As much as 60–80% of doctor visits are related to stress. No pressure...
As much as 60–80% of doctor visits are related to stress. No pressure, but in this episode, we’ll learn about how chronic stress can lead to long-term illness, how we can recognize the important symptoms, and what we can do to let off some steam. We’re exploring the impact of stress – not just on our mental health, but on our physical health, too.
Joining us to provide their expertise and insights are Dr. Roger McIntyre, mood disorders expert and Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at the University of Toronto, and Theresa Nguyen, Chief Program Officer and Vice President of Research and Innovation with Mental Health America.
The opinions expressed are the opinions of the individuals recorded and not the opinions of Viatris.
Mental Health America: mhanational.org
In the Open Podcast: https://www.mhanational.org/podcast
Disclaimer:
This podcast is provided for educational purposes and is not intended to replace discussions with your healthcare provider. All decisions regarding your care must be made with a healthcare professional, considering the unique characteristics of your personal situation. The opinions expressed are the opinions of the individuals recorded and not the opinions of Viatris. Individuals featured in this podcast may have participated in the past or may be current members of an advisory group for Viatris.
Narration: Today on Listen Well, we'll be exploring the science of stress, inflammation and its impact on the body – literally from head to toe. I'll be asking Dr. Roger McIntyre, mood disorders expert and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Toronto, about the negative and positive role stress plays in our lives. I’ll also tap into the insightful mind of Theresa Nyguyen, chief program officer at the patient association Mental Health America, who will share her personal story and professional experiences with us. By the end this podcast, it’s my hope that you gain a deeper understanding of how stress impacts our bodies and our minds – and that you will be inspired by the science and personal stories to achieve a healthier equilibrium. Remember, don’t let the pressure make you tune out. It's time to listen well.
Part 1: the basics on stress & inflammation
Mo:
So, you've worked in the area of stress as part of your work for a long time, but there's an essential question. What is stress?
Roger:
It really is the essential question. And I think that for me, the way I approach stress is that stress is neither a good thing or a bad thing. Stress is really in fact a scenario that we all face with. We have stresses in our day to complete our education. We have stresses with respect to managing our lives and that's a good thing.
Roger:
That's how we grow, that's how we adapt. Stress is a scenario where a person is faced with a call to action of sorts. That call to action requires that person to adapt. That's how we move forward in our lives and that's very healthy.
Roger:
Stress can be, in fact, very unhealthy if a couple of aspects of stress present. First, if stress is just unending. It just keeps going on, and on and on. Second, if we have really very little control over that stress, in other words it's coming or we or perceive it as coming through some other source.
Roger:
So, for example, people who have, say, difficulties paying their bills, they have economic stress. And often they feel they're not in control of that. That goes on for a long, long time. In those situations, rather than adapting to the situation, it ends up in fact becoming what we call maladaptive. In other words, what happens is it ends up actually interfere with our wellbeing, our quality of life, our day to day function. The longer it goes on, it increases the chances that we begin to have what we call stress related problems.
Roger:
We start putting on weight. We start having problems sleeping. We start having heart disease, and diabetes and get depression and the list keeps going. So stress is a scenario where we as organisms, and we are organisms, interact with our environment. And it's a call to action. And when it is in our control, and when it's in fact moderate in its dose, it's a good thing. But if it's too much, it's uncontrollable, it's a bad thing.
Narration: Ok, just to clarify here, our takeaway is that stress is both a good and bad thing in our lives. We all react differently to stress. Our personal characteristics may amplify or minimize our reaction to external stressors. If your instinct is to keep it coming in manageable doses, Dr. McIntyre is saying you’ve got the right idea. If not, there are things you can do.
Roger:
For example, we now know that if you're exposed to stress that's maladaptive, it can activate your immune system, your inflammatory system. And your inflammatory system is developed to help you. It's there to develop, fight bad guys like bad pathogens, bacteria, viruses and so on. It's also going to help your wounds if you had a wound of sorts.
