Countdown Reason # 13: The American Stress Crisis

A new study released today by the American Psychological Association found, after studying 2000 Americans, that the day-to-day stress the average American is living with surpasses healthy stress levels.  Americans say their daily stress is at a 3.6 on a 10-point scale. Just think of that for a minute in terms of the physical “pain scale” you fill out when you go to the doctor’s.  If you are experiencing physical pain that is almost a 4 out of 10 (with a 10 being as doctors say, “the worst pain you’ve ever experienced”) that’s painful. Ditto with emotional stress. Worse, for many Americans, stress levels are on the rise — 35 percent of all Americans say their stress increased this past year, and two-thirds of U.S. adults who report living with “high stress” say their stress levels have risen. Yet 53 percent of Americans say they receive little or no support for stress management from their health care providers, and that stress management is not discussed at doctors’ visits. APA CEO Norman B. Anderson, PhD. says, “Unfortunately, our country’s health system often neglects psychological and behavioral factors that are essential to managing stress and chronic diseases. In order for our nation to get healthier, and lower the rates of chronic illnesses…we need to improve how we view and treat stress and unhealthy behaviors that are contributing to the high incidence of disease in the U.S.” When it comes to stress management and wellness, says the APA report, “there is a gap between what Americans want from their health care system and what they actually get.” I’m hoping, with all my heart, that THE LAST BEST CURE will help to fill that gap. 13 days.

Countdown Reason # 14: The Autoimmune Epidemic Was Just the First Half of the Journey

THE LAST BEST CURE will be in stores, on Amazon, Indiebound, and everywhere else in two weeks. I can hardly believe it. Many of you are fans of The Autoimmune Epidemic (now in its 5th printing!). Which, as you know, talks about all the environmental stressors and toxins we encounter in our lives that add up to inflammation and illness. I call it the barrel effect. Our bodies can handle just so much in the barrel, and then, one day, there is that one more “hit” and it spills over, leading to chronic conditions too numerous to count (well, if we are counting, 133 million adults suffer from at least one chronic condition, and the numbers are skyrocketing). I wanted you to know everything researchers know about how we can decrease what’s overfilling our barrel, both by being aware, and by knowing how to eliminate what we can. After I finished writing The Autoimmune Epidemic, I encountered a great deal of emerging research on how the chronic and acute stress we feel also acts on our immune systems exactly like a toxin. How our state of mind can overflow the barrel, or, conversely, help to protect the immune system. To our bodies, it doesn’t matter if the “hit” is viral, toxic, or stress. It looks the same. Stress and anxiety can cause our “barrel” to overflow in just the same way.  And so, I set out to research and write the “sequel” to The Autoimmune Epidemic. I’d talked about how to eliminate all the triggers we could to bring our immune system back to health, and why it was so important to do so. I felt I owed it to you to talk about the one thing in our “barrel” that is most under out control: reversing the inflammation-promoting agitation, fear, stress, pain and anxiety we all encounter and experience in our lives, which leaks, like a toxin, into our barrel. Thousands of researchers have been studying how to best use scientifically studied methods to do just that. And how to activate instead, the healing secrets of the brain. I would like to think my last two books form something of a health equation: The Autoimmune Epidemic      +      The Last Best Cure  =  Reclaim Your Body, Your Joy, Your Well-being, Your Life.

