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TRUTH OF DAILY LIFE STRESS...Industrial humans endure average of 14 stressful episodes a week...destabilizing Nature's Human Design for happy life... Posted by Vishva News Reporter on December 22, 2010 |
(Please
click on the
hyperlinked words in
PVAF publishing to increase your understanding of
the dynamically evolving world in your daily life...
and thus keep up with the world with getting an option not to stress
yourself
to destabilize life and sometimes destroy life beyond repair of your
Creator's design for happy life) |
....TODAY'S KNOWEDGE SHARING NEWS HILITES ON
LIFE STRESS
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Industrial humans endure average of
14
stressful episodes a week...
and
EXPERIENCE "TIME CRUNCH"
meaning need 25 hour days/365 days a year
ONLY TO
feel overwhelmed by overcrowded inboxes at work
and jammed weekly professional and personal schedules.....
THUS CREATING STRESS IN THE SOULD
AND BODY
.....triggered by the lack of control over our lives
is an evolutionary response, not a state of mind......
...BIOLOGY OF CHRONIC STRESS....
Any time we’re in a situation beyond our control,
the brain releases two
hormones, cortisol and adrenalin,
which allow us to engage our
fight-or-flight response – without them,
we would not recognize or react
to danger. But when a brain is constantly stressed,
confronted with a
daily onslaught of overwhelming situations,
it begins to pump out these
hormones in excess,
throwing off the body’s other systems and
overpowering the immune system.
.... high levels of cortisol and adrenalin even change us on a cellular level,
wearing
away the telomeres that protect our chromosomes
and causing us to age
more rapidly and die earlier.....
.....These changes aren’t
reversed when a person decides to slow down.....
by taking on too much
both at home and at work......
and thus overworking has been linked to a wide range of serious health
concerns...from
Alzheimer’s and depression to obesity, diabetes,
hypertension and heart disease.
AND LOSS OF
PERSONAL, FAMILY AND PROFESSIONAL
LIFE VALUES AND
HUMANITY....
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Roy Romanow
translates above in layman terms:
Former Sasketchwan, Canada Premier and
leading Canadian Health Advocate
“We are paying a steep price for this time crunch.
We’re less healthy, both physically and mentally.
We have less time for personal pleasures.
And we’re more dissatisfied with the quality of our lives.”
“The cost of stress is amazingly high.”
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"a
growing body of evidence suggests that stress
can no longer be dismissed as a psychological problem
easily solved by having a deep tissue massage or
spending a few days on the beach." |
Today's news-knowledge sharing is so critical to human life in
the next five years that depression caused by stress has been forecast
to be the leading disease affecting human kind....so without much
ado...please click on the next line to read the main article titles
"Stress: Public Health Enemy No. 1?" |
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.....NOW KEEP ON
SCROLLING.....
TO READ THE
DETAILS AND MORE OF
THE ABOVE PREAMBLE ON TODAY'S
LIFE-STRESS
KNOWLEDGE-NEWS.....
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Stress: public-health enemy No. 1?
(From: Canadian
Globe and Mail: October 30, 2010:
Siri Agrell)
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In a small, windowless room at the Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital in
Montreal this winter, 80 employees, from psychiatrists and nurses to
custodians and support staff, will undergo a series of psychological
tests designed to
stress them out.
How stress affects the human body Before and after each test, the
subjects will be asked to spit into a small plastic vial, their saliva
used to detect the hormones that are released when the brain is faced
with a stressful situation.
The point of the study?
- To see how results vary according to what jobs
we do – and
- whether those of us with less flexibility to juggle work and
family demands, with less control over our schedules, have chronically
higher levels of stress.
If this is true, the researchers believe their findings will not only
indicate something about what we do for a living, but about our future
health – with serious side-effects for public, as well as personal,
priorities. “I hope I live to see the day when we have a ribbon for
stress research like we do for breast cancer,” says Sonia Lupien,
director of the hospital’s
Centre for Studies on Human Stress, which
will conduct the study. “The cost of stress is amazingly high.”
Across the country, people are experiencing increasing levels of stress.
A poll commissioned by The Globe found that Canadians endure, on
average, 14 stressful episodes a week.
That might not come as a surprise to the researchers behind the latest
report from the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, which recently revealed
that one working person in five is experiencing high levels of “crunch
time” – periods when they feel overwhelmed by overcrowded inboxes
and jammed weekly schedules.
“We are paying a steep price for this time crunch,” Roy Romanow, chair
of the agency’s advisory board has warned. “We’re less healthy, both
physically and mentally. We have less time for personal pleasures. And
we’re more dissatisfied with the quality of our lives.”
The former Saskatchewan premier has already called for a national
dialogue on public policy. Now, a growing chorus of scientists is
calling for action as well.
The first order of business is to reduce our
stress level, something that a growing body of evidence suggests can no
longer be dismissed as a psychological problem easily solved by having a
deep tissue massage or spending a few days on the beach.
Chronic stress caused by taking on too much – both at home and at
work – has been linked to a wide range of serious health concerns, from
Alzheimer’s and
depression to
obesity,
diabetes and
heart disease.
In Canada, hypertension is the No. 1 reason people go to the doctor, and
last year accounted for almost 20.7 million medical appointments.
The physical and psychological ailments brought about by stress are
believed to be a major reason absentee rates for full-time employees
have shot up 43 per cent in the past 10 years. Canadians miss far more
work days for personal reasons than both their British and American
counterparts. At least one think tank estimates that stress-related
absences cost employers more than $10-billion a year, with an additional
$14-billion impact on the health-care system.
The situation has become so serious that scientists such as Dr. Lupien
want to reframe
work-life balance as a public health issue. She hopes to
see her saliva test become part of an annual checkup, monitored by
physicians as frequently as
cholesterol and blood pressure.
