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Beat Chronic Stress and Live Longer

Stress is a killer. There is no question about that. But stress is like a cigarette. The damage it does is slow and cumulative. You probably don’t realise the harm it’s doing until there is a health crisis and you find yourself asking “Why me?”

Don’t live with regret about the things you could have changed.

Stress, and the body’s response to it, is a natural and helpful process. It is a survival strategy. The problem is that it only evolved to deal with short-term stress, like escaping from a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, our bodies respond to our imaginary worlds as if they were real and so you can create a stress response just by thinking about something that scares you.

Most of us are incredibly skilled at imagining the worst outcomes for things that haven’t happened yet. We are also incredibly good at creating a whole host of troubling scenarios as we try to control a future problem. We have this crazy idea that if we worry about something enough then that will enable us to cope. It’s not true. We cope better when our reaction is spontaneous.

Because the body was never designed to deal with long-term stress, and because the body’s stress response was only ever for dealing with real, rather than imagined, threats, the body has no way of dealing with chronic stress.

Chronic stress creates negative health consequences. It has a negative impact on your immune system, it can indirectly affect your cardiovascular health, and there is now direct evidence that stress can shorten your life by around 8 years.

Stress & Immune System Responses

Stress wears away at your immune system. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, PhD, and Ronald Glaser, PhD, noticed that the immunity of medical students was lowered during their three day exam period each year. They had fewer natural killer cells, and produced less gamma-interferon – which boosts immunity. So if you suffer from frequent minor illnesses – like colds – then that’s a good sign that you are not dealing effectively with the stresses in your life.

Another study by Richard Davidson (University of Wisconsin) clearly linked negative thoughts to lowered antibody levels and positive thoughts to increased immune system activity. This is clear evidence that your mind, and what you think, has a direct impact on your health.

Stress & Heart Health

There is no direct link between stress and hypertension, or stress and heart health generally, but there is an indirect link. When we are stressed, we tend to overeat; we fail to exercise sufficiently – simply because there’s so much to do and so little time to do it; and we can find ourselves drinking more alcohol than we know is sensible. All of these things do push blood pressure up and they also have a negative impact on heart health.

If heart disease is already present, then sudden severe stress can trigger a heart attack. The associated sudden rise in blood pressure can also cause a stroke.

Stress & DNA

Another study by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser et al looked at the impact of stress on the ends of DNA strands. Chromosome ends are protected by telomeres. As we get older these protective covers wear and get shorter. The length of an individual’s telomeres are linked to how long they live. In this study it was discovered that chronic stress causes wear and tear on the telomeres – thus shortening life. Those who participated in the study were caregivers for parents with Alzheimer’s. An earlier study reported a similar life-shortening impact on mothers of chronically ill children.

It seems that chronic stress will knock 4-8 years off your life.

How to live longer

Stress is really about your mind and what you do with it. It might seem, at times, that it’s all about the pressures of earning a living and paying bills; or about the pressure that other people – like managers and family members – place on you. It might even seem to be about you never being quite good enough and spending your life trying to prove that you are. So you push yourself constantly to do better, all the while repeating that mantra It’s not good enough – a mantra that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The solution is simple, just not easy. But then nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Without at least a little challenge we tend to undervalue the results. When we put a little effort in to learn a new skill we feel good about ourselves and value our accomplishment.

What you have to do is learn how to take control of your mind and learn to let go of those things that do not serve you.

If you are willing to put the effort in to learn that new, life-enhancing, skill, then first of all download my free book Freedom by filling in your details on the right – just underneath the book cover. If you like my style, then invest in a copy of Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis. This is available in Kindle or paperback from Amazon, or from iBooks if you like to read on your iDevice.

Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis is filled with tips, strategies and techniques to deal with the stresses in your life. It takes you, step by step, through the process of retraining your thought patterns and how to use your mind to ease the stresses in your life that are caused by anything from a relationship that isn’t working to dealing with challenges in the work place.

