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Stressed Out? Time To Laugh!
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Stress seems synonomous with life in the 21st century. Who doesn't feel rushed, pressured, hurried, anxious, or worried about deadlines, commitments, work, finances, or relationships. Whether from a charging lion, or a pending deadline, the stress hormones released are the same. The stress response gives us the strength and speed to ward off or flee from an impending threat, but when it persists, stress can put us at risk for many varied disease, including obesity, anxiety, depression, heart disease and even cancer.
On-the-Job Stress Causes Heart Attacks
Research confirms that healthy people with stressful jobs who work long hours but get little satisfaction from what they do have twice the risk of dying from heart disease as employees that feel fulfilled by their jobs.
Regardless of the occupation, researchers have found that workers who reported high job stress - defined as too much work as well as a lack of satisfaciton and feeling undervalued and unappreciated - were 2.2 times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than workers with low job stress. Similarly, employees who felt there was a large imbalance between their job effort and reward had a 2.4-times higher risk of cardiovascular death. (British Medical Journal 2002;325:857-860)
Women under high levels of stress are 2.28 times more likely to suffer from heart disease, 2.24 times more likely to suffer a stroke and 1.64 times more likely to die of a heart attack, according to the study. (Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Aug. 13, 2002)
Marriage Stress
Among couples who seem the most hostile during discussion of marital troubles, three stress hormones - Epinephrine (better known as adrenalin), Norepinephrine and ACTH - rise considerably in the blood samples. These three stress hormones have been shown to be consistently and significantly elevated in couples who later divorced.
That's significant because those hormones are known as immune inhibitors, meaning they "down regulate" the immune system. That, in turn, could leave the person more vulnerable to disease.
"If those hormones stay up, you're probably going to have higher blood pressure, higher heart rate, and it's not good for your body," says Dr. Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser, lead author of a recent study on stress in marriage and professor of psychiatry at Ohio State University. The elevated hormone level didn't just appear in the blood drawn during the discussion of marital problems and it was also found in samples taken much later, even those drawn while the participants were asleep. (Psychol Bull 2001 Jul;127(4):472-503)
The production of stress hormones was far greater among the women than the men. "The women produced more hormones than the men because women notice hostility a lot more," Dr Kiecolt-Glaser adds. "They are much more attuned to the quality of the relationship. Men just don't even see a lot of the negativity or hostility that women see."
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Read the entire article, right down to the part about anticipating laughter and how it affects your immune system and hormones.
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Remember to laugh... or at least imagine yourself laughing!
Wendi
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So what does all this tell us? Did hormones destroy the marriages? No. Stress hormones do not destroy marriages, but stressful relationships can destroy your marriage as well as your health. Thoughts and emotions are powerful things. Anxiety and worry about daily events and relationships produces stress hormones that continue to wash through your body at high levels for days and can have a hazardous, or even lethal effect.
Stress Ups Risk of Catching a Cold and Cancer
People who see the proverbial glass as half empty may be nearly four times more likely than their optimistic peers to come down with a cold, study findings suggest. According to research, psychological stress, particularly the chronic type, is a risk factor for colds. An optimistic outlook and outgoing personality seemed to protect individuals. (Epidemiology 2001;11:345-349)
While the common cold is rarely serious, it can be blamed for about 30 million days of lost work in the US each year, the study authors explain. Individuals with a negative outlook were at greatest risk of developing colds regardless of their use of vitamin C and zinc, and their smoking and drinking habits. Those at next highest risk were individuals who believed that they were under stress. These people were nearly three times as likely to develop a cold, the report indicates.
Psychological stress can take a toll on the immune system by raising stress hormones that suppress the immune system, including immune cells that help to ward off infections and cancer. Additionally, individuals who are under stress are also more prone to behaviors that can make them vulnerable to disease, such as smoking, consuming alcohol, eating too much of the wrong things and forgoing exercise.
