So today on my way home I was contemplating things that I noticed throughout the day like I normally do. Only to realize a lot of the people I see seem run down, lethargic, and just plain ol' miserable. Now normally this really wouldn't compute, but today something was different. It got me thinking about how stress affects people and what effect it has on them. Then I began to think of a discussion we had in class, and how the professor asked if we thought stress was good? or if stress was bad? She quickly realized that I raised my hand twice. She walked over and said in the class that I was right. Then did a brief segment on both sides. However, I don't think a brief segment does eustress, good stress, justice.
Eustress, is the positive stress that helps to bring about positive change. Distress is the negative stress that typically brings about negative change.
In exercise physiology we would classify eustress as a workout that brings about positive adaptations or changes to make similar exercise bouts closer to our metabolic homeostasis. In a similar vein, in exercise physiology we would classify distress as chronically raised cortisol levels. Im going to make a complex issue into a very simple way to understand it so just remember its not so black and white and there is a lot of grey area. We will classify acute stress as beneficial and classify chronic stress as not being beneficial.
What initially brought this thought process on was me looking through my Facebook feed and realizing how many people are misusing your and you're. I can understand why you wouldn't care while on Facebook from time to time, but the truth of the matter is that most people are not just on Facebook occasionally but tend to use the social media quite often, as its the ones who are on there most often that commit this unforgivable crimes against grammar. If you are consistently just going through the motions of writing or typing with no care of the grammar YOU'RE using, you will begin to consistently make these errors when writing a professional paper. I'll tell you what, when trying to get a job getting minute details may make it or break it for you. Some may make the argument that consistently stressing over the minutiae may add to YOUR stress level, which may be true but practicing will help you to get better and the daunting tasking of using correct grammar will become more second nature.
However, this post isn't meant to be me being obsessive over grammar errors, because frankly I make a great deal myself. This is meant to be looked then extrapolate the underlying message to YOUR overall lifestyle. I'll make the correlation to exercise because as a personal trainer and exercise physiologist I typically see more of it in the gym. People come in stressed out from work and let it affect what THEY'RE (another commonly misspelled word!) doing in the gym. As a human being stress is always going to be there in one form of another, and typically if YOU'RE not stressed I would make the argument YOU'RE not pressuring yourself enough. Im not talking about pulling-hair-out stressed but you should always feel a pressure to do something better.
While in the gym you need to manage YOUR stress. However, that manifests itself for you, do it. Whether thats listening to music, repeating a mantra, or just solely thinking about what it is YOU'RE doing, not thinking about how many essays are due tonight, or that finals are in a couple weeks. In the gym, heck with everything you do focus on that task. There have been plenty of studies that show you truly cannot multitask on two things at once but rather one at a time and just switching between to two at lightning speed. The more you multitask the less productive you get and the less quality is achieved while doing that task. MANAGEMENT OF STRESS IS KEY! Make a list of to do's in priority. Focus on the first finish it then move onto the next. This will help mainly with your chronic stress.
Now focusing on eustress or the acute stressors of our lives. It is important that that we manage our chronic stressors first because adding stress even acute or beneficial stressors may turn to negative stressors (heres the grey area I was telling you about). Say that we managed to get our distress under control. We need to add some beneficial stressors to our lives. Exercise is probably the first one most people think of. I would concur, that is a very beneficial stressor. If you take a sedentary person and a person who SMOKES and exercises, you might imagine the non-smoker has a lower risk factor. Wrong, exercise is a potent eustressor that will even lower the risk factor more than smoking increases it. (STILL DONT SMOKE, BAD IDEA). Back on point, exercise is a good idea. However, if you don't have time to exercise (you really do but thats for another discussion) there are other ways to cause beneficial stressors. If you've read some of my other posts you can probably guess my next proposition. DIET, diet is another eustressor you can add, hypo caloric diet or a diet that will cause weightloss preferentially fat loss is what I would aim for. I mean eating less, if you say you can't afford that there might be something wrong with you mentally (hypo caloric diets can help with cognition as well). Im not suggesting take some time to learn about diets right now, because I can help you with that just email me brett@reinhards.us; but you don't even need to change what YOU'RE eating just eat less of it. Next is FASTING or if that word is too scary just skip a meal. Its basically the same thing.
As a physiologist specializing in exercise I am interested in anything that can give me or my clients an edge. Fasting or skipping a meal along with diet and exercise are simple ways of doing that. Even Bill Nye tells us, "we are what we eat or we are what we ate".
Heres a very basic understanding of why skipping a meal can help us. We all have cells in our body. All of our cells have built in mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms help to clean and purge the cells of nasty or bad portions of the cells. Especially due to our oh so wonderful western diet, some of our cells are just plain bad. Say we have several cells, some are healthy and others are unhealthy but we consistently feed all our cells a wonderful carb based meal (cells love carbs). Our meals consistently feed our sick and healthy cells to keep them alive. Me, I am mean to my sick cells and compassionate for my healthy cells. I simply don't want my sick cells taking food from my healthy cells. You would think you might want to feed YOUR sick cells more food to help them recover, but I propose a different option one far less likely to cause a negative gene expression causing some horrendous effect to occur. How can we protect against that? Well its simple really. Remember the built in mechanisms I was talking about, every cell in our body except for cancer cells have a mechanism which is often referred to as "survival mode", sounds pretty badass if you ask me. The actual process I'm talking about is called autophagy, its basically the house cleaning process and it cleans up your cells. There is a similar process called apoptosis, programmed cell death, where a neighboring cell actually destroys the cell. When you miss a meal or fast, these processes are induced, fasting will cause a greater effect. (www.leangains.com probably has one of the most substantial accumulation of fasting knowledge I can think of).
We can think of eating every 2-3 hours as pampering all of our cells (the healthy and the sick), giving them food, a blanket, and a pillow making sure they are nice and comfy. On the other hand we can think of skipping a meal as making our cells work for their keep. Health cells can undergo this stress and adapt and survive, while sick cells will typically die off or get killed. You may think that sounds bad but really thats a good thing, then YOUR body will create new healthy cells and you will become healthier as an effect. If YOU'RE an athlete and think YOUR muscles will fall off if you miss a meal, it won't. As you fast growth hormone (which is protein sparing in it of itself) increases and also helps to mobilize free fatty acids aka fat.
I tend to go off on tangents, mainly because I just feel obligated to share all this information with you, but I am also trying to write more so I can get a better hang of it and will eventually get better and saying what I want to say. Overall, I feel I made a good example of what the different stresses are and the importance of managing stress, along with additional good stressors we can add into our lives regardless of time.
if you are wondering why you don't hear to much about fasting in the media. I propose a question for you to ponder. If fasting consists of practically nothing but water for anywhere from 12-36 hours, where is the profit for suggesting this type of practice?
And with that I hope you learned something and I hope you try to keep a better eye on YOUR stress and YOUR spelling ;).
No comments:
Post a Comment