Can stress kill you?
• Antidotes to anxiety offered
By Karen S. Peterson
USA Today
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| Illustration by Greg Taylor • The Honolulu Advertiser |
Good luck.
Chances are, when you get home the stress dragon will be waiting on your doorstep. Leaving stress permanently behind, or just putting it down at the end of the day, is an unreachable goal for many Americans who worry about everything from escalating terrorism alerts to their children's SAT scores.
Chronic stress is not easily set aside. It is packed inside mental suitcases and travels with us daily. "Counting on a spa or a vacation is looking for an external cure for an internal problem," says Denver psychiatrist Paul Dobransky.
Adults can pay a high price for not dealing with such chronic distress. Long-term stress releases brain chemicals that can be toxic, contributing to everything from headaches to heart attacks, says Paul Rosch, clinical professor of medicine and psychiatry at New York Medical College and president of the American Institute of Stress.
About 60 percent of visits to healthcare professionals are "in the stress-related, mind-body realm," problems from sexual performance to insomnia, says Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and co-author of "The Break-Out Principle."
The first problem for researchers seems elementary: agreeing on a definition. "Stress is different for each one of us," Rosch says. Giving a speech can be terrifying for some, but a delight for those who love being the center of attention.
Just as there is no definition of stress common to all, there is no one correct way to cope with it. "No strategy for dealing with stress is a panacea. You have to find out what works for you," Rosch says.
Researchers don't talk about eliminating stress. "Stress is an unavoidable consequence of life, of the human condition," Rosch says. And some of it is good, sparking necessary action such as reacting to danger or improving — to a point — performance and productivity.
But chronic stress can leach the joy from daily living. Researchers are finding new clues to how to handle it, and prevention is proving to be significant. "The focus today is on preventing the problem, identifying your sources of stress, since preventing or minimizing them makes more sense than trying to lessen" the effects once they are manifested in symptoms or diseases, Rosch says.
The core cause of much stress is the sense that one is not in the driver's seat. "All the clinical and lab research shows that the perception of not having control is very stressful," Rosch says. "The way to turn a stressful incident into something that is not stressful is to regain a sense of control over it."
While you may not control events, experts say you can control your reactions.
To restore a sense of control, Rosch suggests, "make a list of all the things that tick you off" and that create daily stress. Then decide which ones you can do something about. "What could you do with that commute that takes an hour a day? You could go to the boss and tell him you have to change your hours. Or that you can do some of your work from home."
If that doesn't work, think of new ways to use the commute time, perhaps listening to books on tape in the car, he says. This type of thinking is called "reframing." The commute time is reframed from a negative to a positive.
Also list the things you cannot change, Rosch says, and have somebody check both lists. You may get suggestions for moving some minuses to the plus column. When you get down to bedrock, to those few stressors that can't be changed, accept them and move on, Rosch says. Continually fretting over what cannot be changed creates great stress.
Benson and others also say that negative patterns of thought may become the cause of chronic stress. Often they can be traced back to "nagging anxieties, stress-related emotional baggage or circular, obsessive mental tapes," that are recorded in the mind in early childhood, Benson says.
Say you had a perfectionist parent who tended to set you unrealistic goals. Your reaction then — "I can't do it!" — may unconsciously recur when the boss assigns a big project. Chemicals released in the brain create an inappropriate "fight or flight" response, and you stress out.
The goal of stress experts is to break that cycle. In "The Breakout Principle," Benson combines science and self-help. He suggests "turning on a natural inner switch to sever those past mental patterns." With practice that signal or "trigger," which can be as simple as taking a brisk walk, actually turns on different, calming brain chemicals.
Dobransky talks about filtering out the bad messages. He refers to setting "personal boundaries" that "are our ultimate protection against stress." Like countries, the boundaries have "customs and immigration services whose purpose is to keep out what is bad for us and let in what is good."
It takes "discipline, commitment and practice to build such boundaries, Dobransky says. And that is difficult to accomplish in an era that worships "the quick fix."
Some of the anxious do need professional help to set stress down. But the trend among many researchers is to emphasize the innate strengths of individuals. They can learn, Rosch says, that "maybe I can't fight. Maybe I can't take flight. But I can learn to go with the flow."
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