If you prefer to listen than to read then check out the guided visualisations on my download page. The chakra meditation is highly recommended.

 

If you have any questions about dealing with stress then leave a comment below.

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Is Fasting an Easier Way to Lose Weight than Dieting?

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend at a meditation group and he was telling me all about this programme he’d seen a couple of nights earlier. The programme was about the benefits of fasting. He was buzzing and already on his fast. I didn’t really take a great deal of notice because the minute he mentioned fasting I thought that sounds like effort, real hunger, and going without things I like.

Anyway, I listened with a level of interest that was curious about how it had inspired my friend, but without any intention of doing anything with that information. My friend, by the way is young, fit, healthy, and a keen mountain biker to whom a 40 mile cycle ride is taking it easy.

The following morning I was going for a day out with my daughter and she started to tell me about this same programme and how she was going to start a 48 hour fast at the weekend. At this point I started to take notice. The Universe was trying to tell me something here.

So I got out my iPad that evening and watched the programme on the BBC’s iPlayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01lxyzc

It’s on again in the early hours of tomorrow (Wednesday 5th Sept) morning if you want to catch/record/make a note to watch on iPlayer.

By the time it was finished, I was hooked too.

This was science, as opposed to New Age weird stuff, and Michael Mosley, the presenter, was talking to some of the world’s leading experts on body fat. Each of these experts had come up with different fasting techniques, but each also agreed that much more research is needed. Among the benefits discovered are the reduction of visceral fat, increased cardio-vascular health, longer life, and weight loss.

Michael Mosley went on a four day fast and managed to survive. In the programme he talked about alternate day fasting whereby you eat what you want one day, then the next day you restrict yourself to 600 Calories (men) or 500 Calories (women) and repeat this forever. Apparently with this regime you can eat what you want on the eat anything day. This produces weight loss and increased health benefits.

There was so much more in the programme that I encourage you to watch it. I don’t want to make this just a review of something you can watch for yourself.

What I wanted to tell you about was why it is having such a powerful impact on the people who watch it.

If you are a regular reader of my words, or if you’ve read my book How to Lose Weight Easily, you will know that I am not a fan of diets or dieting – for reasons that I explore at length in my book. Fasting, however, fits in very well with my approach to weight loss and gives it a boost.

I’ll tell you why.

Other than the fasting period itself, there is no control over what you eat the rest of the time.

I wanted to experiment with this in a way that would be beneficial not only to myself but to others as well. So I had a think about this.

What could I cope with? Four days without eating would be difficult for me. Two days I could manage, but I probably wouldn’t want to repeat it too often.  One day, yes I could do that. I don’t think I’ve gone a whole day without food in my life, but I figured I could manage that.

Now, there was nothing in this programme to suggest that one day of fasting would achieve anything at all, but I wanted to experiment and understand the thoughts and sensations that go along with not eating.  I also decided to not eat anything rather than the 600 calories that was suggested. I thought it would be easier to have nothing rather than be worrying about how filling I could make my allowance.

So I picked a Sunday when I had no plans, got home late after being out with some friends to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower and had a big slice of apple pie around 1:00 am. Then I ate nothing until breakfast on Monday morning around 8:00 am, so it was a little over 24 hours.

The most interesting thing was that I didn’t really feel anything I could call hunger until about 9:00 in the evening, at which point it was so close to bedtime that it was almost over. All I consumed that day was green tea without milk or sugar. This is my normal beverage not something I chose especially for the experiment. I wanted to drink something calorie-free that was a little tastier than water. Interestingly I wasn’t especially hungry when I woke up on Monday morning and could easily have gone another day without food.

When I weighed myself Monday morning I was 3lbs lighter, but a week later I was back to my normal weight.

Two weeks later I did the same again only this time my last food was around 6:00pm on Saturday.

A week later I repeated the experiment once more.

