|
Stress
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
Latest News |
Back Issues | Get updates:
Subscribe Now
Stressed Parents Damage Children
May 20, 2002
Researchers in the US believe that parents who avoid conflict or do not express feelings adequately set a poor example for their offspring. They have suggested the health implications can be particularly serious if there is a family history of high blood pressure.
They found that the offspring of parents with high blood pressure who do not cope well in stressful situations react even more negatively to such incidents. Psychologists from West Virginia University examined the behavioral responses, heart rate and blood pressure of 64 healthy college students during stressful mental activities.
Half of these had parents with a history of high blood pressure or hypertension. The other half did not. Those who had a family history of hypertension had higher resting heart rates. They also recorded higher blood pressure levels during the mental tasks and their verbal and non-verbal behaviour was more negative. This included more rolling of the eyes, sighing and lack of eye contact.
Writing in the journal Health Psychology, Dr Nicole Frazer and colleagues said: "This suggests that for offspring of hypertensive parents, certain behavioural styles of interacting in relationships might predispose them to essential hypertension or cardiovascular disease."
They suggested that if similar studies backed up their findings, psychologists and other health professionals could draw up programs to help break the cycle. These could include interventions involving conflict management, relaxation, assertiveness and social skills training.
They suggested that learning such skills could break the cycle of how parents and their children react to stressful situations, which in turn they said would reduce their risk of heart disease later in life.
We teach Uplift relationship-building skills and relaxation techniques to teenagers (and their counselors) as well as to parents in the US and Australia. Without this kind of intervention, the parent-child cycle goes on for generations. AF
Read more in Health Psychology
Top of page
Men 'Stressed in the Womb'
December 8, 2001
Research carried out at the University of Cambridge suggests men may be predisposed to stress because they release more of the stress hormone cortisol than women. Scientists examined levels of the hormone in unborn lambs and found that males released twice as much cortisol as females.
They believe the findings, presented to the Society for Endocrinology's annual meeting, can also be applied to humans and may explain why the two sexes respond differently to stress.
"We have known for a long time that men and women respond differently to stressful conditions," said Dr Dino Giussani, who led the study. "It has been thought that this was down to environmental factors but we have shown that these differences between men and women may be pre-determined from birth."
The study on unborn lambs found little variation between males and identified a significant difference compared with females. "The males released twice as much cortisol and there was little variation between them," Dr Giussani told BBC News Online. "This is a new idea, which may have direct clinical implications. However, this work also suggests that males may be more predisposed than females to overreact to stressful conditions later in life."
He added: "Our results show that there may already be differences between men and women's ability to deal with stress even before birth."
Read more in BBC News
Top of page
'Too Much News is Bad for You'
November 10, 2001
Dale Brashers, professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois, in his article in the Journal of Communication, said people want more and more information because of the fears of further terrorist attacks following the September 11 tragedy. He said: "This is a case in which information may simply cause greater anxiety, particularly if the information forecasts negative consequences or if it is contradictory or unclear.
"Sometimes people need to back away from the onslaught of information." He said that could be difficult when people want to be vigilant about certain risks, such as the current fears over anthrax. "This is an area in which the science seems to change from minute to minute," he said. "So in addition to the uncertainty about the possibility of bioterrorist attacks, we now also have questions -- and uncertainty -- about expert advice."
He said: "People should listen to trusted sources, realize that media sources may be inaccurate because they are trying to disseminate information rapidly and -- from time to time -- verify information through health agencies."
However not everyone agrees that too much news is bad for you or can lead to increased anxiety.
Barrie Gunter, a British Psychological Society spokesman and professor of journalism studies at the University of Sheffield, said information about the current situation was being brought to people "quite legitimately." He was quoted in the BBC as saying that people did often feel better if they knew more.: "If you're in a highly anxious atmosphere, you will seek information to help you. If you can understand more about the causes of a particular situation, it reduces the uncertainty. And if you reduce the uncertainty, you feel more in control -- and if you feel more in control, you feel less anxious."
Read more in the Journal of Communication
Read more in BBC News
Top of page
Social Stress 'Can Kill'
September 4, 2001
As if there weren't enough evidence to show it already, new research shows that social creatures, such as mice and humans, can have their health severely impaired by bad relationships.
US researchers, working with mice, have found that social stress can trigger potentially deadly over-activity by the immune system. They believe that the results could be directly relevant to humans. They found that stressful social interactions stimulated a dangerous inflammatory response in the mice equivalent to the human condition septic shock.
The mice were put into either "social stress" or "physical restraint" groups. In the first, subordinate mice were placed in a cage with an aggressive dominant mouse for two hours a day. Mice from the second group were confined in a cylindrical tube for 16 hours without access to food or water.
