“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath.

Stress is an ignorant state.  It believes that everything is an emergency.  Nothing is that important.  Just lie down”

Natalie Goldberg

Many of the women I see in the clinic come in with physical ailments, but in the vast majority of cases there is a large serving of underlying stress.   Real life is often messy, unpredictable, hectic, unbalanced and overwhelming.   It’s often impossible to control the external stressors which keep us awake into the wee small hours.

Then the best we can do is focus on increasing our internal resilience through shifting mental paradigms.

Of course it makes sense to modify as many external stressors as possible, and then take a deep breath and  remember that stress is really an “inside job” -  an internal response to an external cue.  Have you ever heard anyone say “I’m under so much stress?”  The truth is that stress is not  what happens to us  – the unpaid mortgage; the sick children; or the strained marriage… these outside forces are the stressors not the stress. 

The stress is generated purely by how we perceive, interpret and respond to these outside forces. Given that the path of modern life is littered with stressors, simply putting in place strategies of avoidance is not the answer.  What is?

The secret to reducing the impact of these “stressors”, is shifting our focus from the outside chaos and turmoil, to our inner world, paying attention instead to altering our mental perceptions.  As our thinking changes, so too does our biology.  

Stressors will always be present, but we can increase our understanding of our own individual reactions to them; and learn new psychological skills to maintain our internal biological equilibrium in spite of the less than ideal outside world. 

Our mind and body are one, and their second by second interaction literally creates our internal biological soup.  First comes a thought, followed immediately by a biological response.  On the way home you remember that you left your house keys on your desk.  Immediately your adrenal glands squirt a fountain of stress hormones, and your heart rate and blood pressure climb rapidly.   Over time, our thought determined biology predicts our physical state of health.

Our attitudes, beliefs, and emotional states, be they love and compassion or fear and anger, trigger biochemical chain reactions that affect our blood chemistry, heart rate, and the activity of every cell and organ system in our body.

So what are the psychological characteristics which  increase our stress hardiness and reduce our risk of physical illness?  Studies looking at executives running top companies have identified several personality characteristics in those executives who remained healthy in the face of ongoing stress.  One trait is the ability to respond to challenge with excitement and energy to change.  These people look at new situations as a new opportunity to learn, grow, and develop personally. 

Having a commitment to something meaningful, be it their work, their community, family, or charity was also another key factor.   The third, and critical characteristic, was a sense of being in control, of being able to make decisions that make a difference and make things happen.

Conversely, there are other mental traits which increase our vulnerability to stress:

• negative mental processes such as “deficiency focusing”-  the habit of always focusing on the negative instead of the positive.  Often this is accompanied by a mindset which anticipates and expects difficulties and problems. 

• Negative self-talk – bombarding ourselves with  internal messages of failure and low self esteem, such as “I always mess up”; “I’m not good enough to do that”; “they won’t pick me of course”.  Playing these negative records endlessly in your brain triggers a stress response, causing a  release of  adrenaline and cortisol, and eventually leading to the development of stress related illness. Negative self-talkers often have an associated tendency of low skill recognition.  With low perception of their own abilities, they underplay the role of their abilities in their success, instead  attributing everything positive to an external factor such as luck or another person.

A new study from Denmark confirms what I’ve suspected for a long time. Women who live a life of high career pressure (a role traditionally associated with males) take on the male profile of cardiac disease. The Danish study looked at a group of 12,000 nurses between the ages of 45 and 64, and assessed the impact of their work pressures, and the degree of personal influence or power they had in the workplace. The nurses were tracked for a fifteen year period. The results were hardly surprising, but interesting confirmation that it’s not just stressed out type A business men who pay a price for workplace stress. Those nurses who reported their work pressures to be too high, were 25% more likely to develop heart disease compared with nurses who said work pressures were manageable and appropriate. For those at the top end of the stress scale, who felt overwhelmed by work pressures, there was a 35% increased risk of heart disease.

