How Owning a Dog or Cat Can Reduce Stress

When thinking of ways to reduce stress in life, usually techniques like meditation, yoga and journaling come to mind. These are great techniques, to be sure. But getting a new best friend can also have many stress relieving and health benefits. While human friends provide great social support and come with some fabulous benefits, this article focuses on the benefits of furry friends: cats and dogs! Research shows that, unless you’re someone who really dislikes animals or is absolutely too busy to care for one properly, pets can provide excellent social support, stress relief and other health benefits—perhaps more than people! The following are more health benefits of pets.

Pets Can Improve Your Mood

For those who love animals, it’s virtually impossible to stay in a bad mood when a pair of loving puppy eyes meets yours, or when a super-soft cat rubs up against your hand. Research supports the mood-enhancing benefits of pets. A recent study found that men with AIDS were less likely to suffer from depression if they owned a pet. (According to one study, men with AIDS who did not own a pet were about three times more likely to report symptoms of depression than men who did not have AIDS. But men with AIDS who had pets were only about 50 percent more likely to report symptoms of depression, as compared to men in the study who did not have AIDS.)

Pets Control Blood Pressure Better Than Drugs

Yes, it’s true. While ACE inhibiting drugs can generally reduce blood pressure, they aren't as effective on controlling spikes in blood pressure due to stress and tension. However, in a study on pets and blood pressure, groups of hypertensive New York stockbrokers who got dogs or cats were found to have lower blood pressure and heart rates than those who didn't get pets. When they heard of the results, most of those in the non-pet group went out and got pets!

Pets Encourage You To Get Out And Exercise

Whether we walk our dogs because they need it, or are more likely to enjoy a walk when we have companionship, dog owners do spend more time walking than non-pet owners, at least if we live in an urban setting. Because exercise is good for stress management and overall health, owning a dog can be credited with increasing these benefits.

Pets Can Help With Social Support: 

When we’re out walking, having a dog with us can make us more approachable and give people a reason to stop and talk, thereby increasing the number of people we meet, giving us an opportunity to increase our network of friends and acquaintances, which also has great stress management benefits.

Pets Stave Off Loneliness and Provide Unconditional Love

Pets can be there for you in ways that people can’t. They can offer love and companionship, and can also enjoy comfortable silences, keep secrets and are excellent snugglers. And they could be the best antidote to loneliness. In fact, one study found that nursing home residents reported less loneliness when visited by dogs than when they spent time with other people! All these benefits can reduce the amount of stress people experience in response to feelings of social isolation and lack of social support from people.

Pets Can Reduce Stress—Sometimes More Than People

While we all know the power of talking about your problems with a good friend who’s also a good listener, research shows that spending time with a pet may be even better! One study showed that, when conducting a task that’s stressful, people actually experienced less stress when their pets were with them than when a supportive friend or even their spouse was present! (This may be partially due to the fact that pets don’t judge us; they just love us.)

It’s important to realize that owning a pet isn’t for everyone. Pets do come with additional work and responsibility, which can bring its own stress. However, for most people, the benefits of having a pet outweigh the drawbacks. Having a furry best friend can reduce stress in your life and bring you support when times get tough.

http://stress.about.com/od/lowstresslifestyle/a/petsandstress.htm

12 Ways To Eliminate Stress At Work

The average business professional has 30 to 100 projects on their plate. Modern workers are interrupted seven times an hour and distracted up to 2.1 hours a day. And four out of 10 people working at large companies are experiencing a major corporate restructuring, and therefore facing uncertainly about their futures. This may be why more than 40% of adults say they lie awake at night plagued by the stressful events of the day.

“People are asking me for answers,” says Sharon Melnick, Ph.D., a business psychologist and author of just released Success Under Stress. “Everyone feels overwhelmed and overly busy.”

Is there a way to maintain steady focus throughout the day? Is it possible to do everything that needs to get done and still have energy left over after work? How do you keep cool under so many demands? Informed by 10 years of Harvard research and field-tested by more than 6,000 clients and trainees, Melnick offers the following strategies to take your work stress down a peg, before it takes over your life.

Act Rather Than React

“We experience stress when we feel that situations are out of our control,” says Melnick. It activates the stress hormone and, if chronic, wears down confidence, concentration and well-being. She advises that you identify the aspects of the situation you can control and aspects you can’t. Typically, you’re in control of your actions and responses, but not in control of macro forces or someone else’s tone, for example. “Be impeccable for your 50%,” she advises. And try to let go of the rest.

Take A Deep Breath

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or are coming out of a tense meeting and need to clear your head, a few minutes of deep breathing will restore balance, says Melnick. Simply inhale for five seconds, hold and exhale in equal counts through the nose. “It’s like getting the calm and focus of a 90-minute yoga class in three minutes or less at your desk,” she says.