When the mice were exposed to a bacterial toxin the socially stressed animals were twice as likely to die as those suffering physical hardship.
The stressed mice were found to produce high levels of chemicals called cytokines. These chemicals regulate the functioning of the immune system. However, they can stimulate inflammation.
Not only were cytokines higher in the stressed mice, the chemicals seemed to be resistant to the effect of other hormones called glucocorticoids, which normally keep inflammation in check. The result was a mouse equivalent of septic shock -- a deadly disorder characterised by a severe fall in blood pressure and widespread damage to body tissues.
Researcher Dr Ning Quan, from Ohio State University in Columbus, said: "During infection, there is a balancing act of the immune system. You want inflammatory cells to kill the bacteria at the site, but you don't want too many at the site.
"Septic shock is directly association with over-inflammation. Sometimes it's not the infection itself that kills a person; rather, it's that the body doesn't properly respond to inflammation."
Doctors had noted glucocorticoid resistance in people who were suffering from major depression or infected with HIV.
Dr Quan said: "Chronic social stress in these patients may contribute to the development of glucocorticoid resistance, which could put these folks at increased susceptibility to inflammatory diseases including septic shock."
In our Uplift Program, which counters stress and depression very effectively, we emphasize the value of functional relationships. Since humans are social animals, the better our connections to each other the better our mental and physical health. BM
Read more in The New York Times
Top of page
Nine Billion Humans by 2070
August 8, 2001
The past century's world population surge has led many to wonder how the globe will sustain the ever-growing horde of humanity. A new study suggests that it may not have to: the world's population may peak as soon as 2070, then start to decline (at least a bit).
There is an 85% chance that the population will stop growing before 2100, the model says. Unlike most, it does not produce just one prediction, but a range of possible futures, each with a certain probability of occurring.
The main message is that the population could rise from it's present level of 6 billion to about 9 billion in 2070 (a 50% increase), then sink to 8.4 billion in 2100. This is one billion fewer than a United Nations estimate.
Such a prospect should cheer those worrying about food supplies and the human impact on the environment, says Wolfgang Lutz of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, who led the study. His model does, however, raise the spectre of an increasingly elderly society. The United Nations estimate assumes that fertility rates will eventually stabilize at the replacement level of two children per mother. But most countries with declining populations have dipped well below that level, Lutz says. "We assume that as a society modernizes, the fertility rate goes down to between 1.5 and 2 children per woman."
The model predicts a huge geographic redistribution of the population. Europe's share is expected to dwindle from its present 10% to 6% by 2100; Africa's will soar from 13% to 22%. "The world is becoming less European, less white, less North American," agrees John Bongaarts, of the Population Council, a charitable research organization in New York. "The voice of the southern countries will grow, because they will represent more and more of humanity."
The model depicts a greying population, as fewer babies are born and life-expectancy increases. By 2100, the proportion of people over the age of 60 will have leapt from today's 10% to 34%, the model predicts. Caring for this elderly population will be a challenge, says Nico Keilman, a demographer at the University of Oslo. "China is already facing an enormous pension problem," he says.
But many societies may have what Lutz describes as a "window of opportunity" before this ageing occurs, when both the elderly and child populations will be relatively small. During this time, countries could experience an economic boom, with many women in the workforce and few children to support.
"Some say the miracle of the Asian tiger economies of South Korea, Singapore and Thailand is being caused by this window of opportunity," Lutz says. Europe is already well past this period, he adds.
With the increasing population will come a huge increase in stress-related mental and physical disorders and illnesses. There will also be more and more pressure to enact euthanasia laws similar to Holland's because the numbers of working-aged men and women will not be able to support the elderly and the sick without a huge reduction in their standard of living. BM
Read more in Nature
Top of page
Have Our Children Forgotten How to Play?
August 8, 2001
It seems obvious that car crashes can be especially dangerous for children, but according to a new study published in this week's issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics, playgrounds, too, pose a serious threat. "Most injuries are minor, but a higher proportion of playground injuries were moderate to severe compared to injuries due to motor vehicles, bicycles or all falls," explains lead author Kieran Phelan of the Children's Hospital Medical Center of Cincinnati.
Phelan's team analyzed statistical information gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics on how many children and adolescents visited U.S. emergency rooms between 1992 and 1997. Falling accidents in general made up a quarter of all injury-related E.R. visits, the largest proportion from a single cause. And of those falls, 5.3 percent, or approximately 153,000 cases, occurred on playgrounds.