Lasting Stress Effects
Even relatively short periods of stress may cause changes that leave brain cells hypersensitive for weeks, according to new research trying to uncover the molecular root of post-traumatic stress disorder. Stress hormones can make you more alert and your muscles and nerves primed for action, but, chronic, cumulative or traumatic stress may cause long-lasting harmful effects (Science 2002 Jan 18;295(5554):508-12)
Laughing Matters
A funny movie, or joking around with friends, on the other hand, is known to reduce stress. Recent research has found that people who laugh more often are less likely to have heart attacks. Watching a funny video, or just laughing at a joke, can make healthful changes in the levels of hormones involved in stress and lower high blood pressure and other indicators of ill health. (Altern Ther Health Med. 2001 Mar;7(2):62-72, 74-6) .
The first studies of the effect of humor on the body were conducted in the United States in the 1930s. But it wasn't until 1979 that humor research began in earnest. That's when Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins countered a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis, a painful and potentially crippling arthritis, with a combination of mainstream medicine and large doses of humor.
Cousins watched videos of Candid Camera , as well as Marx Brothers and Three Stooges films. Although his doctors had given him little chance of recovery, within 8 days his pain began to subside, and he returned to work. He documented his recovery in the book Anatomy of an Illness and founded the Humor Research Task Force.
Laughter Therapy
Cousins' experience spawned a wealth of humor research. Some of the most intriguing findings include those of studies conducted at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California, which found that laughter stimulates the immune system. Students who watched funny videos had a significant increase in T cells and natural killer cells, both of which fight off diseases. They also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood (Am J Med Sci 1989 Dec;298(6):390-6)
There's more. A yearlong study by the Oakhurst Health Research Institute of 240 people who had had heart attacks found that those who spent 30 minutes a day chortling at comedy videos were less likely to have a second heart attack.
Just Thinking About Laughing Eases Stress
A new study conducted at the University of California Irvine has revealed that just anticipating a happy or funny event can lower production of stress hormones and raise levels of endorphins and other pleasure and relaxation-inducing hormones (Society for Neuroscience, 2002 Nov)
The new study shows that just knowing you will be involved in a positive humorous event days in advance reduces levels of stress hormones in the blood. When the study participants watched a funny video, levels of the stress hormone Cortisol fell 39%, the anxiety hormone Epinephrine, also known as Adrenaline, fell 70%, while levels of the feel-good hormone Endorphin rose 27% and anti-aging hormone HGH (Human Growth Hormone) levels rose by 87%.
This all suggests that anticipation of a funny event can lower stress, stimulate the immune system and extend longevity. Dr. Lee Berk and colleagues have shown for the first time that mere anticipation of having fun has similar effects. "You have been thinking about it all day, so you experience a change in biology even before you get there," Berk said. "That is therapeutic." The finding strengthens the advice that everyone lighten up a little to live longer. "Anticipation is half or two-thirds the fun," Berk said.
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Surprise! Researchers Find That Sexless = Sadness
Fox News:
NEW YORK — It might be the biggest breakthrough in sex research since the invention of the Pill.
Two Georgia State University sociologists have come out with a study finding that people who aren't having sex, but want to, are frustrated and unhappy.
Nuns, priests, monks and others who choose abstinence aren't part of the Journal of Sex Research report, co-authored by GSU sociology professors Denise Donnelly and Elisabeth Burgess. Instead, so-called "involuntary celibates" are the study's focus, and were often found to be depressed, cranky and insecure.
The less-than-stunning conclusion, along with the less-than-solid sample they profiled (82 people, all found on the Internet) have led some to ponder why they bothered.
"I wonder why the authors thought this was an interesting question," mused Sally Satel, a staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. "They did not make a convincing case for undertaking it."
Donnelly said she's heard similar criticism before: She and Burgess have been accused of wasting time and money on research whose conclusion seems ridiculously simple. But the project provided valuable insight into a common problem, she said — and only cost $5,000, which came from an internal university research grant.