Eliminate Interruptions

“Most of us are bombarded during the day,” says Melnick. Emails, phone calls, pop ins, instant messages and sudden, urgent deadlines conspire to make today’s workers more distracted than ever. While you may not have control over the interrupters, you can control your response. Melnick advises responding in one of three ways: Accept the interruption, cut it off, or diagnosis its importance and make a plan. Many interruptions are recurring and can be anticipated. “You want to have preset criteria for which response you want to make,” she says. You can also train those around you by answering email during certain windows, setting up office hours to talk in person or closing the door when you need to focus.

Schedule Your Day For Energy And Focus

Most of us go through the day using a “push, push, push” approach, thinking if we work the full eight to 10 hours, we’ll get more done. Instead, productivity goes down, stress levels go up and you have very little energy left over for your family, Melnick says. She advises scheduling breaks throughout the day to walk, stretch at your desk or do a breathing exercise. “Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project has shown that if we have intense concentration for about 90 minutes, followed by a brief period of recovery, we can clear the buildup of stress and rejuvenate ourselves,” she says.

Eat Right And Sleep Well

“Eating badly will stress your system,” says Melnick, who advises eating a low-sugar, high-protein diet. “And when you’re not sleeping well, you’re not getting the rejuvenating effects.” According to the CDC, an estimated 60 million Americans do not get sufficient sleep, which is a critical recovery period for the body. If racing thoughts keep you from falling asleep or you wake up in the night and can’t get back to sleep, Melnick suggests a simple breathing trick that will knock you out fast: Cover your right nostril and breathe through your left for three to five minutes.

Change Your Story

Your perspective of stressful office events is typically a subjective interpretation of the facts, often seen through the filter of your own self-doubt, says Melnick. However, if you can step back and take a more objective view, you’ll be more effective and less likely to take things personally. She recalls one client who sent a request to human resources for more people on an important project. When she was denied, she immediately got angry and defensive, thinking they didn’t trust her to know what she needed. Yet she never stopped to even consider there might be budgetary issues on their end. Once she was able to remove herself from the situation, she called the HR director and said: Tell me where you’re coming from, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from and then let’s see if we can find a solution. Ultimately, it worked

Cool Down Quickly

“When you feel frustrated or angry, it’s a heated feeling in your body that can cause you to react,” says Melnick. Instead of immediately reacting—and likely overreacting—she suggests trying a “cooling breath” technique: Breathe in through your mouth as if you are sipping through a straw, and then breathe out normally through your nose. Done right, you’ll feel a cooling, drying sensation over the top of your tongue. It’s like hitting the “pause” button, giving you time to think about your response. She says, “It’s so powerful it will even calm the other person down.”

Identify Self-Imposed Stress

“Learn to stop self imposing stress by building your own self-confidence rather than seeking other’s approval,” says Melnick. If you’re too caught up in others’ perceptions of you, which you can’t control, you become stressed out by the minutia or participate in avoidance behaviors like procrastination. Ironically, once you shift your focus from others’ perception of your work to the work itself, you’re more likely to impress them.

Prioritize Your Priorities

With competing deadlines and fast-changing priorities, it’s critical to define what’s truly important and why. That requires clarity, says Melnick. It’s important to understand your role in the organization, the company’s strategic priorities, and your personal goals and strengths. Cull your to-do list by focusing on those projects that will have the most impact and are best aligned with your goals.

Reset The Panic Button

For those who become panic-y and short of breath before a presentation, Melnick says you can quickly reduce your anxiety with the right acupressure point. Positioning your thumb on the side of your middle finger and applying pressure instantly helps regulate your blood pressure.

Influence Others

Even if you’re responsible for your behavior and outlook, you’re still left dealing with other people’s stressful behavior, Melnick notes. She advises confronting a problem coworker or employee by stating the bad behavior in a respectful tone, describing the impact on the team and the individual, and requesting a change. For example, constant negativity might be addressed in this way: “When you speak in a critical tone, it makes others uncomfortable and less likely to see you as a leader. I understand your frustration but request that you bring concerns directly to me, so we can talk them through.” By transferring the ownership of the problem, you’re more likely to resolve it.

Be Your Own Best Critic

Some 60,000 thoughts stream through your mind each day, Melnick says, and internal negativity is just as likely to stress you out as an external event. The fix? Instead of being harsh and critical of yourself, try pumping yourself up. Encouraging thoughts will help motivate you to achieve and ultimately train you to inspire others.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/03/20/12-ways-to-eliminate-stress-at-work/

Brain 'switch' may control stress

Many of us find ourselves swimming along in the tranquil sea of life when suddenly a crisis hits - a death in the family, the loss of a job, a bad breakup. Some power through and find calm waters again, while others drown in depression.