There has been no change in my weight,  other than the 3lbs I lose the day I don’t eat, but I have noticed several things.

My days are focused around meal times. When I take food out of the equation there is a bit of a sense of the loss of a milestone, or an anchor in the day with which to measure progress. I was finding that I had to find more interesting things to do than I normally do. But I stuck to having just a pot of tea instead of food at mealtimes.

While I was on the fast day I never really experienced anything other than transient feelings of hunger until late in the evening. I did think about food, but only when my mind wasn’t occupied with something interesting. The decision to eat nothing for a day made it easy not to eat and to ignore food thoughts.

The week following the day of fasting leaves me feeling hungrier than I normally am, and fuller than I normally feel when I eat. I’m finding that I’m still eating my normal quantities of food but feeling much fuller afterwards. It seems that the fast has put me back in touch with those feelings of hunger and fullness that we seem to lose contact with when we regularly eat more than we need.

Unfortunately I’m still stuck in the old habit and cooking what I used to cook, But I’m starting to reduce what I eat, getting back to throwing more away and being more sensitive to full feelings until I establish the new habit. What I’m realising is how little food I need to eat to stay fit and healthy.

But the strangest thing of all, and this has nothing to do with weight, is that I feel more alive, more alert and have more energy – more bounce.

This for me is the biggest benefit.

I don’t think a one off fast will achieve anything lasting at all. But I think if it is built into your routine, like me, maybe one day a week, or the day on, day off, with a restricted calorie intake on alternate days – then I see the potential for huge benefits and really easy weight loss.

Michael

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Don’t Worry, or You’ll Soon Be Dead!

The latest research from the University of Edinburgh, looking at the lives of over 85,000 individuals in good health and aged 35 or over, has established a link between mild mental health problems and an early death. I’m sure it will be no surprise that depression and anxiety leads to physical illnesses like heart disease and cancer, but what is surprising is that there also appears to be a causal link with death from external causes. Unsurprisingly the more intense the psychological distress the more likely a person is to die of cardio-vascular disease, cancer, or accidents.

The types of psychological distress looked at in this study were: anxiety, depression, social dysfunction, and loss of confidence. Quite low levels of distress predict an almost 1 in 3 increase of death from cardiovascular disease, and from external causes. But it seems that more severe psychological problems are needed to trigger increased cancer risk – but when the distress is more serious the cancer risk increases to 2 in 5.

The interesting thing about this study is that the distress levels at which mortality increases are not high enough to require any medical intervention. What has been highlighted here is that about a quarter of the adult population are at risk of an earlier death unless they take action regarding their own mental health and well being.

The connection between stress and a lowered immune system response has been known for a long time, but this new study is really highlighting the fact that your mental health is hugely important and that minor stresses and feeling low should not be shrugged off or coped with. What is needed is for individuals to discover that there are things they can do to help themselves feel better. These are simple things, but they do require action. For instance turning off the tv news and slipping a DVD into the player so you can watch something that makes you laugh, or just feel good, is a smart move. But it takes effort. When you make the effort regularly, actions like this soon become effortless habits.

If you get hold of your free copy of my book Freedom you’ll find information in there that will help to lift your spirit and move you away from a life of worry.

Many people have lives that don’t seem to be working and every day is a struggle for them, but the rest are just getting by. If you are just getting by then you really should start to pay attention to the constant stream of negative messages that impact you during your day.

As a one time exercise get a pad and pen and just make a note every time you receive negative input from outside of yourself. It comes in the form of gossip, bitchiness, judgements, opinions, headlines, and tv. You even get it from ads. The ads do it subliminally because most ads create a positive aura around the product they want you to buy. However, the subtext is that your life is not good enough right now and will only be perfect when you purchase this whatever-it-is.

This research is a real action call to be much more aware of your mind state and to take action when your mood is low.

So why not take up my offer of a free book – after all it may add years to your life.

Michael