"Some parts of the study are obvious, but some aren't," she said. "We knew we were going to find people who weren't absolutely ecstatic, but what we didn't know was how much it affects all aspects of their lives."
Researchers divided participants into three categories: virgins, singles (non-virgins who wanted an intimate relationship but didn't have one) and partnered celibates (those who were no longer having sex with their significant others).
Donnelly said most people who participated in the study reported depression, low self-esteem, poor body image and emotional paralysis at the thought of initiating a relationship.
"It snowballs — the longer one goes without a partner, the harder it is to find one," she said. "It's important to do the study because sex is an important part of our lives. We don't often talk about it."
Donnelly and Burgess found that the "involuntary celibacy" problem is usually ignored, despite the fact that about 10 to 20 percent of the population falls into the category.
"It's not stupid — it's me," said a middle-aged Russian woman identifying herself only as Tatiana. "I'm divorced and I don't have it. I need it, but I can't just go out there and get it."
Others who were asked what they thought of such research were more skeptical.
"It seems kind of silly," said Matthew Kelly, 21, a Rhode Island college senior. "It's a really hard thing to do a scientific study on."
The conclusion might be a given, but the GSU authors aren't naive. After all, the topic of sex never fails to attract attention.
"It's obvious: A lot of people who don't have sex are grouchy," said Jerrozz Brooks, 22, a New York City cook. "But I would want to read about it."
Still, is titillating content a good reason to research something we already know — that lack of sex is a downer?
"A lot of people would say 'Duh!' but this information has potential usefulness," said Dr. J. Michael Faragher, a sex and addiction expert at Metropolitan State College of Denver. "There is stupid, funny research that goes on, but within obvious results there are sometimes intriguing trends we didn't know about before."
Satel, for her part, was unimpressed, but took heart in the fact that the project came cheap.
"It would be a shame to spend significant tax dollars on an uninformative study such as this," she said. "It doesn't tell you a lot. It's really a non-finding because the methodology is so weak."
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Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleep-dependent motor skill learning.
Walker MP, Brakefield T, Morgan A, Hobson JA, Stickgold R.
Laboratory of Neurophysiology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, 74 Fenwood Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. mwalker@hms.harvard.edu
Improvement in motor skill performance is known to continue for at least 24 hr following training, yet the relative contributions of time spent awake and asleep are unknown. Here we provide evidence that a night of sleep results in a 20% increase in motor speed without loss of accuracy, while an equivalent period of time during wake provides no significant benefit. Furthermore, a significant correlation exists between the improved performance overnight and the amount of stage 2 NREM sleep, particularly late in the night. This finding of sleep-dependent motor skill improvement may have important implications for the efficient learning of all skilled actions in humans.
Harnessing the Power of Preconceived Notions
By Joe Hammer
Wendi asked that I provide a little wisdom for this issue of her newsletter. She normally provides me with wisdom when I need it (which is quite often…), so I felt obligated to reciprocate…
I'm going to touch on the topic of preconceived notions.
When we think we're being straight and fair, the words we utter often subconsciously convey different messages to the listener. This can be managed and used to assist you in leading the listener into a predetermined destination, or it can be detrimental to your efforts if you are unaware of this mental processing.
In marketing, my area of expertise, research can often alters its own results. From a marketing standpoint, research can be skewed in the researcher's (the company wanting more market share) best interest.
Here's an example:
Folks attending a convention were stopped and asked to participate in a simple survey. All they had to do was taste two samples of water. One of these samples was labeled "tap" water, while another was labeled "distilled" water.
After sampling the water, they were asked to rate the taste difference as well as any other elements of difference they noticed.
The outcome was that over 92% of the respondents indicated the tap water had a less than favorable taste in comparison to the distilled water. Further, many noticed a "metallic taste" in the tap water, as well as a small hint of "chemicals" and "odor."
Most everyone noticed little problem with the distilled water.
