept a life  ruled by stress. Often, you may find yourself in an environment where there is an assumption that this is the way we do it, a place where stress rules. 

Stop focusing on what you don’t want - focus on what you do want. When you learn to ride a motorcycle, one of the first things you are taught is  not to look where you don’t want to go, but look where you want to go. Your bike will follow your eyes. Your behavior follows your focus. If your main concern is simply survival, you will do just that.. As your focus shifts to generating a full spectrum of success, your survival and your stress around it may handle itself. 

Make a commitment to your health and success. Use the information and resources in this blog to break out of the state you are in with stress. Being more productive is being less stressed. France is known as a laid back country. Not only do they drink their wine, they also have one of the shortest work weeks in all of the developed world. Yet, they are one of the most productive, more productive than the United States. 

A huge step occurs when you set boundaries that yourself and others respect. Start saying “no” to what takes energy from you and “yes” to what gives you energy. Make a conscious decision about the long hours of work; don’t just do it because everyone else does it. Are you willing to work those long hours to make partner? Is being a partner what your really want? Ask your head, and ask your heart. 

Just as a cost in business needs to be balanced with more income, so does more stress needs to be balance by receiving more rejuvenation. After your long and hard two weeks, your mind and body needs time to renew. It might mean vegging-out for the weekend or going fishing. Balance your expenditures with your rejuvenation. 

Take the long view. I once had someone tell me that as he matured he would ask himself: When I am an old man sitting on my rocker on the porch – would I be glad I chose a particular decision? 

Reducing stress is not reducing risk taking. It may be taking a different kind of risk. Takerisks that allow you to be different and invest energy in areas that will produce long term gains in health, wealth and happiness.

I have a drug that will cause you to feel more stressed, more tense and more run- down – do you want some? Nine out ten adults in the U.S. take it every day for its upside of effect. That drug is caffeine.

The energy we get from caffeine is pseudo-energy. It is nervous system or endocrine system energy, the same form of energy that amphetamines give us. Caffeine also produces the same response that stress produces when it creates the “fight or flight” response. Caffeine, uppers, and stress all rev up our bodies in the short run while over time wearing us out.

We often crave our hit of caffeine when we are coming down from being “up” from stress. I suspect the first addiction we all experience is the one of stress and its drug of adrenaline. Yes, I know none of us wants to be stressed out, yet we often enjoy the rush of being under pressure and feeling the effects of adrenaline. When the adrenals begin to burn out from constant use, we look for a back up. Caffeine is happy to supply us with it’s adrenaline effect.

Bottom line – caffeine increases the affects of stress. Insomnia, mood swings, body tension, hindered digestion, increased blood pressure and heart rate, along with strained and worn-out kidneys and adrenals. Caffeine acts as a powerful vasoconstrictor, restricting the flow of oxygen to the brain and impairing memory. The headache from quitting caffeine is actually a result of blood returning to the brain.

Caffeine decreases DHEA, the rejuvenation hormone. DHEA supports the anti-aging processes and the immune system. DHEA also acts as a precursor to sex hormones and increases brain’s serotonin levels - what Prozac claims to do.

It is true that caffeine speeds up our metabolism. Yet it also ages us because our metabolism is sped up. Caffeine promotes weight gain, particularly abdominal fat, which is the most dangerous fat. Under stress, we crave carbohydrates and fats for quick energy. Meanwhile, our body’s digestion turns down while our blood and resources are allocated to areas necessary for survival, such as our big muscles.

Suggestions:

I realize that even volumes devoted to the reasons on caffeine’s harmful effects would not be enough for most of us to quit. My hope is that learning about caffeine’s full effects will encourage us to look for ways to reduce our consumption.

The usual suggestions of switching to decaffeinated beverages and no caffeine after 2 pm will help. Note that Stanford University recently did a study that showed decaf coffee raises cholesterol levels faster than caffeinated coffee (decaf cup has 7 mg of caffeine).

Switching to herb teas can help, but be warned that these herbs have caffeine: guarana, kola nut, yerba maté, and ephedrine from Ma Huang. Most sodas and chocolates have caffeine as well.

The best and perhaps the most challenging way to reduce caffeine intake is to reduce our stress. Less stress reduces the craving for the boost that caffeine provides. Less stress, over time allows our vital energy to rise. This energy is, known as “chi”, by Oriental medical practitioners and martial artists. By not feeding our need for short term energy and by building our chi, we can decrease the desire for caffeine and increase our health.