Roger:
But like many things in life, if in fact there's too much of it, it may not be a good thing. What happens is when the immune system becomes activated ... Because the immune system doesn't discriminate. If in fact the body is under stress, it doesn't know if it's under stress because you can't pay your bills, or you're living in a high crime neighborhood or if you've been exposed to trauma. Or if it's because you had an infection. It just turns itself on.
Roger:
But if there's no infection to fight, it starts fighting you. And you start seeing a wear and tear effect on your body. You start seeing, in fact, a real wear and tear. Over time this results in both medical and mental illness.
Narration: Ok, buckle up. We’ve defined stress and its potential impact. Now Dr. McIntyre is adding in a complex concept called inflammation. So I asked him if he could help us by exploring its link to stress.
Roger:
What's so interesting about inflammation ... Well, it has got kind of a very interesting evolutionary perspective. So we as humans survived because of our ability to adapt to stress. And, frankly, our job description ... In fact some may still say it still is ... But our job description from an evolutionary perspective was to pass our genes onto the next generation.
Roger:
And what assured that was a proximity to food. Secondly, proximity to the ability to mate. And if in fact you had an infection, or a wound, or the sorts, it made good evolutionary sense for you to fight your infection, and to make good evolutionary sense for you to stay put. That is reduce your overall activities so you can fight your infection and not be subjected to a predator attacking you like a big gigantic mountain lion.
Roger:
So, what ended up happening is survival or fitness was given to people with robust immune systems. The more robust your immune system was, the more likely you could fight infection, heal your wound, and adapt and have your DNA move on to the next generation. Well nowadays, most of us are not being chased around by mountain lions and tigers. Most of us are subjected to social determinants of health like poverty, food deserts, racism, high crime neighborhoods.
Roger:
Inflammation has always been like a fire. The body is inflamed, the brain is inflamed, the body is inflamed, and like many fires, it can really be an out of control wildfire. When we go camping, we have a campfire that's controlled, we enjoy time with the family, etc. That's a very different fire than an out of control wildfire. An out of control wildfire does damage. So we want some inflammation. Inflammation is good. It's what actually helps us heal our wounds. It's what helps us fight foreign invaders. But when that becomes out of control, we've got a wildfire going on and it spreads and it spreads all over the body creating all kinds of collateral damage and just like a wildfire, it is indiscriminate. It takes out everything in its path. So I like the concept of a fire that becomes a wildfire.
Narration: And there you have it. Inflammation and our reaction to stress are traits that come from our ancestors. Traits that helped them, and now us, to survive. Today, we understand that inflammation is like a fire, and stress like the spark. The fire can spread wildly across different systems in our bodies. The best we can do is try to subdue the spark to control the flame. I’d like now to introduce you to someone who actively struggles with stress, daily – in both her professional and personal life. Meet Teresa.
Teresa:
Yeah. Stress is such a sucky thing. I think most people, when you're early on in your process, you don't really have a grasp of the way that stress subtly just can screw so many things up because you're worried about the thing that's stressful itself, right? You're worried about the relationship that you have that's exploding or you worry about the depression or the anxiety getting overwhelming. And what you don't realize is the way that it's a cycle and when you're stressed, it makes everything just so much harder.
Teresa:
And biologically we know that as a consumer or a clinician, you know in your logical mind the way that's supposed to work, but when you're caught up in the process, I don't think that it's easy to separate stress from the challenges that you're experiencing and that's why it's really hard unless you're really good at practicing things like mindfulness and presence and calmness. Those are all the things that we know are so good, or exercise, but it's the hardest thing to do when you're in the chaos, right?
Teresa:
I think so many people relate to that right now because everything feels so chaotic and you're like, "My mind is not focused on trying to get better right now. My mind is focused on trying to fix what I'm dealing with. I'm trying to fix the fight in the house. I'm trying to fix that we can't get food or have access to housing or whatever." Really difficult, stressful things that people really experience.
Narration: Now that we’ve laid the groundwork on stress and inflammation, let’s look at the links with health in general. Have you ever heard the saying, “stress kills”? It sounds like an over exaggeration. But learning how stress, inflammation, obesity and mental health are related may make you think twice.
