According to a recent article in The New York Times, exercise not just enhances mood and reduces anxiety but scientists are on the groundbreaking cusp of understanding the physiological processes that enable you to feel that amazing workout high after a long run or trek on the treadmill.

We have long known that exercise enables the growth of new brain cells. But at an October meeting for the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, researchers from Princeton University revealed a startling revelation: In response to exercise, brains are calmer and more able to respond to stressful stimuli than brains that have not been exposed to regular exercise.

While the research was conducted on rats, the study does hold powerful implications for the far-reaching benefits of exercise in humans.

According to The New York Times, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth.

So if you find yourself this week waiting in an airport line 200 people deep or with a houseful of ungrateful and cranky relatives, show your nervous system some love and move your body. Even if it’s just a brisk walk around the block as the pumpkin pie cools or an early a.m. fitness fix at the gym before the rest of your household wakes, you will feel much better prepared to handle daily stress with a little movement under your bum.

And hey, your bum will probably benefit too!

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Exercise Makes You Less Anxious and Reduces Stress

Manage Stress

Is it me or are most people pre-wired for high anxiety and the go-go-go mentality? Work pressures. The economy. Life drama. No matter what day it is, you can bet there’s something going on that is making your blood boil. You don’t see it, but it’s killing you.

Chronic stress is linked to six of the leading causes of death. The link between stress and diabetes is hormonal. Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is a stress hormone that increases with severe or prolonged stress. The main effect of the hormone is increased food intake, increased proportion of energy stored as fat, and decreased physical activity. Uh oh. If you read the post on preventing diabetes, you know that excess fat, especially in the belly area, significantly increases your diabetes risk.

Point well taken. So how the heck do you calm down? My quick tips for stress management are very basic.

1. Say “no.” Don’t put too much on your plate. The overcommitment increases stress levels, eats up valuable free time for nutrition and exercise, and frankly wears you out unnecessarily.
2. Just breath. When you feel the stress piling on, take five minutes and lie on your back in a quiet room only focusing on your breath. The drop in blood pressure also allows your crazed stress hormones to take a reprieve.
3. Sip on herbal tea. Teas like peppermint, ginger, or chamomile are very soothing and help you come down from that stress frazzle.

But there’s one more thing that can weigh down the risk for diabetes. Yes, sleep.

Sleep

Research shows that people who get less than six hours of sleep are 4.5 times more likely to have problems controlling their blood sugar – and that, my friends, leads to insulin resistance and eventually diabetes. What’s more, lack of sleep also throws your hungry/full hormones out of whack so when you don’t get sleep, you’re hormonally hungrier the next day thanks to higher levels of ghrelin (the “grow” hormone).

So, cheat yourself of sleep (maybe due to poor stress management) and now you’re hunger hormone is raging like a teenage boy at cheer camp. Of course you’re going to overeat and gain weight, which takes us back to our “top three” ways of preventing diabetes… eating healthy, exercising, and losing weight.

Behavior change starts with awareness. What can you do today to make yourself more aware of your behaviors?

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Sleep and Relax to Prevent Diabetes

One thing I have to guard against on a regular basis is doing too much and overpacking my schedule. As a result, I sometimes feel rushed even when I am not. This morning after assisting my friend to take his great dane to the vet and a quick drop off at doggy daycare, I jumped in my car to get to one of my weekly therapuetic client meetings. I could either get some breakfast on the way or run out for something in the 30 minutes between my client and staff meeting. Still debating my timing until I pulled in to my favorite brunch restaurant, I made the better choice of fresh, local ingredients to go. Dipping my fork into the syrup rather than dumping it on my cinnamon pear french toast was also a wise choice; trying to do so while driving was not…

Warm syrup seeping into your lap is an interesting experience, not one that I necessarily recommend.

Other than don’t eat and drive (in my defense, I was taught to eat and drive in driver’s ed), I think I found a pretty good lesson in the awful stickiness, super-fast shower at my friend’s house, and wearing jeans to work (lucky I at least had those with me!). I could have gotten upset that I was working hard to make good choices and fit them into my busy schedule. I could have decided that next time I would choose the Dunkin’ Donuts drive through instead. I could have thrown out all my good intentions, like the syrup that dumped all over me and my car.