Scientists continue to search for the underlying genes and neurobiology that dictate our reactions to stress. Now, a study using mice has found a switch-like mechanism between resilience and defeat in an area of the brain that plays an important role in regulating emotions and has been linked with mood and anxiety disorders.

After artificially enhancing the activity of neurons in that part of the brain - the medial prefrontal cortex - mice that previously fought to avoid electric shocks started to act helpless. Rather than leaping for an open escape route, they sat in a corner taking the pain - presumably out of a belief that nothing they could do would change their circumstances.

"This helpless behaviour is quite similar to what clinicians see in depressed individuals - an inability to take action to avoid or correct a difficult situation," said study author and neuroscientist Bo Li of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. The results were published online May 27 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Because there is no true animal equivalent to the depression that affects humans, researchers instead model certain symptoms of the disorder, such as despair and, in this case, helplessness.

In his famous 1967 experiment on dogs, American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that helplessness can be learned. He put a dog into a box with two chambers divided by a barrier that could be jumped over. When one chamber became electrified, the dog ran around frantically, finally scrambling over the barrier to escape the shock. In later trials, evading the shock becomes easier and easier for the animal until it would just stand next to the barrier waiting to jump.

But the outcome is much more grim if a dog first learns that electric shocks are uncontrollable and unavoidable. If animals are repeatedly shocked while tied up beforehand, then later placed in the same box free to roam, most didn't jump the barrier. Instead, they lay down while whining and taking the jolt. Subsequent trials showcased the animal's same passive, defeatist response.

Seligman formed a theory he called learned helplessness. It occurs when an animal or human has learned that outcomes are uncontrollable and thus fails to take any action in the future despite a clear ability to change its situation.

Learned helplessness has been observed in human experiments, such as subjects enduring a loud, disturbing noise if they had been taught that it wasn't under their control. Since then, the theory has been used to build up the human spirit. (Seligman set up a resilience-training program for US Army soldiers to do this, as well as to break it down.) Before President Barack Obama banned the practice, the CIA used sleep deprivation, stress positions and sometimes multiple methods while interrogating detainees in order to create a "state of learned helplessness and dependence" in them.

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In Li's experiment, mice were put into a two-chambered cage with a door between them that at first was closed. For one hour, they were subjected to inescapable foot shocks in an unpredictable manner, giving them the impression that nothing could be done to prepare for or avoid the jolts. This learning period occurred over two days. On the third day, the door opened to allow the mice to escape by running into the other chamber that was not electrified.

After a few trials, most mice avoided the shocks by standing near the door, waiting for it to open and running through to the other chamber. But about 20 percent developed learned helplessness.

"They sit in the corner and just take the shock," said study author and biologist Zina Perova, who worked on the study in Li's group as a graduate student. "It's this belief of 'No matter what I do, it won't change anything' - it's hopelessness."

The team investigated which part of the brain lit up during such an experiment by using a genetically modified mouse whose neurons glow green when activated.

After the learned-helplessness trials, the researchers extracted brain slices and found that neurons were tagged with green in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Then they looked closely at these tagged neurons, searching for differences among the two groups of mice. Li and his colleagues discovered that the neurons from helpless mice had more nodes of connection and mice that showed determination had fewer. They presumed that this could mean an increase and decrease, respectively, in how active those neurons were.

To verify that, the researchers artificially boosted activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of resilient mice - those that easily escaped the shocks. The mice suddenly became helpless. A switch seemed to flip in their brains, and the previously strong rodents lost their determination and failed to avoid the painful jolts. Although learned helplessness can be overcome through antidepressant drugs or if an experimenter shows the animal how to escape, the researchers had never seen once-persevering mice turn helpless before.

Next, Li hopes to investigate whether the switch goes the opposite way - whether inhibition of activity of these neurons makes helpless mice strong - and suspects that it may.

If so, the results would be consistent with deep brain stimulation, a treatment for depression that uses electrical impulses to inhibit neuronal activity in a targeted brain area.

The study "tells us pretty clearly that the medial prefrontal cortex is important in anxiety and stress behaviours," said neuroscientist Amit Etkin of Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. "There's a lot of interest in doing deep brain stimulation in that area."

In addition to emotion regulation, the medial prefrontal cortex has been implicated in such tasks as decision-making and memory retrieval.

"It's thought to be an area important for understanding your environment and how you fit in," said neurobiologist Ronald Duman of Yale University, who also was not involved in the research. "So disruption of that may alter how you feel about yourself in that environment."

Duman notes that other areas of the brain have been associated with depression in prior studies as well, such as the hippocampus and amygdala. Our complex brain circuitry - how all these parts interact - likely complicates any easy translation of this switch mechanism to humans.

"To really understand what's going on, we have to get down to the level of how [the medial prefrontal cortex] is talking to other brain regions," Etkin said.

- The Washington Post

http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/wellbeing/10128680/Brain-switch-may-control-stress