The crux of this survey was that both water samples were taken from the same bottled water container!
Respondents to this subconsciously skewed survey prove the point that how a survey is conducted can easily influence the results.
This known, if I am working with a bottled water company and choose to slant "consumer taste tests" you can see how this is easily done. In the above scenario, I could now legally promote the fact that "92% of those surveyed preferred XYZ Distilled Water."
We simply exploited the preconceived notions present in our minds when we hear the words "tap" water, most of which are negative. By starting with that preconceived notion, the tap water starts at a disadvantage.
I make certain to drive home an important element of marketing this fact in all of my advertising and marketing workshops:
Facts don't reside in the human mind; only perceptions exist there.
Perceptions are the reality!
In the above scenario, a more honest and forthright approach would be a "blind" test, where neither sample is labeled. This eliminates these preconceptions.
Whether you are conducting a survey, or devising a verbal stratagem to having the kids clean up their room, always be aware of the preconceptions present in the minds of your audience!
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Joe Hammer has been called "The Entrepreneurs' Secret Weapon to Higher Profits." As an active Business Development/Marketing Strategist, Speaker/Trainer, Entertainer and Lifetime Entrepreneur, Joe teaches business professionals how to make more money with their business. He is the author of How to Be Outrageously Successful and Make a Ton of Money in Your Service Business, a premier home-study small business marketing course featuring unconventional strategies to succeed in a cluttered marketplace, and The Marketing Forerunner, his no-fluff newsletter of tips, trends, tactics, sources and techniques to build your business. Visit Joe at http://www.JoeHammer.com
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SCIENCE JOURNAL
By SHARON BEGLEY
WSJ October 11, 2002
Page B1
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Parts of the Brain Used Most
Expand, Rewire on Demand
For the conventional wisdom on our gray matter, just open any lavishly illustrated brain book. There, detailed diagrams map out specialized brain structures: areas that generate speech and areas that process vision, areas that sense sound and areas that detect when you touch your left big toe.
The diagrams resemble nothing so much as zoning maps produced by the most rigid land-use board. Every bit of neural real estate is assigned a job, reflecting the decades-long belief that different parts of the brain are hard-wired for certain functions.
This view of the brain dates back to 1857, when French neurosurgeon Paul Broca discovered that particular regions are specialized for particular functions, such as language. His and subsequent discoveries gave rise to the dogma of the hard-wired adult brain, and it had profound real-world consequences. It held that if the brain sustained injury through stroke or trauma to, say, a region responsible for moving the left arm, then other regions could not step up to the plate and pinch-hit.
The function of the injured region would be lost forever. And it implied that if, by the age of 12 or so, you had not recruited neurons to the specialized task of playing the violin, for instance, or learning a second language, then you might as well give up: Your old brain was simply not going to learn new tricks.
But that dogma has been under assault in recent years. Although specific portions of the brain do, usually, specialize in certain tasks, the brain is much more adaptable and renewable than previously thought -- and that's true throughout life.
Animal experiments provided the first hints that the brain is able to change dramatically after childhood. When lab monkeys practiced -- and practiced -- the trick of using a single finger to reach into a tiny dish and grab a morsel of food, the brain region devoted to fine motor control of that finger grew like suburban sprawl. And these were grown-up monkeys.
Even the adult brain is "plastic," able to forge new connections among its neurons and thus rewire itself. Sensory input can change the brain, and the brain remodels itself in response to behavioral demands. Regions that get the most use literally expand. In terms of which neural circuits endure and enlarge, you can call it survival of the busiest.
In 1993, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, then at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, led the search for what would become one of the earliest findings in human neuroplasticity. Does anyone, he wondered, habitually experience powerful tactile stimulation to a particular portion of their body? Of course: blind people who read Braille with their fingertips.
