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Ms. Ammar is a nationally board certified health coach who is passionate about helping people make small, sustainable changes so they can bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. She often works online, and loves supporting clients who are also working with a physician. She can be reached at jayneanneammar@gmail.com

How to Manage Stress: A Beginner’s Guide

by Jayne Anne Ammar

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If you’ve ever blushed when you felt embarrassed at saying something foolish, gotten clammy hands before meeting a job interviewer, or felt butterflies in your stomach ahead of giving a speech, then you know what a psychophysiological response is. In other words, this describes the way our physical bodies respond to our mental and emotional states. These examples are also mild forms of stress that we experience in the body. Common ways we experience stress can also include muscle tension, shallow breathing, and other physical symptoms when we encounter a stressor.
 

Recognizing the way our bodies respond at the most basic level in various ways from blushing to “butterflies” in the stomach is foundational to understanding how intricately our minds and bodies are linked and to understanding the effect that the stress of daily living can have on our health. While at first glance, it may seem impossible to control things like our body’s stress response, understanding that our minds can affect our body and vice versa is actually key to choosing and practicing effective ways to release stress daily.

 


The “Overflowing Bucket” Metaphor for Understanding and Ultimately Coping with Stress Well


The “Overflowing Bucket” is a metaphor I like to use to describe:

  • stressors (things that stress us out),

  • stress (the complex physiological responses in the body that occur in response to a stressor), and

  • managing stress (practical actions we consciously decide to take to release stress).


Imagine that you’re holding a bucket. All day long, you’re adding water to the bucket. The added water throughout the day are your stressors that may include everything from fighting daily traffic to taking care of your kids or aging parents. By the end of the day or even before then, the bucket is getting full, and it’s heavy. That’s stress. You may notice this as something like tight shoulders. When there’s no more room in the bucket, it may even overflow, which is when you may experience states like overwhelm, anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments like headaches. Each day, over and over, you need to continue to pour out some of the water so you can find your equilibrium and function at your best. In this metaphor, pouring out the water each day is the way you can choose to manage stress so that it doesn’t manage you.

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The Connection Between Stress and Physical Health


While not all stress is bad, as evidenced by the concept of eustress (or good stress,) when our bodies undergo stress repeatedly day after day without releasing those stress hormones, it can be bad for our health. “75% to 90% of all doctor's office visits are for stress-related ailments, complaints, and concerns,“ according to WebMD. When our nervous systems stays stuck in a parasympathetic or “fight, flight, or freeze” response for an extended period of time, without activating the sympathetic nervous system or “rest and digest” response regularly, it can result in physical illness.

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Fortunately, there are ways to bring awareness to and manage the stress created in our bodies in a healthy way.

 

Stress Relief Practices

No matter what the cause of the stress is, whether it’s big or small, we can control how we respond to stress. While it can be worthwhile to consider ways to remove or change the stressor, the practices I suggest below are ways to manage the physiological stress response after a stressor in order to essentially take care of your nervous system. Developing healthy coping mechanisms rather than just ignoring stress, letting our stress out on other people, or numbing ourselves with food or addictions is the way to prevent our buckets from overflowing.

These mindful and embodied practices are tools we can use to bring more awareness to the stress we experience daily so that, with practice, we can become better at giving ourselves the time and space to respond to the stress in our bodies in a healthy way.

 

Exercise - this has been shown to help “complete” the body’s stress response. Meaning when we encounter a stressor and we are unable to fight or flee, we still have a physiological response. Allowing the body to purge itself of the hormones and reactions in the body through physical exercise is a solid way to release stress, according to authors Emily and Amelia Naoski in their book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

 

Journaling - also called expressive writing can be helpful when we have an accumulation of thoughts, feelings, or situations we perceive as negative or stressful in order get it outside of us and onto the page, according to research done by James W. Pennebaker and outlined in his book Expressive Writing: Words that Heal.

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Mindfulness - this has been described as the conscious awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations in the present moment, attended to with gentle, nonjudgmental awareness. We can bring mindful awareness to any action such as eating, walking, or through simply stopping to observe our internal state.

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Breathing - considered both a voluntary action and a function of the autonomic (unconscious) nervous system, breathing techniques have been used since ancient time until the present day to induce a state of relaxation in the body. One modern evidence-based way to induce relaxation through the breath is using a pattern of breathing such as the 4-7-8 breathing.

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Meditation - the formal practice of setting aside regular periods of time in order to basically do nothing with mindful awareness. Some popular secular meditation techniques focus on mindful awareness of one’s breath, tuning into the body’s five senses, or repeating a mantra silently to oneself. Guided imagery, which can be similar to meditation, can also produce feelings of relaxation through listening to voice guided meditations in which the listener is guided to visualize a peaceful setting. For example, Insight Timer is a free app that I enjoy that has a plethora of different types of meditations to explore

 

All of these mind-body practices are powerful ways to activate the parasympathetic nervous system or the "rest and digest" response that supports our feelings of safety after a threat/stress. Doing one or more of these practices in the moment when we notice signs in our bodies that we’re starting to feel stressed, as well as experimenting with some of these as daily exercises, can keep our buckets lighter and allow us to meet stress in our daily lives with more equanimity.
 