Countdown Reason # 15: YES, True

I don’t know why I thought of this today. Maybe because as I walked past my son’s room this morning it hit me, ping (really, I guess the word is pang), how empty his room will be when he leaves for college. Standing there, with my hand on the door, I had a sudden flashback. How when he was very little I made up a song to get him to sleep. It’s a little embarrassing but among the lines were these: “…know this is true, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I’m going to love you your whole life through. Sometimes you’ll say I love you too much, sometimes you’ll say I don’t love you enough. But no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I’m going to love you your whole life through…” (Full disclosure here: part of the reason I wrote my own lullabies for my kids was because I really can’t sing. Really. So, I figured, if a song and the tune are mine, I never have to worry whether I’m singing it right or how off key I might be…) Sometimes when my son (or a few years later, his little sister) was tired, or cranky, or had a scraped knee, he’d give me one of those leg squeezes that toddlers give you when you’re holding them on your hip and they want you to move in a certain direction. And he’d point and say, “rocking chair!”  I was happy to rock in “rocking chair” because sometimes I got tired and cranky too. And I’d sing our own personal Top 10 hit lullaby, “Know This is True.” It was a kind of mom and babe meditation. But, back to my story. My son didn’t chat a lot when he was a young toddler, though he had plenty of words. He was just… circumspect. When he started really talking he spoke in thinking-out-loud sentences. I remember once, we were in “rocking chair” and near where we then lived workmen were bulldozing a small forest for a new neighborhood. And my son put his hand on my lips and said, quietly, “Mommy I don’t like the sound the trees make when they hit the ground.” He always seemed to be listening to the world around him, as if reading a book that no one else could see. One day we were in “rocking chair” and I was singing my made up song, “…know this is true…” and he put his fingers on my lips. “Mommy, how come it’s ‘NO this is true?’  Is it YES true you’re going to love me, or NO true?” I stopped rocking. It took me a minute to understand what he was thinking in his little toddler brain. And then I got it. He didn’t understand that I was saying the word “know” instead of the word “No.” And he wanted a little clarification. No true, or yes true? I brought his face up to mine. “YES true,” I remember saying. “YES true, I’m going to love you. YES true, your whole life through.” I stood there this morning with my hand on the door of my 18-year-old son’s room, as that memory went through me in a hold-your-breath-and-you’re-back-there-again-in-the- rocking-chair whoosh. I think it came back to me, really, because of what I’ve been blogging about this week. Bless, bless, bless. Gratitude. YES true. That’s how we love the people we love. YES true, your whole life through. How many people can you bless, bless, bless today (in the grocery store, on the beltway) and say YES true to in your own living room?

Countdown Reason # 16: And Gratitude Helps with Pain

I have a good friend, a dear, dear friend, really, who I’ll call “K.” “K” suffers from an autoimmune disease. In the past five years she’s gone from daily injections of a multiple sclerosis drug that packs difficult side effects to taking no meds at all. She carries the most grateful, compassionate outlook of anyone I know.  I’ve watched her devote herself over the years to exercising more, getting a three-wheeled bike when she realized a two-seater wouldn’t work and toodlling around her neighborhood, building a strong social community, and training herself to think, as she puts in, “on the better side.” I heard an interview on NPR today with an American vet from the Iraq war who just this week had two new arms transplanted onto his torso at Johns Hopkins — in a first of its kind surgery — to replace the two he lost in Iraq several years ago. He’d also lost a leg. He was amazing. The interviewer asked, “How do you feel?” He said, “I was pretty happy before the surgery, my life was pretty good, but yes, this definitely just makes me even happier.” Think about that. “I was pretty happy before.” Despite losing three limbs in the war. I suspect his transplant surgery has a good chance of succeeding. Gratitude is not only good for our relationships, it also helps with healing. Studies show it helps us to better deal with pain, suffering, illness, grief and loss. Patients who keep a positive mindset prior to even a relatively simpler surgery, such as total knee replacement surgery, and who “recognize within themselves the ability to ensure that things will be okay,” say researchers, consistently report less pain and disability after surgery and recover faster.[i]  Older people who have a positive take on life are less likely to fall – suggesting that the risk of falling among the elderly is tied to one’s view of the world.[ii] There are dozens of studies like this. We know it’s true. So why is it so incredibly hard to live, as my friend “K” would say, “on the better side?” I write about that too, in The Last Best Cure. What’s getting in our way. And really, how to get out of our own way. ———– [i] Public release date: 17-Feb-2011.  Healthy lifestyle, positive attitude can help improve patient outcomes.  American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. [ii] BMJ 2010; 341:c4165 doi: 10.1136/bmj.c4165 (Published 20 August 2010) Determinants of disparities between perceived and physiological risk of falling among elderly people: cohort study, Stephen R Lord, professor et al.