“It’s
difficult to get this addressed in the doctor’s office because they see
stress as a yuppie thing,” she says. “But this is what predicts
disease.”
STRESS, ON A CELLULAR LEVEL
For scientists who study work-life balance, the stress triggered by the
lack of control over our lives is an evolutionary response, not a state
of mind.
Any time we’re in a situation beyond our control, the brain releases two
hormones,
cortisol and
adrenalin, which allow us to engage our
fight-or-flight response – without them, we would not recognize or react
to danger.
But when a brain is constantly stressed, confronted with a
daily onslaught of overwhelming situations, it begins to pump out these
hormones in excess, throwing off the body’s other
systems and
overpowering the immune system.
Even people who believe they thrive on stress or accept it as part of
their chosen profession have a physical response to it they can’t
control.
Research has shown that high levels of cortisol and adrenalin change the
way the body stores fat, leading to higher rates of obesity, and
increase its production of cholesterol and insulin, which cause heart
disease and diabetes. They even change us on a
cellular level, wearing
away the telomeres that protect our
chromosomes and causing us to age
more rapidly.
These changes aren’t reversed when a person decides to slow down. “Once
you are a hyper-secreter of cortisol, you always will be,” Dr. Lupien
says.
In addition to being found in saliva, cortisol can be measured in an
individual’s hair, where the hormone’s build up can be tracked over
months. Many scientists believe these diagnostic tools can help predict,
and possibly prevent, a range of serious health problems.
Consider this: Last month, two researchers at the University of Western
Ontario said they have found that hair samples from men who recently
suffered heart attacks showed their cortisol levels were elevated for
three months before being hospitalized.
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Attempts are being made around the world to uncover how health problems
are triggered by the way we work.
Harvard researcher Lisa Berkman recently studied 400 employees at four
nursing homes in Boston to examine the impact different types of
supervisors can have.
Se says:
- “The stunning thing we found was that managers who scored very low on
creativity in managing work-family conflicts had employees who scored
much higher in terms of their cardiovascular risk,”
“They were
more likely to have diabetes, they were more likely to have
hypertension, they were more likely to be overweight, than people with
managers who were more adaptive.”
Similarly, the renowned Whitehall Study has tracked 18,000 members of
the British civil service since the 1960s, and found that employees’
health varies profoundly according to how they are treated.
People who
have less control over their jobs and feel overextended or without
support have a markedly higher incidence of obesity, higher prevalence
of underlying illness, higher blood pressure and increased risk of heart
disease.
“Your whole lifestyle, everything about your health, is influenced by
these worries, anxieties, the lack of a support system in your job, in
your life,” says Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at New York’s
Rockefeller University who is considered the godfather of stress
research. “This is something that has a disproportionate effect on our
health-care systems and on our productivity.”
STRESS, THE NEW SMOKING?
The problem has become so profound that governments are starting to take
notice.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services made stress
the focus of its annual campaign to raise awareness of a vital
mental-health issue.
And this month, European MPs voted to extend fully paid maternity leave
to five months, as a way of easing the burden on young families.
China, meanwhile, has responded to growing concern over public health by
reinstating mass calisthenic routines that were launched by Mao in 1951
but dropped in the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games.
Lisa Raitt, the federal Minister of Labour, is currently doing
cross-country public round tables on the issue of
mental health and the
workplace, and says work-life balance is emerging as a serious problem.
“The worst thing possible is for someone to get so unbalanced that they
have to go on long-term disability or take sick days or go to work and
just go through the motions,” she says. “It is one of the biggest issues
we have out there in the workplace.”
The Public Health Agency of Canada has taken major steps to mitigate the
damage of work-life conflict and stress.
The Healthy Living Fund,
Cardiovascular Health Awareness Program and a new national mental-health
strategy, due to be completed in 2012, are all designed to combat
conditions linked to stress, including high blood pressure, depression,
gastroenteritis and hypertension.
But experts say that more direct action is needed.
Dr. Lupien says physicians should monitor stress and show patients how
to control it, while Dr. Berkman at Harvard says the onus should be on
governments to protect work-life balance just as it enforces
occupational safety standards and non-smoking bylaws.
“We don’t ask individuals to take sole control of those issues because
we understand that they’re more effectively managed at the state or
federal level,” she says.
WHEN BIOLOGY TRUMPS AMBITION
Researchers insist there is no magic pill – the human stress response
is, as McGill’s Dr. Lupien points out, necessary for our survival, so it
would be suicide to eliminate it.
But if we don’t get our lives under control, learn to prevent our stress
levels from rising, and deal with the causes of chronic stress, the
hormonal cocktail released by the brain will continue to take its toll.
“People say they thrive on stress,” Dr. Lupien says. “That may be true –
they may enjoy it – but it doesn’t mean it’s not impacting you
physically.”
The pioneering Dr. McEwen feels the key is to realize that being too
busy comes with a cost.
“People complain about how overwhelming their lives are, but they don’t
connect it in a biological sense with the problems they experience:
eating too much, not sleeping well, not being physically active,” he
says. “So how do you get the attention of policy makers, business and
the public?”
He suggests showing skeptics a magnetic-resonance image of two brains:
- one that’s normal and one that belongs to someone suffering from chronic
stress.
- In the latter, the hippocampus – the region responsible for
memory formation and linked to Alzheimer’s disease – will be visibly
smaller.
“That might make them realize that their biological organs are paying a
price. There comes a time for everybody when they have to take that
seriously.”
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.....More related to TODAY'S SHARING... |
AND NOW DESTRESS WITH THE
FOLLOWING....
ACTUALLY IT IS A TEST FOR SELF-EVALUATION
OF HOW MUCH YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD
ABOUT STRESS IN YOUR OWN LIFE.... |
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