Premenopausal women under the age of 50 generally have a low incidence of heart disease, due to the cardiovascular protective effects of estrogen. If you’re a younger woman in a stressful work environment, don’t bank on your female hormones protecting your heart from the effects of stress. According to this latest study, you are in a demographic MOST at risk of work stress related heart disease. Nurses under the age of 50, who felt they were under moderate work place stress were a whopping 60% more likely to have heart disease compared with their unstressed peers.

So is it the actual biochemical changes resulting from stress that predispose us to heart disease, or is it the effect that stress has on our lifestyle choices? Most likely it’s a combination of both. Feeling chronically stressed puts you into a “fight or flight” state for much of the day, complete with health damaging biochemical changes. But the truth is that if you’re stressed and exhausted when you get home you’re much less likely to have the energy to exercise or cook yourself a healthy dinner… and a glass or three of wine a night may look just a little too tempting.

If you are interested in finding out proactive ways of optimizing your health, read “Wellbeing”, by Lynda Wharton, published by Harper Collins. Available in book stores, and online at www.lyndawharton.com

It’s October again.  That means we will be washed away in a sea of pink… pink sky tower, pink lapel ribbons, pink t-shirts.  Our pink overdose all in the name of supposedly saving women from breast cancer.  The funds raised to go towards more research into this disease… it’s early detection and “cure” through western medicine.

While the intention of reducing the suffering of women and their families yet to be effected by this terrible disease is indeed noble, it never fails to engender a huge bucket loads of frustration and cynicism for me.

I am frustrated by the almost exclusive citation of the “early detection” mantra… and the glaring absence of real information on the subject of breast cancer PREVENTION.  This frustration which peaks around this time of the year, every year, is a big part of my decision to write my latest book, “Wellbeing”.  The hundred pages I have devoted to the subject of breast cancer, is all about what we know about prevention, and making different choices on a daily basis, for our future breast health.

The truth is there is much we have yet to discover about what triggers the development of breast cancer…. but there is much we already know, or strongly suspect about how our lifestyle and environment play a part in its development.  We’re starting to realise that lowering our breast cancer incidence is not as simple as just teaching adult women a healthier way of living.  The relatively new science of epigenetics suggests that lowering our risk involves teaching women about diet, nutrition and a clean environment while they are pregnant, in order to lower the future risk of their yet unborn child.  Our maternal responsibility doesn’t stop there – the diet a baby girl is exposed to as she grows from infancy to womanhood may well play a significant part in switching on the genes which allow the uncontrolled breast cell division of breast cancer.

I feel especially frustrated when I hear the hundreds of millions of dollars of money poured into breast cancer research, alongside the deafening silence from the breast cancer elite, surrounding the subject of environmental toxicity.  Instead of spending hundreds of millions on the next great way of detecting breast cancer early, what about spending some of that money cleaning up the toxic environment we live in.

Many of the chemicals routinely used in agriculture and industry are potent endocrine disrupters.  They are chemicals which even in trace amounts are able to disrupt our hormonal system.  Some of these chemicals are also frank carcinogens.  Women are especially at risk from endocrine disrupters.  We absorb them more easily then men, and once in our body, they take up residence in our greater mass of fat tissue (including breasts), and stay there indefinitely.

Our supposedly “clean, green” New Zealand in fact caries a shameful legacy of environmental pollution. As an agricultural country, our use of endocrine disrupting agricultural chemicals is high.  Only last year we finally banned the use of the powerful endocrine disrupting herbicide Endosulfan.  This is a chemical banned for decades in other countries because of its known ability to disrupt the hormonal system, and potentially lead to the development of cancer.

I could go on for hours on this subject.  It makes me very hot under the collar!  So this October, I may well not be wearing a pink ribbon in my lapel, but you can bet I will be out there speaking, teaching, writing, and letting women know the truth about what they can do to help themselves.

To Your Wellbeing…

Lynda Wharton

lynda@lyndawharton.com
www.lyndawharton.com