Addendum – One day when you are hyped up and are looking for something to do, your can calculate you caffeine intake using this data base.

Let’s get honest. Are you really just a little overweight? By 2030, according to a Baylor University study, 100 percent of U.S. citizens will be obese by current standards. For many, being overweigh is stressful. For others, stress is a significant cause of extra weight. It’s stress that holds the key to shifting this paradox.

To understand the importance stress plays, we need to understand that it’s a survival response that’s always activated. To survive, we either do fight or flight, so we need quick energy – sugar. We crave survival food under continuing stress. Simultaneously, our bodies are shutting down other functions such as digestion. Complex adjustment of body functions makes us crave foods that we should not eat.

Then there is the culture we live in, which shows anorexic models, and movie stars that have lipo-sucked every once of unwanted fat. If that’s not enough there is Photoshop morphing of humans into super humans. These unreal images create huge stress, particularly for our young girls, to the extent that they are experiencing puberty earlier than ever and getting plastic surgery to be perfect. These images become subliminal. Then we are consciously blind – we don’t realize we are seeing them. They linger in our unconscious, drive us to spend our money on merchandise to be beautiful, and stress out about our imperfections.

Whatever we may stress about will impact our bodies. Often the influence will effect the disposition of our fat. A new study will be based on the phenomenon that stress creates a pot belly. Because of the hormone released under stress, pot bellied people develop a more dangerous fat, a visceral fat that lies between the organs.

Fat is a symptom of stress. We can continue to treat the symptom as we have for the last 50 years or we can shift to treating the cause. There are external factors, such as the media, which we can’t change. More powerful and more immediate are the internal factors, our response to stress. After 30 years of working with clients and students who often sought my help for addressing the cause of their weight, I can say often reducing stress will take weight off and create a body that you will inherently accept.

Here are 8 approaches to losing weight through reducing stress. Some of what I discuss may not be comfortable to read. My goal is to assist you in escaping your stress, not making you feel good.

1. Leave survival behind. Begin to understand the power of stress. Fighting stress and its response (craving survival foods) is a losing fight. You are going up against your biology and genetics. You are hardwired to survive, so stop trying to repress a natural behavior. Focus on taking yourself out of the survival state.

Another view is to realize you are stuck in post traumatic stress. The body is experiencing trauma when stress is not actually present. You need to unwind tension and unlearn stress behavior. Your body will transform itself when this occurs.

About 15 years ago, when I had a clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, a woman came in asking if I could do for her what her friends claimed I did for them. I told the woman that if she lost her chronic stress and learned to not recreate it, after several months she probably would be thinner. She saw me for ten weekly sessions. Her body changed some, but we both agreed it was not transformed.

Six months latter, I saw a very attractive woman in a black dress at the end of my long hall. Not until I was close to her did I realize it was my former client seeing someone else in my office. I told her I did not recognize her. She said few months after finishing with me she started dropping pounds without dieting or exercising. Her parting comment was, “this is the body I always wanted, but thought I would never have.” It was the body of an unstressed woman.

When we release old stress, we learn to not recreate it. The cellulite women often complain about disappears. The fascia (the connective tissue which is also scar tissue) that holds the stress also holds fat. When the stress is released, the fascia is released and the fat can dissolve away.

Be aware of when stress or tension is going into your body. Then breathe and express your feelings. These two simple behaviors will change your life.

2. Challenge your beliefs. What are your unconscious affirmations? What are your mantras that you keep repeating? These internal voices become self-fulfilling statements. For example, if you tell yourself and others “I am fat,” you will continue to be. I am not suggesting the opposite, that you go around staying “I am thin” when you don’t believe it. There is a middle ground that allows for change. This ground is where you stand in the present experiencing what is true while holding the possibility and intent of change. For example, you might say to yourself – “I am losing weight.”

As you begin to accept being overweight, along with the corresponding emotions, you hold the in you mind the intent of being your thinner self. At first, your mind will want to escape to the old patterns of denial, self-loathing and setting unreal goals before it settles in a place of acceptance. This acceptance can then lead to creating a vision of what you want while still maintaining the experience of your negative emotions. The juxtaposition of acceptance and goal setting may seem counter-intuitive, yet it in this space you create an opportunity for something new to occur.