Luckily, I remembered to take a deep breath and consider that such things happen to others (although, syrup?!?). I knew I would not want any of my clients or readers to suffer undue distress or give up after one measly disaster. Making a change is a stressor and it is easy to feel overwhelmed and tempted to give up when something does not go right. It’s easy to let those old negative thinking patterns take hold. Don’t do it. Laugh at yourself. Remember that we all stumble when we are learning to walk, but eventually you will be able to run. Learn that planning ahead can prevent unnecessary stress. Be thankful for wonderful friends who love you anyway and french toast with just a bit too much syrup.

What else have you or could you learn from an embarrassing experience?

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Embarrassing Situations Yield Learning Lessons

Remember, if you are not breaking a sweat, you are not working hard enough!

So, putting exercise aside, being healthy mentally and physically requires a lot more than just getting the heart rate up. Below are 10 simple ways to a healthier you! Each of the following will help increase your energy levels and in turn, better workouts and more productive days will be the result.

1. Rest: Get six to eight hours of sleep a night
2. See the Doctor: Schedule regular doctor/dentist visits
3. Relax: Find time to relax and enjoy life
4. Be More Active: Find ways to get the heart rate up more throughout the day, in addition to exercising
5. Laugh: Find time to laugh
6. Eliminate Stress: Avoid stressful situations and try not to worry as much
7. Help Someone: Giving back has been proven to offer health rewards
8. Get a Hobby: Can help you enjoy life more as well as reduce stress levels
9. Try Something New: Try something new each week or weekend (dancing, hiking, etc.)
10. Smile: Reduces stress and it seems to be contagious

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10 Simple Ways to a Healthier You

Recovery is an important component of both growth and maintenance. If you run a marathon without proper training, you will probably find it difficult to impossible to walk the next day. If you push yourself too hard, eventually your body will refuse to work. The same thing happens mentally. Have you ever had a tough day at work or had to think too much and found you could not bring yourself to do anything but stare at the TV that evening? Creating a new habit and sticking to a food plan are mental stressors.

You need a break, even to maintain the status-quo of your ability to function. Allow yourself to recover physically and mentally. You also need to take a break if you want to empower yourself to higher achievement, greater endurance, or weight loss. Recovery is an important part of growth. Although we want to push ourselves toward higher achievements, if we do not allow ourselves time to recover between, there will be nothing left to push.

It is not weakness to take a break; it is responsibility. If you push too far, you will not have any thing left to give. If you live at a high level of stress, you may not be able to handle any extra thing and there is always something extra.

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Take a Break to Achieve More

The study was conducted on a group of 26 other studies that included 9,417 patients. After examining the results, researchers found that death rates were as much as 25 percent higher with patients who showed symptoms of depression. But the rates were higher (39 percent) in patients who were officially diagnosed with depression.

While it’s always a good idea to keep a positive outlook on life to maintain optimal health, the researchers don’t want people to think it’s life or death to be chipper.

But they do think that the findings emphasize the need to screen cancer patients carefully for signs of psychological distress, since it is a small, but a real, risk of affecting the medical outcome of patients.

“Cancer patients need not panic if they are experiencing depressive symptoms, but it is certainly reasonable to talk to their physicians about their mental health,” says lead researcher Jillian Satin.

So, what’s the actual physical reason for the risk? Previous research has linked stress with the growth of tumors or spreading of cancer. The reason could be that stress may have an impact on hormones or the immune system. Or maybe a depressed person can tend to engage in behavior that affects the outcome, such as not complying with scheduled treatments.

“There are still many unanswered questions as the effects observed in this study are quite small and may be due to other factors,” says Dr. Julie Sharp, of the charity Cancer Research UK.

“More research will be needed to explain whether these observations are true and if so why.”

(via: BBC)

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Depression May Cut Cancer Survival

The health risk was even higher when the noise rose above an average daily exposure of 60 decibels. That accounts for about one in four people in western Europe. No comparable analysis was done on how many people would be affected in the U.S.