Countdown Reason # 17: Grateful at Home

A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology evaluated the relationship between how much partners felt appreciated, and how likely a marriage was to last over the years. They found that appreciation and gratitude between two people spirals up or down; the more a partner shows gratitude, the more their partner shows them appreciation, and so it goes, back and forth, improving the relationship over time. (I don’t really need to describe the downward spiral do I?) Likewise, the more appreciation you show to your partner, the more likely you are to feel that your own needs are being met. This makes perfect sense to me.  A decade-and-a-half-ago, I worked closely with psychologist and mathematician John Gottman, PhD, who ran what was known as the “Love Lab” in which he observed couples interact. Gottman could predict, almost flawlessly, who would be divorced in five years, ten. His main litmus test: how many positive comments did each partner make for each negative one? The magic number was 5 positive comments to each negative one. Below that ratio, relationships start to break down. Downward spiral or upward spiral — we have a choice. We humans are not static. Either we’re growing in our ability to interact with the world around us with resilience and grace, and becoming more creative, more alive, or we’re reinforcing our bad habits, becoming more stagnant, less alive both within ourselves, and within our relationships.  We reach the tipping point in imperceptible increments — via the split second, blink-and-you-miss-it decisions we make about how we interact with the people we love. Other research shows that that 5:1 scale works pretty well with everyone. Gratitude is the superglue in the intimacy bond. And we know, as you’ve read in earlier posts, that when we show gratitude, compassion, and bless, we feel much better about who we are. I’m grateful to my husband for coming out to join me while I was walking the dogs when he pulled in. For stopping to get eggs. For cutting up all the vegetables for dinner. For clipping me two articles from the newspaper. And these were all just in the last hour. I’m going to post this, and then send a copy to him.

Countdown Reason # 18: Bless

Recently, Stanford researchers put folks into two groups. One group went through a 9-week compassion course, the other didn’t. Afterwards participants who had taken the course were not only found to be more compassionate to others — they had more compassion for themselves. They liked themselves better by learning to be more compassionate to those around them. When I read this I couldn’t help but think about a practice called bless that neurobiologist Rick Hanson, Ph. D., author of  Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time, suggests we all practice. Hanson doesn’t use the concept of bless, which means to see what’s tender and beautiful, in a religious sense. He talks about it as showing “compassion, kindness, appreciating, honoring, non-harming, cherishing . . . helping rather than harming, giving rather than withholding …wishing well rather than ill, delighting in rather than finding fault… [seeing others’] goodness, efforts, hopes, suffering, and what’s neat about them… You can express good wishes with actions – a touch, a door opened, …or inside your heart alone.” I want to live more like that. Bless, bless, bless. Rather than rush, rush, rush or grrr, grrr, grrrr. Don’t you?  

Countdown Reason # 19: Why Emotional Memories of Joy Matter so Much

We’ve learned so much in the course of our lives. Math problems, how to punctuate a sentence, set the table, use an iPhone, hit the right buttons on our blog dashboard or twitter (okay, the latter three are still not so easy for some of us!). But can you remember exactly when you learned how to do each of these? Unlikely. That’s because our brain stores memories in one of two ways. The first is to file away facts we need. The details we depend on to survive, succeed, thrive. These are called declarative memories. We can declare the facts we know. But the second way the brain stores memories is through our emotional responses —  in the emotional big moments that matter to us most. That’s why I can remember (and I bet you can too) the time the teacher called you up in front of the class and you didn’t have the right answer; the moment a child was born and first placed upon your chest; the minute you got engaged; the time you and your friend were in tears over a diagnosis, a husband, a child; or the joy of finding out you were expecting, or got the big job. Memories that have signficance in some way to you are emotional memories. When we need a declarative memory our brain usually retrieves it for us unconsciously and we’re not even aware it’s happening. So we can drive all the way to work without even realizing we made all the right turns. And bing, there we are, in the parking lot. That’s why we work so hard with our kids with their math facts, so they have what they need, easy to retrieve, when they go on to algebra or, later, calculus. But here’s where it gets interesting. Emotional memories are treated by the brain in an entirely different way than are factual (declarative) memories: the part of the brain used to create, retain, store, permanize and retrieve our emotional memories is called the hippocampus. This is also the area where amnesia occurs, erasing emotional memories but not factual ones (which is why patients with amnesia can still set the table or do calculus). Because the brain stores these two types of memories so differently, emotional memories are so much stronger, and as we get older, we accumulate more and more of them. This means a few things. A lot of things. But here are the two most interesting to me. If you learn something new in the process of making an emotional association, you’ll retain it a lot longer. If you really care about a topic or issue in your heart, you’ll be able to keep that information and store it and retrieve differently than if you don’t. But it also means that the things we are doing today that create our emotional memories — good, chest-swelling memories — will be protective LONG into the future. They are like gifts we pay forward to ourselves and those we love. This is really a good reason to reach for joy moments right here, right now, in your day just as it is. Whatever might be happening around you. Joy is a strong emotion, and we all know when we recall moments of joy it’s a healing balm. I think of joy memories as memories we need. After reading this study today, I’m going to think of how to make a joy memory today. I’ll let you know how that works out on an icy, windy Friday evening in a house with with two tired working parents at the end of the week and two teenagers 🙂

