KEY

9

De-Stress

There’s a dangerous drug in our society. Here’s what just a little bit of it will do to you: It sends your heart into overdrive, pounding at four times its natural rate. It does the same to your lungs. It constricts your blood vessels and raises your blood pressure to dangerous levels. It dries your mouth and shuts down your stomach and intestines. It drains the blood from your face and skin. It scrambles your immune system. It wrecks your sleep, turns off sexual interest and reproductive capability, slows healing, and increases your risk of periodontal disease, skin disease, and autoimmune diseases. It shuts down short-term memory and rational thought. It actually shrinks part of your brain. And it even makes you overeat.

Sounds like bad news, doesn’t it? I bet you would go out of your way to steer clear of this drug. Yet you give yourself doses of it every day. I was addicted to it for years. The drug is cortisol, the most famous of the glucocorticoids—the stress drugs. And your body makes them daily.

Stressed Out

When we say “I’ve had a stressful day” or “I’m stressed out,” we mean we cannot relax. Things come up during the day, or carry over from previous days, that we must deal with. If enough of those things happen or go unresolved, then we have no escape, no place to relax, and we are “stressed out.”

Stress is the opposite of relaxation. Physically, stress is the body’s gearing up to tackle whatever situation arises. It does this by sending stress hormones in all directions. When a stressful situation happens, out of your adrenal glands come cortisol and the other glucocorticoids. Out of your brain comes adrenaline (which scientists call epinephrine) and related hormones, which are messengers that rush through the body telling all your systems—your heart, muscles, skin, and others—what to do. In the case of stress, the message is “Get ready for action,” also known as the “fight or flight” response.

In itself, fight or flight is not a bad thing. It is a great system if you have to save a child from a burning building or run from a hungry bear. You get hyper-alert, super-quick, and you rescue the child or leave the bear far behind. After a few minutes, your heartbeat comes down and life goes on.

You will be glad you have this system the next time you face an emergency, but the human body was never designed for twenty-first-century living, when mentally stressful moments are the norm, not the exception. All the changes that cortisol and the other stress hormones cause in our bodies help a lot in the short term, but can make us very, very sick—even kill us—if they happen every day. And in a typical modern life, they often happen not just every day but every hour.

A Guide to Stress-Related Disease

Occasional stress is healthy, even stimulating. However, chronic stress does not ever allow the body to recover and slowly kills it because it increases the possibility of sickness or other poor health conditions. Let’s take a look at the different diseases stress causes or aggravates.

Cardiovascular Disease

Perhaps the most important way stress affects your body is to increase the rate at which blood pumps through it. That’s the only way to get fuel—glucose and oxygen—to your muscles where it’s needed (or where your body assumes it’s needed). To do this, your heart beats more rapidly and your blood vessels constrict to force blood through them faster. This means your blood pressure gets very high during stress. That is fine if it happens only occasionally, like during exercise. But if you are stressed all the time, then that elevated blood pressure stays too high for too long. Not good.

High blood pressure increases the pounding on the walls of your blood vessels (especially at the Y’s where a blood vessel branches into two). As soon as the cells that make up those walls become loose, material in your blood can get under them and stick to the wall, forming a blockage. Such blockages cause heart attacks and strokes. No surprise, then, that people with heart disease are four times as likely to have heart attacks if they also suffer from high stress.

Diabetes

When your body senses the alarm from your stress hormones, it wants to send as much fuel as possible to your muscles. Where does the fuel come from? From your fat reserves. Adrenaline signals your fat cells to send their fat into your bloodstream, where it can be converted into glucose for your muscles to use as needed. During stressful times, your body tries to keep as much fat and glucose in your blood as possible. To do this, it overrides your insulin, which is trying to force the fat and glucose into storage or muscle tissue. (The only places it does not override the insulin are in muscles being used right then, which need all the glucose they can get.) Since insulin resistance is a diabetic’s main problem, you can see why stress makes it much worse.

Compounding the problem, your blood gets thicker during stress. Extra platelets get added to your blood, and platelets are responsible for making blood clot. Blood that clots easily is what you want if your stomach is about to get sliced open by a surgeon’s knife or a bear claw, but not if you have diabetes or heart disease, because it is more likely to create blockages.

Weight Gain

During the first few minutes of a stressful situation, the adrenaline from your brain suppresses hunger. But the cortisol from your adrenal glands actually stimulates appetite, and cortisol takes longer than adrenaline to circulate through your body and get removed, so you end up hungry.