Dr. Pascual-Leone recruited 15 proficient Braille readers and wired them up so he could measure their somatosensory cortex -- the part of the brain that registers and processes the sense of touch. Then he administered weak electrical shocks to the tip of their right forefingers (the "reading finger"), recording which parts of the somatosensory cortex registered the sensation. He did the same thing to the blind people's left index finger, and to fingers in non-Braille-readers that don't get exceptional use.
The result was unmistakable. In the Braille readers, the area of somatosensory cortex devoted to the reading finger was much larger than the comparable area for fingers in both blind and sighted people who don't have such demands put on them. It was a clear case of sensory input changing the brain. The cortical region processing that input had expanded, with a consequent increase in sensitivity. That would explain how Braille readers are able to make such fine discriminations among patterns of tiny raised dots.
By the spring of 1995, Edward Taub was also exploiting the ability of the brain to rewire itself. The University of Alabama, Birmingham, scientist was developing a revolutionary new therapy for stroke patients. The goal was to enable an intact area of the brain to take over for a region knocked out by stroke. But Dr. Taub was sure that neuroplasticity went beyond damaged brains. His goal was to see how normal behaviors changed brain maps.
One evening that spring, he and his wife Mildred Allen, a lyric soprano who had been a principal artist at New York's Metropolitan Opera in New York, were having dinner in Germany with a group of neuroscientists. Casting around for a study they could collaborate on, Dr. Taub asked the group: Is there any normal activity that uses one hand way more than the other? The scientists were flummoxed, but Ms. Allen chimed in, "Oh, that's easy -- playing a string instrument."
When a right-handed musician plays the violin, four digits of the left hand continuously finger the strings. (The left thumb grasps the neck of the violin, undergoing only small shifts of position and pressure.) The right, or bowing, hand undertakes far fewer individual finger movements. Might this pattern leave a trace on the cerebral cortex?
To find out, the scientists recruited six violinists, two cellists and one guitarist, all of whom had played their instrument for seven to 17 years, as well as six nonmusicians. The volunteers sat still while a pneumatic stimulator applied light pressure to their fingers to record neuronal activity in the part of the brain that processes the sense of touch.
There was no difference between the string players and the nonmusicians in how much of the cortex was devoted to "feeling" the fingers of the right hand. But there was a huge difference when it came to the left hand: The amount of brain territory devoted to those fingers had increased substantially in string players. That increase was greatest in musicians who began to play before the age of 12.
But to Dr. Taub, the most dramatic finding was that even in people who took up the violin as adults, regular practice had changed their brains. Their cortex had rezoned itself so that more neurons were assigned to the fingers of the left hand. "Even if you take up the violin at 40, you still get brain reorganization," he says.
These were the opening shots in what would become a revolution in treatment for stroke, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's syndrome and other brain diseases. All were based on the discovery that the brain has the ability to change in response to the input it receives.
At the University of California, San Francisco, researchers led by Michael Merzenich had shown that sound has the power to reshape the brain in lab monkeys. Across the country, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, neuroscientists Paula Tallal and Steve Miller had begun to suspect that Specific Language Impairment (a general term that includes dyslexia) might reflect a problem not with recognizing the appearance of letters and words but, instead, with processing certain speech sounds -- fast ones.
Dyslexics, Dr. Tallal thought, have some brain impairment that prevents them from hearing staccato sounds like "b," "p," "d" and "g," which burst from the lips and vanish in just a few thousandths of a second. Since learning to read involves matching written words to the heard language, it's no wonder that a failure to hear certain sounds impairs reading ability.
When Dr. Tallal discussed her theory at a science meeting in Santa Fe, you could almost see the light bulb go off over Dr. Merzenich's head. His experiments on monkeys, he told her, had implications for her ideas about dyslexia. Dyslexics might become better readers, he said, if their brain could be rewired to hear staccato phonemes -- something that could be done by harnessing the power of neuroplasticity.
