How to Make Stress Your Friend

How to Make Stress Your Friend

By Dr. Shayne Morris -adapted from transcripts by

Professor Kelly McGonigal

Stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Stanford UniversitypsychologistKellyMcGonigal tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years. What she found is that people who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.So how do you Change your Belief about stress?Step 1: When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s response to stress. Remind yourself that the stress response is helpful for your performance. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you’re breathing faster, it’s no problem. It’s getting more oxygen to your brain. Next time your feeling the physical changes from stress, you’re going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.
In a stress test study conducted at Harvard University, participants were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. When participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed. Their heart was still pounding, but they had a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looked a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage.

Step 2: Understanding that Stress actually makes you social.
Oxytocin Is a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain’s social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. But the key here is that Oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress induced damage. All physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by seeking support AND helping someone else. Human connection is a mechanism for stress resistance.

Step 3: Remember CCR – Caring Creates Resilience.
Find someone to care for. Help your neighbor. Visit people in need. Give someone a Hug. The more you care the more resilient you become.
Another Study that tracked 1,000 adults in the united states found that people who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience.

The harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you create resilience.

“Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy, and when you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement. You’re saying that you can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges, and you’re remembering that you don’t have to face them alone.” – Kelly McGonigal

A Sad Reality

Imagine:  You were hospitalized for some reason.  Hospitalization costs a lot, and so ‘guidelines’ tell your doctor you can only stay in the hospital so long for that problem. If they let you stay one day past the guideline, the hospital eats the cost.  So, whether you are medically stable or not, you go home or you get sent to a ‘skilled nursing facility’ for the rest of your recovery.  Ready or not, you go.

And, why?  It costs less to take care of a patient in a skilled nursing facility than a hospital.  Why does it cost less?  Because insurance don’t reimburse the facility as much.

We expect the ‘skilled nursing facility’ to have the funds to hire the staff and buy the monitoring equipment that is needed to provide ‘skilled nursing’ care despite low reimbursements paid to the facilities.

The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reviewed records for 653 randomly selected Medicare patients who were in skilled nursing care – treatment in nursing homes for up to 35 days after a patient was discharged from an acute care hospital – in August, 2011.

The findings are scary:  33 percent had a medication error, infection or some other type of harm.  2/3rds of those suffered events that caused lasting harm, and 1/3rd were temporarily harmed. In 1.5 percent of cases a patient who had been expected to survive died because of poor care.

The injuries and deaths were caused by

• substandard treatment,
• inadequate monitoring,
• delays or the failure to provide needed care

The deaths involved problems such as

• preventable blood clots,
• fluid imbalances,
• excessive bleeding from blood-thinning medications
• kidney failure.

Doctors who reviewed the patients’ records determined that 59 percent of the errors and injuries were preventable. More than half of those harmed had to be readmitted to the hospital at an estimated cost of $208 million for the month studied — about 2 percent of Medicare’s total inpatient spending.

Projected nationally, the study estimated that 21,777 patients were harmed and 1,538 died due to substandard skilled nursing care in that one month period.

My opinion:  Something needs to change.  If we can’t afford to keep patients in the hospital long enough to be stable when they leave, then we need to reimburse skilled nursing facilities enough that they can truly provide skilled nursing.  Duh.

Read One Third of Skilled Nursing Patients Harmed in Treatment and follow their links to read the studies.