Cortisol’s job is to take over after you have dealt with an immediate threat. It keeps your muscles and senses on high alert for a while because the threat might still be around, and it tells you to eat. Since you probably expended a lot of energy in fight or flight mode, you now need to fuel up to be ready for the next emergency. Cortisol makes you ravenous and makes fat storage extra easy—especially around the abdomen.

You probably know the scenario. You have a high-stress job, and for nine or more hours a day you run around at an extremely fast, focused pace, hardly thinking about food. You may even skip lunch. No time! Then, finally, you trudge home at 8:00 p.m. with Chinese takeout and practically inhale it. The stress is gone (temporarily), you’re unwinding, your cortisol is still going strong, and now it tells you to eat the whole chicken chow mein, plus dessert, and store those calories fast. This is why chronic stress is one of the main culprits of weight gain.

Ulcers and Digestive Disorders

The slow process of converting food in your stomach to energy does not fall under the “emergency” category, so when faced with stress, your body shuts down digestion. When stress comes into your life, blood gets diverted from the stomach and small intestine to the heart and other muscles. Then, once the stress disappears, cortisol cranks up digestion again.

Normally, your stomach wall is lined with a thick layer of mucus to protect it from the hydrochloric acid that breaks down food in the stomach. But when stress frequently shuts down your digestion, your body can get out of sync as it makes mucus to coat the stomach. Then the acid burns a hole in an unprotected spot on the stomach wall, and you have a painful ulcer.

Your intestines also suffer when you are under stress. While stress shuts down the stomach and small intestine, it actually speeds up the movement of the large intestine to unload excess baggage in preparation for any “flight” that may be necessary. When the stress goes away, this process is reversed. But just like throwing your car back and forth between “drive” and “reverse” can mess up your transmission, regular on-and-off stress throws your intestines out of whack. They can spasm, causing or aggravating such conditions as colitis and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Immunity

When stress hits, your body makes extra white blood cells to fight infection. And cortisol pulls your existing white blood cells from their everyday tasks, such as looking for cancer cells, and sends them to the front lines to protect against infection from any puncture wounds you might suffer during the stress. This is kind of like your body’s version of mobilizing the National Guard. After about a half-hour of stress, cortisol starts reducing the number of white blood cells you have in circulation. Why? If you keep those National Guard white blood cells on alert, racing around the body looking for enemies and there aren’t any enemies, eventually they start mistaking your own cells for enemies and attacking them. This results in autoimmune disease—your own immune system attacking you.

Cortisol simply tries to do its job by reducing the number of white blood cells when you are under stress. But there’s a problem. If the stress goes on for a while, cortisol keeps reducing your white blood cells until your immune system is depleted. With such low immunity, you are suddenly more likely to catch colds and other diseases.

As with so many other systems in your body, a bit of stress is not bad for your immune system. During the first few minutes of a stressful situation, you feel a quick burst of energy and are less likely to get infections or colds. But soon, your white blood cell count starts to fall and it keeps on falling the longer the stress goes on, resulting in a severely compromised immune system.

General Aging

We have all seen what happens to people who suffer through years of stress. Their hair turns gray. Their skin becomes sallow and wrinkly. Everything from their eyes to their muscle tone just looks “not quite right.” By now, you should understand why. Cortisol tells the body to drop all long-term projects and put its resources into short-term survival.

One of the longest-term projects in the body is the general cell repair that goes on all the time and helps keep people looking and feeling young. Your body uses the protein in your diet to repair these cells and the DNA in the cells. Under chronic stress, your body stops repairing its cells and instead uses the protein as an extra source of fuel for “fight or flight.” All maintenance projects cease. This explains why people undergoing long-term stress look run down. They are breaking down on a cellular level. Lowering stress, regular exercise, and healthy eating will slow down the aging cycle and you can look younger than you actually are instead of older than you are.

Other Conditions

Think of anything bad that can happen to the body and stress will intensify it. Stress causes depression by throwing off your serotonin levels. It makes your muscles tense (which is useful if you are preparing for fight or flight), which leads to everything from back pain to migraines (caused by tense head muscles). As I mentioned earlier, it turns off higher brain functions and memory to let you concentrate on quick, instinctive reactions to stress; furthermore, chronic stress actually shrinks the part of the brain that houses memory. It increases periodontal disease because your immune system does not fight as well against the germs that cause the disease; it slows growth in children; it inhibits reproduction in both women and men.

One obvious consequence of stress is that it makes sleep very difficult. Sleep is pretty much the opposite of stress. To sleep, you must relax, and relaxation is almost impossible with all that cortisol racing through your blood, accelerating your heart rate and lungs. But lack of sleep in itself causes many of the same conditions stress does. So the result is a vicious circle of stress causing poor sleep, and poor sleep causing more stress.