3. Give up unreal images. What literal and metaphorical images do you focus on? Do you have pictures of thin bodies on your fridge? Or are you looking at magazines with “perfect bodies?” When we put what we believe are unreal goals in front of us our minds say, “Who do you think you are, you are not that person and never will be.” These inspiring images backfire. They reinforce our self-loathing and repeated failure at losing weight.

Making the shift from seeing these images as a finite state to a process can enable change. Rather than saying “I am that image,” try saying to yourself “I am in a process of becoming my own person who shares characteristics of that image.”

The mind will know when something is not true and it will, on some level, fight back. Hold images and use affirmations that are possible.

4. Lose the secondary gains. These are behaviors or even illnesses we create to achieve indirectly what we believe we can’t get directly. In other words, if you were not getting something out of being overweight you would not be overweight. We all have some self-defeating behaviors. I certainly have had my share. I can remember allowing kids to pick on me because I convinced myself that was safer than standing up for myself

There was a book a woman wrote 30 years ago, I think it was “Fat is a Feminine Issue.” If it was, I can’t find it. Her thesis was that women (the corresponding can be true for men) acquired fat to keep men away. Dealing with the fat was supposedly easier than dealing with the possibility of a relationship. The author challenged her readers to address their issues around relationships as a means to losing weight.

My challenge to you is to act as if your fat had a purpose beyond reflecting the bad diet you may consume. If your fat was saying something, what would it be saying? Who would it be saying to? Are you angry with someone, even yourself? Are you attempting to get attention from someone?

The first step to meaningful change is to admit were we are and that we need help. This often is the hardest step. Frequently much of what we have avoided comes home to us. When I began to admit getting bullied was more about being afraid to take a stand, I started to develop the courage to say no to the bullies. What amazed me was that I did not have to prove it them as much as to myself. They stopped picking on me when I stopped cowering.

5. Your body is your ally. So often, we approach diet and exercise from a forcing prospective. We deprive, punish and generally coerce our bodies to conform to our wishes. We can produces change – but at what long term costs? The constant binges of exercising and dieting train our bodies to not find a healthy set point

You body is like a kid. It will constantly fight back if forced to do things it does not want to do. As we know, an angry kid will find a way to get back.

My intent here is not to give specific advice about a diet or exercise program, but to encourage you to find programs that are not forcing your body. Seek out programs that support your total health. Of course if you have not exerted your body in 20 years there will be some discomfort initially. At some point, the discomfort should shift to more ease. If it does not, you are back to the paradigm of punishing yourself for not being thin.

I suggest starting easy. Even if it is a yoga class, start with the lowest level of a beginning class. If you do not like what you are doing or are hurting yourself, fine a new teacher or a new activity. A slow walk in the woods can be more enjoyable and healthier for some than going to the gym and running on a treadmill.

Just watch kids play. A child can run around all day. She is not exercising; she is playing. I encourage you to rediscover your play.

6. Step out of double binds. These are mental and relationship traps we put ourselves into where there is no way out. It has been said, “The only way to win at a child’s game is not to play.” Once you are trapped in the maze of the damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you lose.

One double bind I have seen around weight is “I can’t have a loving relationship until I lose weight.” This person is always trying to lose weight to be loved, giving the message to his body that he does not love himself. As I was saying, not loving yourself makes permanently losing weight very difficult.

7. Let others do your work. We often make change of any kind harder than we need to. Being a lazy kind of guy and enjoying being a rebel, I saw getting help as a way to further my cause.

One huge way to shift the fat thing is to have others address the issue directly. Good bodywork can crack open new possibilities for losing weight. Bodywork releases chronic and acute stress and tells our bodies that they are being loved through the gift of receiving someone’s attention. Having someone else’s hands touch places that we are ashamed of brings acceptance to those areas.

Find groups that support the outcome, not the problem. This helps spread the load. So many illness support groups support the problem, not the healing. On a few occasions, I have been asked to speak to different support groups. Virtually everyone in the audience was more committed to commiserating about their shared problem then learning about the array of possible means to alleviating it.

My suggestion is to find a group that supports its members being successful, healthy or just happy. Not to find a group that talks about losing weight or being thin. Yes, there are the diet programs — groups that have success in assisting their clients in losing weight. I am encouraging you to step beyond them to organizations or groups that encourage generating a fulfilling life. If you’re interested in some of these organizations, write a comment expressing your desire and I will get back to you.