Part 2. Inflammation / Obesity & link to Mental health
Roger:
Obesity is a stressor to the human body and it’s associated with inflammation. It itself is an endocrine gland, which means it's a hormone gland producing hormones. And what we've learned is that if you've been obese for five years, that's a lot worse than being obese for two years. If you've been obese for longer, it's worse than shorter.
Roger:
The cells in the body, when they're exposed to inflammation, increase the risk for cancer formation. And that's been associated with obesity and heart disease, et cetera. What I think is especially interesting is that inflammation also metastasizes to the brain from obesity.
Roger:
That causes a decrease in someone's ability to focus and concentrate, which we call cognition. They're prone to depression, bipolar illness, or even schizophrenia and other disease states.
Roger:
not only do we see these studies keep appearing in our literature, everyone knows obesity is linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer, et cetera. But this link to brain health has been one of the most interesting and concerning revelations.
Roger:
Not just linked to dementia, but in younger people linked to mood disorders like major depression, bipolar disorder, and probably even linked to ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Narration: Roger is getting right to the point here, saying that every system in our body seems to be connected. He’s also being very clear that obesity is a kind of stressor that leads to inflammation in our body – something we don’t want getting out of control at any time.
PART 3: Journey into the Brain
Moe:
So, let's take a journey, if you will, through the body. Let's start with the brain, since you mentioned it. You said obesity metastasizes to the brain and all the links to stress. What's actually happening in the brain with the stress and inflammation?
Roger:
The brain cells can be broken into two broad categories. The gray matter and the white matter. For the longest time we thought the white matter was just there for scaffolding support. Just these two by four pieces of wood to keep the brain together. And that was probably was a derivation of Virchow, Virchow was the one who named the white matter glia, the glue.
Roger:
People thought it was just the glue keeping the neurons together. Well, we've learned that that's not entirely true. The white matter plays a critical role in inflammation. And Inflammation is required in the brain because it remodels the brain. It prunes the brain, just like pruning your plants around your house.
Roger:
It's responsible for taking away neuronal debris through the neuroplasticity process. This is all good.
Narration: Jargon alert here. What we mean by Neuroplasticity is the ability of your brain to change throughout your life to adapt to different situations, including cleaning up different types of neural debris.
Roger:
Inflammatory cells in our brain are the white matter, the microglia. They help prune and keep the brain clean, keep it free of debris. And really allow the brain to function on full cylinders. But when those cells remain activated for too long, just like we talked about, you get collateral damage.
Roger:
And what happens is that brain cells, both the white matter and the gray matter, when they're exposed for a long period of time to inflammatory molecules, they begin to die. They die a lot earlier.
Mo:
So you're almost describing a system level breakdown in the brain.
Roger:
It's a great way of putting it. I love that moniker. It truly is a quintessential systems breakdown. In other words, what you have is you have from the ground up, so to speak, inflammation is all out attacking different parts of the brain right from the DNA, but all the way up through the proteins, the cells and the circuits.
Roger:
This is why we really, really think that with respect to people who have obesity, or who are subjected to unremitting, uncontrollable stress, they're so susceptible to an assortment of mental disorders.
Roger:
Patients don't come into our clinic and say, "Oh, my brain's on fire." They come in and they say, you know, life doesn't feel as interesting anymore to me. I lack motivation. Food and friends is not as enjoyable. I become withdrawn, I'm tired, I lack motivation. What they're saying is, is that parts of my brain are on fire. What that means in sort of more scientific speak is that parts of their brain have been adversely affected by inflammation, decreasing its function and manifesting as these features.
Mo:
You know what strikes me about the way you describe it, Roger, is that inflammation, it's like this higher order thing happening in the brain that can explain so many different mental illnesses.
Roger:
It really does, and I think that the thing that's so intriguing about inflammation is not just the evolutionary sort of context of it, but the fact that it is really a system that is really so influenced by the individual in interaction with their environment.
Narration: Before you run into the shower to put your burning brain out and avoid a full systems breakdown, let’s just remember this is an analogy. Yes, there is a real link between mental disorders and stress and inflammation. The good news is that there are practical things we can do to help prevent and reduce this situation.