It’s time to get yourself out of that vicious circle! Today, if you want to live without dangerous stress loads, you must make a choice to do so. You will need to know what to do and how to do it. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Five Ways to De-Stress Yourself

I find that many people nod their heads and give lip service to the idea that stress is bad and should be reduced in their lives, but they do not do much about it. I hope my explanations in this chapter make very clear to you that stress is not an inconvenience; stress is deadly. You cannot lead a full and righteous life if stress is breaking your emotions and your spirit.

I know what I am talking about. For years, I was ruined by stress. I was sick and extremely tired all the time. My schedule was insane and my mind never stopped churning. I did so much every day and worked so late every night that I could not get my system to calm down enough to sleep properly. I got emotionally upset on a regular basis. Most of the time I was stressed about my schedule, yet I was the one making that schedule, so I had no one to blame but myself. I was the only one who could change my schedule, but it took years of misery to get me to the point of being willing to do so.

When I finish ministering at a conference, I’m tired physically, mentally, and emotionally. For years, I came away from meetings where the Spirit of God moved in great power, and I went home and had a bad attitude. I felt sorry for myself, got angry, and took it out on the people around me, all of which is ungodly behavior.

Now, after a conference, I take some time to eliminate stress. I always rest, but I might also do it by treating myself to something I really enjoy. I get a good healthy, hot meal. I might purchase something pretty or watch a good clean movie, while holding my dog and petting her. Sometimes I’ll get a massage because it is a great stress reliever. Whatever it is, I know I will not go back to work until I have eliminated the stress of my responsibilities at the conference. I want to teach God’s Word for the rest of my life, which I pray will be long. In order to do that I know I need to have regular de-stress periods in my life. It has become a necessity for me instead of an option. I actually feel that I am sinning if I don’t rest regularly because I know what it does to my body and overall health and I believe I should glorify God with my whole being!

That’s just one example from my life. I can think of many others, and I am sure you already know of ways that work for you—though whether you actually do them is another matter. Now that you know how sick stress can make you, the next time you feel your body start to work itself into a frenzy, I hope you will try something that will relieve it. Here are some classic, tried-and-true methods.

1. Social Support
Studies show that social isolation leads to elevated cortisol levels. We are social beings, and spending time around other people that we enjoy is one of the best ways to make us feel good and relaxed. Various social outlets are right for different people; just make sure that you have some. My suggestions:

Family and friends

Church

Groups and clubs

2. Shrug Therapy
There are some things you can control in life—your choice of job, your friends, your coffee intake, and the amount of sleep you get. There are others you can’t control—what people say and do, the fluctuations of the stock market, or the flat tire you got this morning. How you react to things you cannot control helps determine your stress level and quality of health. People who regularly get upset over minor things suffer in many ways. People who shrug them off do a lot better. The Bible calls this “casting your care,” which simply means letting God handle your problems instead of wrestling with them by yourself (1 Peter 5:7).

Shrugging something off does not mean you are ignoring it or being indifferent to it; it just means acknowledging there is nothing you can do to change the situation at that particular moment. The flat tire has already happened. Dealing with it by calling AAA makes sense; throwing a tantrum and kicking the tire does not.

The low-stress approach to life is to shrug things off. Life happens. God works in mysterious ways. If you trust Him to work things out, you will navigate the dips of life with barely a blip in your cortisol level, and that will keep you healthy and at peace.

3. Find Your Element—and Stay There
My husband once did one of the wisest things I have ever seen. Before he and I entered full-time ministry, he worked as an engineer. One time, he was offered a promotion that included a pay raise and a lot of prestige. But he turned it down.

Dave explained that he had watched the other men in that position. They had to travel extensively and were constantly saddled with unreasonable deadlines that put them under tremendous stress. “That’s not the way I want to live,” Dave said.

Instead, Dave chose a position that allowed him to stick to his core values—commitment to family and comfort with self—rather than chasing corporate power so others would look up to him.

Why would anyone choose a higher paycheck just to spend it on doctor bills to relieve job-related, stress-induced illnesses? Job stress causes as much illness in this country as overeating and lack of exercise. Like those things, it kills.

We all want more money, and then we get it and find it does not change the basic dynamics of our lives much. Maybe we drive fancier cars or eat in better restaurants, but we are still the same basic people and our happiness level does not really increase. The most important foundations of long-term happiness are being in right relationship with God, good health, a loving home life, work that is satisfying and not overly stressful, and enough money to not have to worry about finances. Everything else is gravy. Money is an important consideration and can make some things in life easier, but I would advise people not to take any job purely for the money if it will make them stressed or less happy on a daily basis.

