Stress Relief: Neurochemistry of Stress-induced Analgesia

With this background, we can understand the story of the neurochemistry of stress-induced analgesia that began in the early 1970s. It was a time of the hippie culture in America and the rest of the world. The young men and women in the West had then discovered the joys of opiates and the pleasures to be derived from them. Naturally, the leading-edge scientists of that time wanted to know how the various drugs like heroin, morphine, and opium worked.

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Stress Relief: Can Stress Accelerate Aging?

Intuitively, we all recognize that there is a connection between how we live and how we die. It then makes sense that if we are stressed during our youth, it will have an impact on how we age and how fast that takes place. At the beginning of the 20th century, Rubner, a German physiologist came up with the idea of living beings having a fixed time for which a body can go on. His main hypothesis was that an organism could carry on an activity for a specific number of times and, after that time; wear and tear would cause it to fail. For example, the heart can beat only so many times before it will fail.

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Stress Relief: Managing Stress by the Aged

One of the questions we posited at the start of this chapter was the ability of older individuals to deal with stress. The short answer is that they deal poorly with stress and the long answer is the rest of this section. The inability of older individuals to deal effectively with stress fits in with our intuition and observation of aged persons as vulnerable and fragile. To put it in perspective, almost all the systems of the body of older people work as they do for young people. But bring in a stressor1 and the aged organism is likely to fail. Consider the scenario of an individual stressed by a sudden drop in temperature.

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Stress Relief: Techniques for Stress Management

The central theory of this book is the irony of the stress response—it evolved in physical environments very different from the social and psychological ones of today. Instead of being stalked by a saber-toothed tiger, today it is traffic jams, board exams, terrorist threats, bomb attacks in the city and worries over money.

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Stress Relief: Stress Management— A Scientific Background

The 1930s and the 1940s saw a great deal of scientific progress in the field of stress physiology after Selye dem-onstrated the effects of stress on rats. Scientists determined the main hormones released in response to stress were epinephrine, glucocorticoids and prolactin. Additional research uncovered the superb control mechanisms of the body that regulate the amount of these hormones released into the bloodstream. In engineering jargon there are multiple feedback domains for each hormone.

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Stress Relief: Do We Slow Down with Age?

We all understand that we slow down as we age. As the body ages it seems to lose some of its capacity and it takes longer to get things done. I still remember my days from school when I would get up and be ready in 15 minutes. These days it takes me over an hour to do the same things and get ready for office. This point is also brought home when engaged in sports or during exercise. Setting out to beat a personal best established when our legs were years younger, we fall short and become convinced that we simply did not perform at our best.

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Stress Relief: Psychological Techniques

Reading through the literature on stress, we can find some psychological answers to coping with stress that are far from simple to implement in everyday life. They emphasize the importance of manipulating feelings of control, predictability, outlets for frustration, social connectedness, and the perception of whether things are worsening or improving.

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Stress Relief: Breathing Exercises to Reduce Stress

Massage

Massage reduced levels of glucocorticoids and epinephrine in depressed mothers with infants. A study at the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School found that massage therapy also improved sleep and reduced the mothers’ depression.

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Stress Relief: Unconventional Technique for Stress Relief

The preceding sections have given a number of suggestions to reduce stress. In this section, we will cover a technique that is quite controversial but claimed to be effective. This technique, advocated by the psychologist David H. Barlow for treating anxiety disorders, is surprisingly simple to explain, although its philosophical and clinical implications are anything but.

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