Roger:
I always ask people, well, has anyone ever heard of the vaccination for depression? People go vaccination for depression, what's that? I say it's exercise. There was a study out of Scandinavia showing that just exercising on a regular basis reduces your risk of depression by 10 to 20%,
PART 4: Section on the Gut /brain axis
Narration: But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, here. Let’s get back to stress and its impacts on the body’s systems.
Roger:
The other part about this, which is really kind of interesting, is that if you're under a lot of stress, stress will begin to change the composition of your gut bacteria. We call that your enterotype. The type of bacteria in your bowel. And then that leaves the body more prone to inflammation, which is very interesting, and the mechanism’s complex. But here's one part I find really interesting, Mo. There are some bacteria that are in your gut, that would be abnormal to find in your blood. And I won't get in all the details of them, but there's a couple of them. They're good guys, as long as they are in your bowel, they help you out in your bowel, but they should not be in your blood.
Roger:
And interestingly, people who have depression have antibodies to some of these bacteria, which means that their blood was exposed to it. And this is what's called the leaky gut. So a lot of people think that what's happening in some cases is that people who have obesity or diabetes or depression end up having these conditions, because yes they're under stress. And stress causes a leakiness in their gut, which causes an exposure of some of the bacteria in the gut to the blood, which then fires off the immune system, setting in motion what you and I talked about.
Roger:
It really begs the question, can we treat the bacteria in the gut to help people with obesity, diabetes, or depression? People are looking at that. There's over 100 studies going on right now, with fecal transplantation around the world, trying to treat these conditions.
Narration: You heard that right by the way– taking healthy poop from one person and putting it into another with the intent of changing the balance of the gut bacterial flora to help manage major medical conditions. It’s a bit of a curveball, but, I’m following. Let’s get back to it.
Mo:
So when we have healthy bacteria in the gut, how do they talk to the brain?
Roger:
They do it through a variety of pathways. One of the pathways is through what we call the gut-brain. In other words, we think of the brain as the central nervous system, but the bowel has its own brain. It's called the enteric nervous system. And the enteric nervous system, everyone knows what it is because if you are under a lot of stress, you maybe have more bowel frequency, et cetera. That's your brain talking to your gut and that's through a nerve system called the vagus nerve.
Narration: You know that old expression about listening to your gut? Who knew our brains were already doing it…
Roger:
A second way in which the gut communicates to the brain is through inflammation. We’re talking about this whole leaky gut and perhaps stress causes leakiness in the gut, activates the immune system, that goes directly to the brain. And a third non mutually exclusive pathway is neurochemical. For example, much of our brain chemistry, like serotonin, is produced in the gut. And there's many types of proteins that are in the gut, that are also in the brain.
Mo:
You know what strikes me about a lot of the things you've been talking about is, stress is neither good or bad. It depends on the balance. Gut brain axis is the same way. Can you talk about that, the sense of balance with all these physiological functions?
Roger:
Yeah. And this is such a good point, Mo, to come back to because I think that the bumper sticker says stress is bad. The bumper sticker shouldn't say that. The bumper sticker which is. , well, it's a pretty long bumper sticker. It would say, stress is bad if it's uncontrollable and chronic, but stress is good if it's controllable and short. We need stress to grow. We need stress to adapt, to evolve. It's a good thing, but again, like most things in life, I guess they call it the Goldilocks effect. Too much or too little, you need the right temperature.
Roger:
And one part about this Mo, which is really important and underscores resiliency. And two people exposed to the same in quotes, stressor, have a very different reaction to that stressor. We know, for example, in post traumatic stress, men and women of uniform who are subject to combat, we're going to presume that the stressor was the same. They'll see something horrific happen. If somebody goes on to have terrible PTSD, the other person in fact goes back to their battalion, they go back home to wherever they're from and they get on with their lives. What's going on here?
Mo:
Yeah. How do we make sense of that?