“Road traffic noise is the most important source of community noise so we felt it was important to look at this,” says the report’s author Theo Bodin. “I think what we have found is probably linked to the noise triggering stress. Previous research has found this, although we need to look at this issue further before we make firm conclusions.”

However, some experts think that these findings might be on shaky ground.

“It seems to me that they have found an association rather than a cause. Other factors, such as smoking, diet and deprivation, are likely to be playing more of a role,” says Alan Maryon-Davis, president of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health. “However, it is an area of research which merits further work.”

High blood pressure increases the risk of heart disease and stroke.

(via: BBC)

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Can Road Noise Cause High Blood Pressure?

It seems to me, the stressors in our lives are affecting just about everything in our lives. If you’re like me, when you are stressed you put the gym on hold, or have a lack-luster workout. All that water retention combined with a bad workout really does not do wonders for the scale.

Now, having stress is bad enough, but now knowing that it can hurt weight loss may put you into a tailspin, but don’t worry.

Here are a few tips that I use to help de-stress my life.

• Make lists-  Make a to-do list. Weekly, daily, whatever. Write down what you have to do for the day. Why? WE FORGET THINGS. I found that when I put my schedule down on paper, not only is it out of my mind, I can easily see exactly what needs to be done and time accordingly. Far too often we try to keep everything inside our heads. It just causes more stress
• Fuel the fire-  Turn a bad day at work into a great workout. Use some pent up anger at your boss for fuel. When I’m angry, I do interval sprints. I seem to run faster for longer and by the end of them not only did I get a great workout, but I’m not mad anymore.
• Get it out-  Let your stress go. Yell, scream, hit a heavy bag, punch a pillow. Whatever works for you, just let your stress air out. You will feel calmer and can look at your list and start working.

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Stress Hurts Weight Loss: 3 Ways to Avoid It

The study illustrates a few key points about the mindfulness that a yoga and meditation practice can cultivate and the benefits of physical activity.

While no one can escape the stress of project deadlines and the fear of job security, mindfulness practices like meditation teach employees how key their reaction to workday stress can affect how they perceive their lives and the workplace challenges they confront.

Additionally, most employees who work desk jobs lead sedentary lives which is not only a factor in obesity and diabetes but also in mood disorders like depression. Numerous studies have shown the positive mental health benefits and physical benefits such as improved sleep quality that come from engaging in exercise. And while yoga may not be the first form of exercise that comes to mind when one thinks of physical activity, certain kinds of yoga have a strong cardiovascular component to them and most all improve strength and muscle tone.

For the millions of  Americans who work, the stress of their everyday office lives takes its toll on their health. But studies like this point to the importance of having workplace policies that encourage employees to take part in mind-body practices like yoga and meditation. Hopefully, as more research is done on the benefits of stress-reducing programs in the office, more and more companies will begin to incorporate such practices as part of their regular employee wellness programs.

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Workplace Yoga Reduces Stress and Improves Sleep

Studies of monkeys reveal an amazing parallel to human society. Carol A. Shively, PhD, and colleagues at Wake Forest University saw that those monkeys at the bottom of the pecking order in a monkey colony get blocked arteries much faster than the other monkeys. All of them in the study were fed the same high-fat diet.

The parallel to human society, of course, is that the poor are much more often heavier than the well-to-do. Being at the bottom rung of the social ladder has its stresses, human or animal.

“We wanted to know more about how the stress outside of you gets turned into plaque inside of your arteries,” says Shively. “So we looked at why stress caused atherosclerosis in our monkeys.”

A more recent study corroborated these findings, as the same research group fed stressed monkeys an American-style high-fat diet, and they ended up with more belly fat that those monkeys who did not exhibit stress.

But maybe the most interesting part of the study was that the fat didn’t just go anywhere. It gathered at the belly on the stressed monkeys.

Harold Bays, MD, medical director of the Louisville Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center dubs this “sick fat.”

It’s like it has a life of its own.

“Your body fat can become diseased like any other body tissue,” Bays says. “Your fat cells are getting bigger and your fat tissue is getting bigger and neither the cells nor the tissues work as well as they should. The fat is sick.”

(via: WebMD)

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Stress Makes Us Fat