Stress-proof your life

Got an endless to-do list? Heart racing? Dreading the 9-5? If this feels familiar, then it’s time to take back control

Put your feet up and find out how to protect your body and your brain from the daily grind.

Every generation thinks it’s the most stressed. In the 19th Century, doctors warned that workload, education and too much information from newspapers was producing an anxiety-inducing cacophony of voices that was affecting the national wellbeing. Rest cures, nerve tonics, relaxation techniques and a kind of yoga were all the rage as cures for so- called ‘nervous exhaustion’. Today, little has changed. In fact, the World Health Organization has labelled stress as “the health epidemic of the 21st Century”.

A long- running population study of women in Gothenburg, Sweden, found that in 1969, 36 per cent of women felt stressed, yet by 2005 the number had doubled to 75 per cent. Similarly, an analysis of self-reported data by Carnegie Mellon University in the US found that stress levels have increased by as much as 30 per cent over three decades.

The possible reasons behind soaring stress levels are constantly being proposed: too many things to engage us from too many directions; increasing expectations of our productivity; 24-hour availability; the social pressures that information technology brings.

But recent research indicates a common thread: lack of control. The 21st Century has seen a significant rise in situations where people have little autonomy but are under pressure to bring results quickly. In work, this type of stress has been found to reduce life expectancy. A 2016 study from Indiana University found that those in low control, high- stress jobs have a 15 per cent increase in likelihood of death, compared to those with low job demands.

And the problem is that the more we move in stressy environments, the more stressed we feel. A new scientific study has found that students who are taught by burned- out teachers display higher levels of stress hormones like cortisol than their fellow students who are taught by calm tutors. It seems that 21st- Century stress has all the qualities of an old-fashioned 19th- Century contagion.

So, if we are currently living in an age of anxiety, then what’s the effect on us? Doctors define stress as your body’s response to mental or emotional pressure. That response centres on two triangular adrenal glands sitting on top of each kidney. When we feel threatened, these glands release the stress hormones adrenalin and cortisol, which switch off the body’s long- term repair projects in favour of short- term

“Research over the past 20 years is revealing increasing evidence of the dangers that long-term stress poses to our health”

measures to help you to deal with a crisis. They are the ‘worry about the consequences later’ hormones, increasing our heart rate and blood sugar levels to give us energy, but dampening down our digestion, our ability to rest and our immune response. These effects are helpful in a short- term crisis. It helped our ancient ancestors to run fast if they were being chased by a wild animal. Yet in the modern era, where we aren’t being chased by sabre-toothed cats, short bursts of stress can still be useful. A new study from the University of Vienna indicates that humans are more likely to help others when under stress. The researchers scanned people’s brains while they were simultaneously stressed by time tasks and asked to respond to photos involving other people’s welfare and pain. The team found that the neural empathy network reacted more strongly when under stress. Short-term stress might also make us temporarily more optimistic, as experiments have shown that we pay more attention to positive information and discount the negative when we’re under pressure.

STRUGGLING WITH STRESS

But the problem is that modern stressors – from noisy neighbours to exam pressures – tend to be continuous rather than short-term. And research over the past 20 years is revealing increasing evidence of the dangers this long-term stress poses to our health.

Prof Stafford Lightman, an expert in stress-related disease at Bristol University, explains that if stress hormones like cortisol are raised continuously over say 24 hours, the responses it provokes can start to cause damage. “Cortisol is an anticipatory hormone, which is normally at its highest when you wake up, but you need a holiday from it so that the body can recuperate,” he says.

Chronic stress has been linked to increased blood pressure, heart attacks, reduced learning, depression,

teeth grinding, obesity, hair loss, acne, lowered fertility, susceptibility to infections and some types of cancer.

“The mechanism by which chronic stress causes damage varies from tissue to tissue,” explains Lightman. In the brain, for example, long-term cortisol exposure reduces the links between cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain which mediates memory. In other parts of the body it may be exposure to other substances released during the stress response – adrenaline, inflammatory cytokines, glucocorticoid steroids – that do the damage. Continual stress seems to affect the body’s ability to regulate inflammation, particularly in the arteries, and this causes tissue damage and immune system disruption.

This year, medics demonstrated for the first time that people with higher activity in the amygdala, which is the instinctive part of the brain that signals the release of stress hormones, are more likely to experience heart attack, angina, heart failure, stroke and arterial disease. Their research, published in The

Lancet, monitored the health and brain activity of 293 people over four years.

AND BREATHE…

It’s perhaps no surprise that as awareness of the risks of stress are growing, many individuals are increasingly obsessed with attempting to stress- proof their lives. Meditation training is a booming industry, recently valued at more than $1bn (approx £ 750m) in the US. The

Headspace mindfulness app alone is worth £ 25m. Many schools and employers are now routinely teaching

“Meditation training is a booming industry, recently valued at more than £750m in the US. The Headspace mindfulness app alone is worth £25m”

their students and staff about time management, prioritisation techniques, mindfulness and yoga.

So do all of these stress management techniques actually do any good? Prof Marc Jones, a stress and emotions expert at Staffordshire University, says that there are certain techniques both to help you deal positively with stress in the moment, and to help you relax between demanding situations so that stress does not become chronic. Both have a role. “Different things work for different people,” he says. “What we’ve found is that people who feel challenged rather than threatened by a demanding situation such as a test or a public talk respond with increased cardiac output and blood vessel dilation. These people perform substantially better than those who have a threat response, where there is little or no change in cardiac output and blood vessels constrict. The challenge response is: ‘It’s difficult, but I’ll do it’. The threat response is: ‘I’m not sure about this, I want to avoid it’. What we’ve found is that physiological response consistently predicts how well people do in these demanding situations.”

It is possible, he says, for all of us to learn mental techniques to help us feel ‘challenged’ rather than ‘ threatened’. “It’s about focusing on what you can achieve rather than what might go wrong,” he says.

So what might be the best ways of stress-proofing your life? On the following pages are 10 scientific approaches to dealing with stressful situations, and tips to give your brain time out of stress mode.