Roger:
There's this thing called resiliency and quite frankly, we are really in our infancy of understanding resiliency. I guess you could kind of say that resiliency in generic terms is the ability to really adapt. If you're the type of person, let's say cognitively, let's say cognitively you're a person who's fairly inflexible, cognitively. You're a person who's got relatively few options in your dropdown menu as how you're going to respond to an event. You're probably more prone to a maladaptive response. If you're someone who in fact has incredible cognitive dexterity and flexibility. And you're exposed to a trauma or a stressor, where your dropdown menu could be a lot bigger, and we choose and select how we respond. No, choose and select, I use that in quotation marks. It's not something you do consciously. But you choose and select the way you adapt to circumstance.
Roger:
And people with greater cognitive dexterity may in fact have greater, if you will, malleability or ability to adapt to the event. And at the molecular level, what happens is, they don't mount as high a stress response. Their palms are not as sweaty, they don't have as much gastrointestinal distress, they're not as inflamed. They kind of just roll with the punches, more than someone who is more prone to having adverse consequence.
Narration: Ok – so how much a person experiences stress also depends on how adaptable they are to different situations, which is why not everyone experiences the same stressor the same way. But it’s hard to ignore the fundamental impact that stress can have on our bodies if we can’t cope with the pressure. We now know that stress leads to inflammation, which can lead to obesity and mental health issues, not to mention gut problems, and then back to mental health again. Did we forget anything?
PART 5: Stress and Cardio
Mo:
Roger, we always hear these stories about the relatively young businessman who suddenly has a heart attack. And then people say, oh, he was so stressed. Is that something that really happens? That stress, mental stress affects the heart?
Roger:
there has actually been a misunderstanding to that. I think the key thing is, the degree to which there is harmony between the demands on the person and what the person in fact desires and what the person in fact enjoys.
Roger:
But, if in fact you're being asked to do task A, B, C, D, all kinds of tasks that are not aligned with who you are as a person, that's where the problems arise. In other words, when the environment is not in sync with the organism, that leads to discordance, and that leads to stress and inflammation. But the reality is, a lot of people like to be in that environment, it's not stressful to them.
Roger:
Can stress have adverse effects on the heart? Absolutely. But, I would also say, it depends, because a lot of people are under a lot of stress, but they thrive in it. And if you were to take a sample of their blood and look at stress hormones, et cetera, they're not the least bit stressed, because this is the environment they thrive in. But when there's a disconnect between what they really desire and what their surrounded by, this is huge.
Roger:
I think one of the great discordances we're seeing today, is the desired versus reality around what people's social networks really are. And the paradox is this hyper connected world of social media, et cetera, people have probably never been so lonely. And we're seeing an uptick in heart disease in some parts of the United States in the last decade. And we're seeing upticks in obesity, upticks in depression. And there's, I think, a valid hypothesis that this is stress linked to loneliness, which again is affecting some of the systems we talked about like inflammation, et cetera.
Narration : This is a good moment to bring up the current environment in which we are in with the COVID-19 epidemic and loneliness.
Roger:
The COVID-19 situation, is something humanity has never seen and this COVID-19 situation has multiple stressors going on. Not only is it a very serious infection, there's also a world of information being communicated that often contains misinformation, which has only adding to stress. And also on top of that, we have seen a shutting down of national borders and regional borders, we'd never seen before. And this is resulting in incredible isolation. So I think, in fact, we're not just looking at an infectious issue going on with COVID. We're not just looking at a financial issue with COVID, but we're looking at one of the great psychosocial stressors to people. Vis-a-vis this external stressor, as well as the isolation, as you said, in this world of loneliness. This is a very complex set of conspirators
Roger:
... that are not good for human health.
Narration: Right. Heart health and pandemics. We’ve really piled on the stress in this show. But like I was mentioning earlier, there are things we can all do to help ourselves. Seriously….
Part 6: What can the listener do?
Roger:
I think where one recognizes that they're stressed is really from the point of view of just day-to-day quality of your life and function. In other words, stress is a good thing, stress is a bad thing. Again, we want to come back to the basic definition. If it's something you can control and it's short term, probably not a bad thing. Conversely, if it's long term, you can't control it, that's concerning. And I think that people subjectively begin to feel a sense of helplessness. They feel the sense of hopelessness. They feel overwhelmed, their quality of life decreases. Their vitality begins to decrease. For our French listeners, their “joie de vivre” begins to decrease. And they become, in fact, less inclined to want to participate in activities.
