It is National Stress Awareness Day and therefore a great opportunity to reflect on how stress is impacting our lives. Stress has been labelled the “global health epidemic of the 21st century” by the World Health Organisation. For many people, it is often triggered at work.
A lot has been written on stress recently and it is certainly a hot topic of conversation. Many general practitioners including Dr Ragan Chatterjee, in his book The Stress Solution, note that stress is a primary concern for many people visiting the GP surgery.
Stress Proof
As stress is such an important aspect of wellbeing I decided to do some further research. I have read up on the science of stress including reading Dr Mithu Storoni’s incredibly well researched book Stress-Proof in which she refers to over 200 scientific studies in her quest to recognise the signs and causes of stress.
Her book focuses on explaining the neuroscience behind why we experience stress; why it is essential to us as human beings and what causes us to develop chronic stress. Her explanations are thorough but accessible and she does her best not to blind with the details of the science whilst providing robust evidence.
She explains what the role of the stress hormones are and outlines practical ways to keep cortisol in check. She includes a chapter on how important it is to tune our body clocks. This includes how essential it is to get enough sleep and reduce our exposure to blue light before bedtime.
Her chapter on gut health in relation to stress and inflammation is fascinating and reveals how connected our bodies are to our stress responses. The chapter on emotional regulation is particularly interesting to me in my work as a motivational and mindset coach. Her tips on when to exercise as a means to reduce stress are also fascinating.
5 key points to help reduce stress
It is an enormous topic and the book covers a huge number of useful and practical ways of reducing the impact of stress. I would highly recommend reading the book if you are interested in this topic.
I have chosen to focus on five key points she makes which really resonated with me. Pick one or two of these and try to incorporate them into your life:
1. Do not dwell:
When you have experienced a stressful episode the last thing you should do is dwell on it or ruminate. Storoni says, “if you play back a stressful event in your mind just seconds after it is over, and your emotional regulation is defective, then your recollection of the event may activate your emotional brain so powerfully that it perpetuates the stress response”. She writes: “the overall stressful experience is the sum total of what happens during and after it”. So your body will react as if it is still in the stressful situation even if you are not.
In fact, rumination has strong links to depression. So trying to relax immediately after a stressful experience may be the worst thing you can do as it can lead to rumination. Storoni suggests shifting attention away from the stressful episode and thinking about something else or using distraction techniques such as mindful breathing or playing a game on your smart-phone.
2. Perform cognitive appraisal by asking how instead of why
Storoni talks about how asking yourself “how” instead of “why” to encourage identifying effective ways forward rather than dwelling on the negative. Asking “why” encourages rumination, pondering and imagination. Whereas “how” prompts more fact finding and engages the rational brain.
As an example, think about if you had planned to go out for a 5K run and you had only managed to do 2K as it is raining, cold and you developed a sore stomach halfway round:
- A possible why approach: “I am not good at running; I failed; I am lazy and I should have tried harder; why can’t I do anything right?”
- A possible how approach: “I went out and tried my best but the circumstances today were not good. The rain made me feel cold and I was worried about slipping over. I had a sore stomach so I didn’t think it was wise to continue as it could have made it worse. Sometimes these things happen and I won’t punish myself. I am sure I will be able to run further next time”.
3. Try to eat plain, unheated probiotic yogurt every day
Stornoi refers to the importance of maintaining a healthy microbiome. This is a topic which is just beginning to gain traction in the wellbeing space in relation to stress. She talks about the importance of including Lactobacillus, a tribe of good gut bacteria, in our diets. Scientific studies are showing that: “stress and Lactobacillus strains exist in perpetual opposition. If one rises the other one falls”.
Plain, unheated, probiotic yogurt contains Lactobacillus. Storoni recommends eating 300g a day. She refers to the Nobel-prize-winning immunologist Ilya Ilyich Metchinikoff’s work in proposing that “eating yogurt every day is the secret to a long life” after he studied the diet of centenarians living in the Balkan states who ate yogurt regularly.
I have recently swapped my cereal milk for yogurt in the morning and now eat a small portion of muesli, with some berries and some plain yogurt. It also has the added benefit of making me feel more full too!
4. Avoid sedentary behaviour
The evidence is clear that sedentary behaviour is bad for our overall health. See my previous post on exercise motivation. Storoni talks about how insulin resistance is tied to chronic stress. If you are in a highly stressed state you need your brain to engage to work out an escape. For example, if you are being chased by a dangerous animal in the wilderness. The needs of escape outweigh all the other functions of the body so glucose piles up in the blood to reach the brain in order to focus on an escape strategy. When the body is in a normal functioning state insulin allows glucose to enter the blood and be delivered to the body’s cells keeping glucose levels stable. Insulin resistance is essential to keep you safe and out of danger but if it becomes a perpetual state it is equally as dangerous and can shorten lives.
Studies have shown that spending too long sitting down and eating excessive calories means insulin is 39% less able to do its job. As Storoni notes “Your body’s resistance to insulin rises by 19% simply on account of not moving, even if you are burning all the energy you are taking in”. She advises walking for at least fifteen minutes, preferably longer, immediately after every meal. Another tip is to do some resistance exercises such as squats or lunges for three minutes every half hour to reduce insulin resistance. Ideally move around as much as possible during your day, especially if you have a sedentary job, and plan for at least one dedicated exercise session.
5. Practice yoga and meditation
Storoni writes “meditators are able to control their thoughts and emotions with greater ease than non-meditators” The long-term positive effects of meditation are now clearly known (see my previous blog post on mindful meditation for more on this topic). Similarly, Storoni notes that there is evidence to suggest regular yoga practice may help to “correct an imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity” in the nervous system by increasing self-control and self-regulation which has proven correlation to increasing heart rate variability known as a sign of wellbeing.
Storoni’s book can be bought from here website here: https://www.mithustoroni.com/