Although the number of playground injuries is decreasing from 187,000 in 1992 to 98,000 in 1997, Phelan hopes that prevention efforts aimed at middle-school-age children can reduce the number even further. "Children in the five-to-nine-year age group had significantly higher rates of emergency visits from playground falls," he says. "They were three times as likely to have an emergency visit as children 10 to 14 years old."
Noting that most of these injuries happen at school and at day-care centers, he adds that "if you are going look into improving the situation, those are the places where you want to focus your efforts." Despite the findings, Phelan is not asking parents to keep their children inside.
"Playgrounds provide obvious benefits for children," he says, "but they should be engineered to provide safety from falls, including rubberized or other soft surfaces to absorb the impact."
I think the researchers are missing the point. One of the reasons that children are hurt in falls is that they are not allowed enough of the kind of adventurous, yet supervised, play in a natural setting that our remote ancestors had. Because of this they don't learn how to fall naturally, or to run on uneven ground or to move their bodies with grace and ease. This lack of play in a natural setting has also been shown to be one of the causes of ADD/ADHD (see my article Running From Ritalin). BM
Read more in the Scientific American
Top of page
Friendship the Antidote to Human Stress
February 18, 2001
Feeling stressed? How are your relationships? We Fortinberry-Murray Practitioners have always known that bad relationships were a prime cause of the inability to handle stressful events.
In this regard one of the most interesting findings to be published at the recent conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was contained in a paper by Professor Robert Sapolsky from Stamford University.
According to Professor Sapolsky the stresses and strains that afflict humans are evident in baboon societies -- as are the long-term health effects. His findings may suggest ways of limiting the impact of modern mankind's highly stressful lifestyle. The key to mental and physical health, he suggests, in both baboon and human societies, is supportive friendships.
Both baboons and humans 'invent' stressors since natural stressors for both species are practically absent. In both species the 'invented stressors' involve disruptions to stable family groupings. Blood samples taken from stressed baboons -- those who live in unstable social groupings -- show consistently high levels of stress hormones and were showing the physical signs: high levels of the "wrong" sort of cholesterol, increased blood pressure and hardening of the arteries.
Similar studies done by Professor Sapolsky on rats showed that high levels of stress affect the brain quite dramatically. In particular there was severe damage to the hippocampus, that part of the brain which is involved in learning and memory.
Read more on BBC News
Top of page
Stress Shrinks the Brain
December 12, 2000
We have said for a long time that traumatic childhood stress probably has a profound effect on the physical make up of the brain. Now research reported recently confirms our long-held hypothesis. According to Dr. Douglas Bremner, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, the undue releasing of stress hormines into the brain during times of perceived or actual threat can shrink the area of the brain called the hippocampus. Chronic stress, Bremner said, can also harm mental concentration and reduce a person's learning ability. Stress hormones can "make you think faster and do better," according to Bremner, "but if you release too much you can't think at all." Our own experience with clients shows that one of the prime causes of learning difficulties in childhood -- including ADHD and ADD -- is childhood trauma.
Read more about Dr Douglas Bremner's study as reported by CNN online on December 12, 2000
Top of page
Post Traumatic Stress in Cancer Survivors
December 19, 2000
An interesting study carried out by a team led by Wendy Hobbie, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, showed that many children who have recovered from cancer develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Ms Hobbie notes that many of these children experience persistent anxiety that their lives are still in danger, which when triggered "generate strong physical and emotional responses more than 10 years after treatment."
PTSD is better known as the problem many troops get as a result of combat. The work of Dr Bob Murray with Vietnam vets tends to show that vets who were prone to PTSD came from violent or abusive childhood backgrounds. We wonder if the same is true of the cancer survivors in the study -- especially as studies have linked the spread of cancer itself to deep-seated emotional problems.
Read more about this study as reported on BBC News on December 18th, 2000
Top of page
Anti-Stress Policies in the Workplace
January 3, 2001
Attempts to tackle stress at work may actually make the problem worse for some employees, according to research by Dr Rob Briner, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Birkbeck College in London. "A plethora of stress management policies had been introduced by employers in recent years, yet none of them actually work", he said.
At the same time, a survey by the British Trades Union Congress last year found that stress was the number one concern among employees. The TUC claims that British industry loses 90 million working days a year because of stress at work.
As part of the Uplift Program's workplace outreach we have developed programs which lead to less time lost to 'sickies'
(read more about our Corporate Seminars).
Read more about Dr Rob Briner's research as reported on BBC News on January 2nd, 2000.
Top of page
RELATED LINKS
Check our event schedule for workshops and seminars.
About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
Do you like our site? Recommend this page to a friend!
|