Roger:
They may not have a form of mental illness, but they're withdrawing just like an animal. We're under a lot of stress, we withdraw. And that's concerning. And it often manifests behaviorally, can't sleep or involved in other activities. And I think, in fact, there's a lot of very basic things people can do to manage stress, Mo, and that is of course being aware of it.
Roger :
It seems like it's 101. It's a very basic kind of almost preachy statement, but good sleep hygiene and sleep behavior is the great resiliency, the great anti-stress intervention. Good food, where you can afford it, where it's available. I know there's lots of food deserts and food swamps out there, but where you can afford it, where it's available, and one that's very tricky is economics and try to benefit yourself there.
Roger:
have a healthy diet, a balanced diet, reducing the sugars, I think is a good place to start.
Mo:
So it's as much about the kitchen as it is about the gym.
Roger:
Absolutely. Absolutely it is.
Roger:
And I think also to the extent you can, being connected to your community, to friends and families, these things are within our reach.
Narration: Sleeping better. Eating well. Two great ways to reduce stress and inflammation. But what about exercise? Are there specific exercises to help get the best effects?
Roger:
You know this area has had much more rigorous research in the last five to seven years. The short answer is both resistance, that is lifting weights, and aerobic, that is going for a run or walking, skating, biking, this type of thing. Both are highly beneficial. You know, Mo, in neuroscience, we have an interesting math. One plus one tends to equal 10. In aerobic exercise plus the resistance, this is the pushups, the sit ups, the pull ups, the lifting weights, that seems to have a synergistic effect when those are brought the aerobic and the resistance together. Whether we're looking at measures of brain health, measures of wellbeing, quality of life functioning, vitality and just the benefits also on physical health.
Roger:
Our listeners will be wondering, well I'm not an Olympic athlete. I don't want to go running and sweating it up two hours a day and becoming buff in the gym and all this kind of stuff. Well, you know, I think that ... well there's two messages. First is you don't need to be an Olympic athlete to benefit from exercise or be exercising at the Olympic level.
Roger:
But here's what I tell people. If in fact you are exercising either resistance, aerobic, or both and you can still maintain a conversation with someone, you're probably not exercising hard enough. Just that level where you got to say to your friend, I can't keep this conversation, I'll talk to you later. That's exactly the heart rate you should be at.
Narration: Of course, pushing yourself physically is great – but it can also be a mental stretch in some situations to even get up, much less to get going. Listen to what Theresa has to say about exercise and mental health.
Theresa:
Yeah, I mean, everyone knows that exercise helps, but everyone also loves ... I personally also love my Cheetos, so it's the constant battle, right? I know what's good for me and I know that exercise is so good. You can literally feel it in your head and your body after I get out. But with depression, especially depression, oh, fricking depression, it's so hard to get motivated to move your body, because your body is glued to your bed.
Theresa
So, I mean, what is there to say? It's like, yeah, we know what works and we know what's good for us. I do tell people, I know what my body can do, but I have to have compassion for what it can do in this moment. So if I'm having a depressed episode, maybe all I can do today is get out for a five minute walk to start. But I know that if I just set that small goal and accomplish a small goal, it will build to a larger goal and eventually get there.
Theresa
The other thing too is just to have a friend who has similar goals. Maybe it's not because of depression, it's just to get out of the house or it's to exercise. We all want to figure out how to lose weight and be healthy and it's the collective struggle in America, it feels like. So finding a friend has helped me a ton, just to say, "I'm going to be your accountabila-buddy and we're going to commit to each other for two days out of the week." Where I can't get up out of my bed for myself, but I can get up out of my bed for my friend and be like, "Okay." Plus, I know she's going to come and say, "Why are you in bed? Come on, we said we were going to do this."
Theresa
The shame of that, the shame of leaving a person behind, that will compel me to go exercise. Then when I'm done, I feel so good, right? That's what you have to focus on too. It's like, oh, I have to remember how good it felt to take care of myself and to do the right thing and to exercise, because whatever it is, it's clearly helping.
