stressed out

How speed = stress
In his latest book, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, Canadian journalist Carl Honore touts the benefits of slow living.

Honore claims that the old paradigm “time is money” is being replaced by the “slow movement” model. Slow living produces more pleasure and better health. The slow city movement is fostering personal connection over speed. He makes a good point about how holistic medicine is inherently slow. Apparently, Italians have even expanded the “slow movement” into sex.

As I mentioned before, slow work is producing higher production. Multi-tasking is not productive. From the workplace to the home, Honore claims slowness is growing.

How speed = stress
Stress reduction needs to integrate slowness for our kids, too. In his book, Honore reports about kids lacking spark and passion because they’re being pushed with homework and extracurricular activities.

Fortunately, a lot of us are putting the brakes on our speed. We’re making conscious choices to have a richer, whole life by traveling through it slowly.

There are places where speed is good. Having faster Internet connections certainly increases production and reduces stress. The unconscious conditioning around speed that we created in our lives is not good, though. Being mindful of where speed serves us, and where slowing down serves us, will enrich our lives. As my mother used to say to me, “What’s the hurry?”

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.

If you stress out about being deathly ill, you may want to read this post. Most aches and pains are just that – aches and pains. Yet, there are times when those pains are telling us something. Us macho men are the worst at avoiding our bodies signals.

This blog post gives you 7 pains you should not avoid – so if your pain is another pain – chill out.

Chest pain could be pneumonia or a heart attack. But be aware that heart conditions typically appear as discomfort, not pain. “Don’t wait for pain,” says cardiologist Jerome Cohen, MD. “Heart patients talk about pressure. They’ll clench their fist and put it over their chest or say it’s like an elephant sitting on their chest.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph. D., the man you essentially created mindfulness stress reduction teaches Google about how to be mindful. This video is an excellent, simple instruction on how to use the power of mindfulness. If you are not familiar with mindfulness, use this video to be your introduction. Enjoy.

There are two simple ways to have a more productive and happier life.

1. Take the controllable stressors out of your life

2. Eat the foods that are right for your body

I said simple–not necessarily easy.

Let’s look at the first one:

I have managed to eliminate or certainly get to manageable levels, the source of most stress for most knowledge workers, which is basically getting everything out of my head and managing externalized systems so that my extended brain is kept pretty intact and current.

David Allen the founder of Getting Things Done (GTD), interview with the Web Daily Worker blog

In this post, David Allen offers his personal stress reducers, which I highly recommend. Also, check out his GTD system to manage your information overload.

As for Number 2, eating right, Allen mentions Eat Right for Your Type, a diet/nutritional book that teaches how to choose food based on your blood type. As strange as this might seem, it works. I have tweaked my diet to fit my blood type for 10 years. From the start, I had more energy. After what I experienced for myself, I have recommended this approach to over a hundred clients. Those who adopted it saw improvements in allergies and their energy levels.

So it’s really very simple: reduce your stress by keeping your body happy, and your mind clear. With the tools listed above, that’s as simple as it sounds.

A New Standard

Is the stress of buying happiness worth it? As we work harder, are we happier? As we purchase more, are we happier? As we raise our living standard, are we happier?

A Wall Street Journal article speaks about how today 30-year-old men are worse off than their fathers were at 30. “The study suggests that absolute mobility — the rate at which an entire generation’s lot improves relative to previous generations — has declined.”

The idea of a standard of living was created by corporate leaders to be the carrot that would keep workers working despite having everything they needed. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it became apparent that man’s needs were being met, so why would he want to work more, why would he want more? The answer was to manufacture a new need, a need to raise his standard of living, to climb the economic ladder.

A New Trend

The old standard may be changing; I suspect we’ve finally maxed out. Not only have we long surpassed our survival needs, we are now surpassing our resources of time and energy to enjoy the amenities of modern life. The silence of the past is now what we strive for. How many restaurants have you seen which had a sign that said “no cell phones” or, in some cases “no perfume”? We are over-stimulated with the pleasures of life and overworked trying to achieve a higher standard of living

Society has peaked – we can’t handle any more. Now, for many the greatest pleasure is escaping our success. Instinctually, we first think of fleeing our environments. That can help. I moved to northern Idaho from Scottsdale, AZ, to escape the Los Angelization of Phoenix. I can tell you, even living in a beautiful location surround by forests, lakes and moose that virtually come to my door – societal stress still exists. Sandpoint, Idaho has cell phones, high-speed internet and more of us ex-urbanites.

Inner Escape

It is true that people are more relaxed here in Sandpoint, and I would say happier, yet they are often still stressed out by many of the same things they thought they were escaping. When that realization hits them, they experience a slight depression. Then, if they are brave, these folks begin to address the psychological/physiological causes of their stress.

Teaching our conditioned (or you may say addicted) minds and bodies to slow down initially can take some work. The return on this investment is greater than the return from investing more of our resources to gathering more stuff, or doing more.

Spokesman Review, Spokane, Washington’s newspaper did an article on www.stressedout.org. Frank Sennett reports how I get stressed out.

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.

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.