8. Enroll your mind to transform your body. Being the advocate for mindfulness, I can’t do this post without mentioning mindfulness for transforming fat. By now, everyone has come to accept the mind-body connection.

Having your mind be your ally sounds simple. Achieving this takes some work. Essentially, you begin using your awareness to witness what is occurring. Witnessing is not judging, evaluating or criticizing. It is just being an observer. When you see that picture of a thin body, you observe your response. What is your first thought? What does your body do? What is happening to your breath? These are just questions to get you started. As you develop this skill, you will not have to ask. Your body/mind will bring to you its response.

In the last 20 years, mindfulness has taken off. There are excellent courses that I no longer teach, but others do. Mindfulness works – there is a growing body of research that supports the efficacy of mindfulness. The prior study on pot bellies is organized around teaching a group of women mindfulness. “Weight loss is not the goal,” said Daubenmier, the lead researcher. “But we are thinking we will find a reduction in the visceral fat, which is really important. We’re looking at breaking that stress — eating link.”

In the development of mindfulness there always has been mindfulness eating used as a natural means to enhance the practice of mindfulness. The added benefit of mindfulness eating is that it can shift your eating habits while increasing your eating enjoyment.

Success lies in not treating the fat, but the cause to why the body choose that expressions of stress. Liposuction and stomach stapling will reduce your fat, but what will reduce your stress? I advocate that you view being overweight as a sign that you are stressed-out. Start with admitting that maybe your fat is stored or unexpressed stress. Then explore ways to remove stress from our life and your body. You can create the body you always wanted and sustain it.

With the advent of technology, we all are multitaskers. It is as if we are in a competition to see who can juggle the most balls at one time. We are on our cell phone, typing on the computer, listening to our spouse tell us what we should be doing and listening to our new CD in the background. We tell ourselves that we are efficient.

As we know all too well, we do get things done. Yet, when we do several things simultaneously, we are doing nothing well or peacefully. Unlike our computers which run several programs at one time, our brains quickly loose focus. We all have had the experience of “not hearing” what our spouse said to us. Yes, we were listening, but how can we allow what was said to soak in when we are doing three other things at the same time.

A new study conducted in Great Britain lays out how our 24/7 lifestyle is stressing us out and making us sick. The good news is we are now beginning to admit to the effect stress has on us. In our white man culture, we grew up bragging about how hard and long we worked as we denied stress’ effect on us.

Possibly, with the inclusion of women in the workplace or maybe the concern of baby boomers growing old, we are beginning to see open discussions about the true consequence of our life style have on us.

Here in the US we work 200 more hours per year now than we did in 1970 – that is five full weeks of extra work per year! Our annual vacations are nothing compared to other industrialized countries. In fact, other countries have required vacations, for example German requires 18 days per year, the UK 20, Japan 25 and France 30. Here in the US the average man works in the range of 50 hours per week with no required vacation days.

Joe Robinson has made a career out of getting us to take time off. He does a good job of compiling all the stats that our brain needs to justify taking time off. He proves that a good vacation improves our productivity.

Short of a vacation, what can you do?

1. Get honest – where is your passion? Are you having fun, are you challenged in a good way with work? You know the difference between getting by and looking forward to work.
2. Make a difference – what about your life is a contribution? When we give, we renew ourselves. 43things can prime your pump.
3. Give to your body – when is the last time you had a massage? A massage is a like a mini-vacation. Not only does it relax us, getting a massage tells us that we are loved, by ourselves. Us guys can take a lesson from our women friends and stretch our ability to receive and get a massage.
4. Personal renewal time – when was the last time you did nothing? I mean not a thing. When we taught our Mindfulness Stress Reduction courses, we told the students in the pre-interview it did not matter how well they did the home work; it was just that they did it. We required that for the eight weeks that every day the student listens to one of the 45 minute tapes. Most said they could not find the time before the course began. By the end of the course one, of the greatest benefits reported was the 45 minutes everyday they had alone doing nothing.

We all let our lives style evolve to a place where they are running us. Reversing burnout begins with making some small behavior changes. Our mind tells us we do not have the time or maybe the money. Do not listen to those voices; give yourself one of the above gifts each week for a month. You can be the rat that gets off his or her treadmill.