Mo:
And what are your thoughts on meditation or other methods to calm the mind?
Theresa
One thing you can do to control your experience is to take deep breaths and practice grounding to bring yourself back to that space where you know you can do at least that and that and it can help you.
Theresa
Grounding is just an exercise that you can do when your mind is going 100 miles an hour, and it takes you from that space that your brain wants to go, and it brings it to the present moment. If you can stop thinking about those things that make you anxious and you just focus on your five senses, you focus on what is right here in the present moment, that's what grounding is. It's called grounding because it's trying to bring you from out in space to the ground. People talk about one grounding technique is to use your five senses, your sight, your touch, your sense of smell. Just say this is what I hear, this is what I smell, this is what I see, this is what I feel. Just put something else in your brain that is benign, just so you can remind yourself that you are here on earth and not where your brain wants to go.
Theresa
People find that they have affinity for different senses. Some of us are big hearers, some of us are big touchers. If you find your thing that you really like, you also learn about yourself and what really works. At least for me, touch is the only thing. It's like I have to touch my chair and I have to say, "I could feel this chair right now, it's cold in my hand. I'm just right here." Then I incorporate in it statements that I personally need to hear to talk myself down. "Theresa, you need to calm down, take a deep breath, walk away. This is not helping right now. Don't be stupid." Just be like, "I feel this chair, I'm not going to deal with this right now." That's what you do. You have to go from where your mind wants you to go in that anxiety shame spiral, and you have to try and practice presentness. Grounding is a tool to practice that present focusedness.
Narration: So, to sum it all up, if you’re feeling the pressure, do what you can to relieve it. Exercise if you’re not already and make time for it. Walking outside is one of the best and easiest ways to get moving. Focus on healthy eating when you can. Get a good night’s sleep. Try a mindfulness exercise, like journaling, or something as simple as taking a walk in nature. Because – your health may actually depend on it. Teresa also has some great tools from Mental Health America that can help.
Theresa
Yeah, yeah. So in 2014, we started MHAscreening.org. It's just anonymous mental health screens. It's really cool, because I know when I go to talk to my doctor in-person, I am not honest. Even me, I'm not honest about my mental health screens. I realized that it's just a different experience than when I'm online and I go and I take a depression screen, just to see how bad I am and I play with it, because I want to see if I'm really that bad right now.
Theresa
But they're free. There's a depression screen, anxiety, psychosis, bipolar, addiction screen. Then when you take a screen, actually, the results pop up and then you can access a bunch of tools and resources and particularly articles that are written based off of comments that we get from screeners.
Theresa
So, a lot of the topics are things that you might not see in a traditional education website MHA as a whole, as an entity, is also always putting out content, if you're an advocate or an educator. A lot of clinicians go to our site and download our mental health month tool kit.
Theresa
This year's toolkit is called Tools to Thrive. So we do see a lot of clinicians take that and download them, because they have worksheets. Which I think are good if you're leading a group or it's good if you're just looking for a self-help tool and you're like, "I want to learn breathing or I want to understand how to reduce my stress and practice grounding." You can download a worksheet and just paste that up on your wall as the reminder about what you're supposed to do when you're otherwise going to freak out.
Theresa
MHA has a podcast called In The Open. I host it with America, and it's a lot of just similar to what I just described, us talking personally about the topics that we see on screening and having an honest dialogue about symptoms and experiences.
Theresa
If people are interested in that kind of approach, you can check it out in the open from MHA.
Mo Narration: Thanks so much for that, Theresa. And for all your honest insights and helpful information.
Mo:
Thanks Roger for joining us.
Roger:
Really appreciated it.
MO:
Stress is becoming a major contributor to poor health, and most of us don’t realize what stress is doing to our bodies, our mental health, and our personal lives.
Make a pledge to yourself to listen to your body and work towards making the changes you need to relieve unnecessary stress in your life.
I’m Dr. Mo Alsuwaidan. Thanks for listening
Brought to you by Viatris, empowering people worldwide to live healthier at every stage of life.
Powered by Viatris