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BigStock Photo 

Copyright: Tyrannosaurus

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Types of Vaccines

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There is a surprising array of vaccine types available these days, including some for COVID-19

 

Late in 2020, I produced a video called Virus Basics.  At that time, there was no vaccine ready for COVID-19, though several were in the works.  Since then, several COVID-19 vaccines have hit the market, and a significant number of Americans have successfully been protected from the virus. So as an update, I have taken a quick look at vaccine types and how they work, including those for COVID-19.  Read on.

 

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Vaccines, usually in the forms of shots or nasal sprays, are used to prevent disease, both viral and bacterial. According to a Health and Human Services website article, Vaccine Types, there are several major types of vaccines. These include live vaccines, which use a weakened (attenuated) form of the live pathogen, and inactivated vaccines, which use dead microbes of disease for vaccination.

 

Another type of vaccine discussed is the mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccine. This is currently being used to prevent the COVID-19 virus. Messenger RNA is found in all living things, but the mRNA in a vaccine contains the code necessary to make a protein or part of a protein produced by a pathogen. The mRNA is then injected into the body, where it is picked up by an immune cell. The immune cell makes the protein and displays it on its cell surface. Antibodies recognize it as foreign, and an immune response is triggered.

 

Also mentioned were subunit vaccines, which include polysaccharide, conjugate, and recombinant vaccine types. These vaccine types all have one thing in common: they elicit an immune response using just pieces of pathogens, germs, instead of the whole pathogen. This article kind of glosses over these vaccine types, and for a somewhat deeper look at how each of these works, you have to turn to other resources. Sometimes subunit vaccines also contain additives, called adjuvants, that enhance the immune response.

 

A subunit vaccine may be made from just part of an immune-triggering protein produced by the pathogen. A subunit vaccine might also be made from a bacteria’s hard, polysaccharide outer covering (polysaccharide vaccines), or the hard capsid (protective covering) of a virus.

 

Conjugate vaccines contain the substances from the hard polysaccharide coats of bacteria linked to a pathogen protein. The conjugation of these two items not only triggers a strong immune response for even very young patients under 18 months, but also allows the body to “remember” the invading germ.

 

In recombinant vaccines, part of the DNA of a pathogen, say from the hepatitis B virus, is inserted into the DNA of another type of organism, such as yeast cells, with the result that yeast cells are “tricked” into quickly and safely producing large amounts of an immune triggering protein of the virus, allowing for the manufacture of this recombinant kind of vaccine.

 

The last of the vaccine types discussed were the toxoid vaccines and viral vector vaccines. Toxoid vaccines trigger an immune response to substances produced by some germs, rather than the germ itself. 

 

Viral vector vaccines use a modified version of a relatively harmless virus to deliver protection from a more deadly virus. As of April 2021, some COVID-19 vaccines were in clinical trials which use viral vectors.

 

As the article explained, there are different pros and cons to the different types of vaccines. For example, live attenuated vaccines deliver a strong, long-lasting immune response; however, there is a slight risk of becoming sick from the disease injected (particularly for those with compromised immune systems), and the vaccine must be kept cool during shipping. Vaccines using a dead germ do not have those risks, but may not deliver a strong or long-lasting effect, and so booster shots may be required over time to maintain immunity. Messenger RNA vaccines deliver a strong response, but must be kept super cold during shipping. This limits the number of sites that can deliver the vaccine, and so on.

 

This is not the end of the story. There are still more types of vaccines under development, such as DNA vaccines, which could be easier and quicker to manufacture; mRNA vaccines that are more stable at somewhat higher temperatures; and vaccines that might be used to treat disease after onset, rather than focusing on prevention.

Water Testing for Brain-Eating Ameba

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Wednesday, 11/04/20 10:00 pm – KPRC Channel 2  ran an investigative piece by Joel Eisenbaum noting that after the September death of a child from a brain-eating ameba infection by Naegleria fowleri (NF), several municipalities in Texas  did water testing looking for NF, but most Texas municipalities did not.  Asking why not, the answer Eisenbaum came up with  was that “around-the-clock chlorine monitoring and more generalized bacterial testing eliminates the need to specifically test”  for NF, per Yvonne Forrest of Houston Water.  Eisenbaum said, “that meets industry standards.”  He also quoted Lake Jackson’s  Assistant City Manager as saying that Lake Jackson’s water had not been adequately chlorinated.  This aligns well with what I learned and explained in my article that  proper chlorination of municipal water systems eliminates the need to worry about NF in water. 

     The take-away is that NF is a heartbreaking, deadly infection, but it is very rare, and it can only access the brain if water goes up the nose.  So, hold your nose or wear a nose plug when diving into freshwater, be sure to use sterile saline solutions in your Neti pots, and remember the next time you complain about chlorinated water,  it is chlorinated for your protection.  

BigStock Photo 

Copyright: Tyrannosaurus

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