Countdown Reason # 20: The Empathy Thing

If you’ve read all my posts you know that I sometimes write about the amazing women who talk to me at my lectures, or who email me their stories about wanting to wrap in more joy in the face of life’s hurdles. And how I thought of them so much as I test drove all the strategies I write about in The Last Best Cure. In a word it’s called empathy. And a new study about empathy came out today that reminded me of one of the major reasons why I write about health science. Guess who is most likely — of all the folks on the planet — to feel most empathy for the suffering of those around them? If you are a female with a lot of female friends you probably know the answer. Women in mid-life are most likely to feel and identify with the pain of others. Researchers write in the January 30 issue of Psychology & Psychiatry that after studying 75,000 adults, they found that middle-aged women are more empathic than men of the same age and than younger or older people. Another study on age and empathy in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological and Social Sciences found that women in mid-life also react more emotionally to the experiences of others, and we are more likely to understand how things “look from the perspective of others.” That’s why watching Mary Todd and Lincoln talk about their dead son Willy in Lincoln (I cite that because it’s the only big movie I’ve had time to see this Oscar season!) is so much more moving to the 50-year-old woman sitting in the audience than to anyone else, and seeing a new mom coo back and forth with her new baby in motherspeak brings up such a welling in the chest. Younger and older adults report feeling less empathy across the board. I think I know why that is. I think it’s because as women in mid-life we have or have almost raised our children and we have lived a long way now feeling deeply for other individuals, imagining how things feel from their perspective, when they are tiny and can’t speak, or when they are 15 and won’t speak. Imagining what those we care so much about feel —  really, the ability to imagine another person’s soul — becomes part well-honed muscle, part art. Either way it’s a gift. And a portal to experiencing the depth and beauty of life in a way we might not otherwise. That’s not a portal you stop being able to walk through. We get what it means to want something better for someone who needs it and might not even know what it is they need. But whatever it is, this heightened empathy muscle is also why women are the ones who show up with a meal when someone is sick, and it’s why I wrote The Last Best Cure. It’s also why I wrote The Autoimmune Epidemic. Something in me just wants all the women — and men! — who feel anxious or sad or just plain tired out or sick or sick of it or sick of dealing to feel something different. To have a crack at something more. At more joy.

Countdown Reason # 21: An Excerpt From The Last Best Cure!

For me, this is huge. You’re finally getting to see what I’ve spent the past two years of my life doing — researching, journeying, writing. I’ve described the book to you in a dozen ways but nothing can give you a better sense of what this book is about than delving into the book itself. Okay, are you ready? At the link below you can read both the introduction AND the first chapter. That’s a lot. Here it is! Right here: The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back my Body, My Joy and My Life Introduction and Chapter 1

Countdown Reason # 22: This is Hard Work, And We Need Help Along the Way

I am sitting here in an odd position. I am in bed with the flu, but the stomach flu can also mean all sorts of very un-fun things for me with my autoimmune condition. If you know my work you know exactly what I’m talking about. So I am trying really hard to do something that those of us with chronic conditions are so often challenged to do. Keep my mind in a great place, while I also call various amazing doctors on whom I totally rely. And this is a conundrum. I’ve written a whole book that has changed my life. Change my brain, change how I feel. We know without a doubt that changing our habits of thought creates a protective biological cascade effect. And we know it is hard work. And that even if our physical health doesn’t shift, guess what, something big inside will. Everything I write about in The Last Best Cure is hard work, especially when we are ill, or in fear, or in pain. Catching thoughts, mindfulness, meditative practice, forgiving myself. Breathing into my toes, laughing like a baby, nature bathing and down-dogging and being an eagle. Letting the darker, more worried thoughts go. Each of the approaches I have spent a year pursuing requires hard work, focus and attentiveness every day.  Time.  Discipline.  Dedication.  Energy.  Lots of energy. And that’s the conundrum. I recognize, all too well, how hard this is to do when we don’t feel well or we’re in pain. And that’s why I wrote the book. I totally get that. And guess what, studies tell us we can’t do it alone. Sharing our journey helps us in the journey. I’m so excited that in 22 days we’ll be able to do it together. So excited about that. Because we all know that really, there are no quick fixes — and we need help along the way. We are all part of The Last Best Cure community.