To find out if the brains of young dyslexics could be rewired, and if that rewiring would help them read better, the Rutgers scientists recruited about a dozen kids and designed an experiment. One of Dr. Merzenich's colleagues, meanwhile, wrote software that slows down staccato phonemes, stretching out the interval between "b" and "aaah" in "baa," for example. To everyone else, the processed speech sounds like someone shouting underwater. But to the dyslexic children, the scientists hoped, it would sound like "baa" -- a sound they had never before heard clearly. When Dr. Tallal listened to the processed speech, she was so concerned that the kids would be bored out of their minds listening to endless repetitions of words and phonemes, that she dashed out for a supply of Cheetos. She figured her team would have to bribe the kids to stick with the program.
And so began Camp Rutgers. For 20 days one summer, 22 kids age five to nine played CD-ROM games structured to alter the brain. One game asked the child to "point to rake" when pictures of a lake as well as a rake were presented, or to click a mouse when a series of the spoken letter "g" was interrupted by a "k." To train the brain to hear target sounds, the computer voice stretched them out, intoning "rrrake" and "ddday" and "bbbay."
To ease the monotony, the scientists offered the kids snacks and puppets, frequent breaks and even handstand demonstrations. Steve Miller recalls: "All we did for hours every day was listen. We couldn't even talk to the kids; they got enough normal speech outside the lab. It was so boring that Paula had to give us pep talks and tell us to stop whining. She would give us a thumbs-up for a good job -- and we'd give her a different finger back."
After a few months of training, all the children tested at normal or above in their ability to distinguish sounds. Their language and reading ability rose two years, something no other dyslexia program had achieved. Although the research did not include brain scans, it seemed Fast ForWord (as the software was called) was doing something more dramatic than your run-of-the-mill educational CD: It was rewiring brains. "You create your brain from the input you get," says Paula Tallal.
At first that was only speculation. Critics of Fast ForWord said the system was being rushed to market before its claims had been proved. The contention that Fast ForWord reshapes the brain was the target of the most vituperation. Michael Studdert-Kennedy, past president of the Haskins Laboratories, a center for the study of speech and language at Yale University, told the New York Times in 1999 that inducing neuroplasticity was "an absurd stunt" that would not help anyone learn to read.
Yet a year later, researchers reported compelling evidence to the contrary. Using brain-scan technology called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), John Gabrieli of Stanford University compared the brains of dyslexics before and after Fast ForWord. He found exactly what the skeptics said he wouldn't: In dyslexics whose language comprehension had been improved, the brain's left prefrontal region showed more activity after training. Hearing the drawn-out sounds apparently induced this region, impaired in dyslexics, to do its job of processing staccato sounds.
As evidence accumulated that changes in the sensory information reaching the brain can profoundly alter the cortex, an obvious question arose: Can the mind itself change the brain? Can mere thinking do it? Dr. Pascual-Leone, now at Harvard University, provided a preliminary answer, with an experiment that has not received nearly the attention it deserves.
He had one group of volunteers practice a five-finger piano exercise, and a comparable group merely think about practicing it. This second group focused on each finger movement in turn, essentially playing the simple piece in their heads, one note at a time.
Actual physical practice produced changes in each volunteer's motor cortex, as expected. But so did mere mental rehearsal. In fact, as big a change as the physical practice. Like actual movement, imagined movements change the cortex. Merely thinking about moving produces brain changes comparable to those triggered by actually moving.
The existence, and importance, of brain plasticity are no longer in doubt. The brain is dynamic, and the life we lead leaves its mark in the complex circuitry of the brain -- footprints of the experiences we have had, the thoughts we have thought, the actions we have taken. The brain allocates neural real estate depending on what we use most: the thumb of a videogame addict, the index finger of a Braille reader, the analytic ability of a chess player, the language skills of a linguist.
But the brain also remakes itself based on something much more ephemeral than what we do: It rewires itself based on what we think. This will be the next frontier for neuroplasticity, harnessing the transforming power of the mind to reshape the brain.
Updated October 11, 2002
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