You may be in a position that does not make you happy and you need to make a change. You may be proud of your position, but if it steals your health, consider getting out as fast as you can. If your superiors constantly disrespect or dishonor you, either work it out with them or think about finding employment elsewhere. Whatever is causing you high stress, do your best to eliminate it so you can avoid the negative effects stress will have on your health and on your life.

I believe there could be much more happiness and less stress in the world if people would take time to figure out their natural elements and stay there. Your element is waiting for you somewhere; if you are not in it, go find it. Jesus came so that we may “have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10, NIV). Do whatever you need to do to make sure you fully enjoy the life He has provided for you.

4. Nutrition, Supplements, and Diet
What you physically put into your body has a huge impact on your stress level. The most obvious example is caffeine. A cup of coffee is a cup of stress—it speeds your breathing and heart rate, tenses your muscles, hones your senses, and so on. Nothing else has the immediate and obvious effect on stress that caffeine does, but other aspects of nutrition can be very important in regulating your stress. A cup of coffee, or perhaps two a day, is not bad in itself, but you need to eat properly and do other things to enhance your health. I can remember when I drank seven or eight cups of coffee each day and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes. I went most of the day without eating and then ate a big meal at night. I was always on some kind of crash diet. At that time in my life, although I was a Christian, I was spiritually deficient and I lived by emotions. No wonder I felt bad a lot. When I went to the doctor hoping for a pill that would make me feel better, he always told me my problem was too much stress. This diagnosis always made me angry because I didn’t want to admit that I was not doing a good job of managing my life.

One of the first things I did to help myself was start taking nutritional supplements and vitamins. I also studied stress, nutrition, food, rest, and other aspects of managing my health. I learned that a high-protein diet avoids the mood-thumping effect of surging and crashing blood sugar brought on by a high-carb diet. Nutritional supplements and vitamins are also important. By revving up your metabolism, stress causes you to burn through certain vitamins at a furious pace, particularly vitamin C and the B vitamins. If you are under heavy stress, make sure you get extra doses of these in your food or through supplements. You may need to experiment to find the right nutritional supplements for yourself. Varying opinions exist about the safety and effectiveness of many over-the-counter herbs and supplements. While they have been safe for me, you should consult your physician before trying them, and make sure if you do take them that they contain high-quality, good ingredients.

5. Relaxation Techniques
Relaxation is not selfish. It is not slacking off. It is a way of recharging your batteries—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—so you can resume your responsibilities at full-strength tomorrow. You will accomplish more during your days, live longer and healthier, and enjoy life more if you take time to treat yourself right. There are many ways to do this. Here are some favorites:

Play. Adults need to play just as much as children do, and for the same reasons. Play is a terrific way to relax; you get the fun of creativity and challenge without the pressure, because there are no “repercussions” based on your performance. Choose a play activity that is flat-out fun for you and that is a total distraction and escape from the rest of your life.

Laugh. “A cheerful heart is good medicine,” says the Bible, “but a crushed spirit dries up the bones” (Proverbs 17:22, NIV). Laughing good-naturedly at yourself and at life’s ups and downs is a great stress-reduction practice. Make your next book or video one that makes you laugh out loud; life can’t be drama all the time.

Exercise. I have already discussed exercise in depth, so I won’t say much here. Just know that it is probably the single best way to burn off stress.

Sleep. In the beginning of the world, God divided the light from the darkness and made day and night. This is because there is a time to work and a time to sleep. We are meant to stop each day and take some time to rest and recharge. Do not try to steal from this time—embrace it. Your body will actually tell you what it needs if you listen to it. My body certainly tells me when it is tired. For years I ignored it. I pushed and pushed and pushed until finally my body said, “I am tired of being pushed beyond reasonable limits. I am not going to cooperate anymore.” And it broke down. Now when my body lets me know it needs to rest, I rest. If it is sleepy, I take a nap. Sometimes 10 minutes is enough to refresh me. Getting proper sleep and rest will do wonders to reduce the stress in your life.

Prayer. Prayer is simply talking to God. Some people find time with God in the morning or evening to be the best method for nurturing calm and focus, but you can try it in mini-bursts too. Any time things start to feel overwhelming at work (or anywhere else, for that matter), stop and ask God to refresh you. Take a few deep breaths and let your mind calm down. Be deliberate about this because it will do a lot to relieve your stress and restore your peace. Talk to God all throughout the day about everything. He is interested in every aspect of your life and all that concerns you.

Massage. Nothing makes me feel better than a massage. And feeling good is health in itself! Massage not only relieves and tones sore muscles, but also lowers blood pressure and heart rate, releases endorphins in the brain, pushes toxins out of muscles, promotes blood flow, and increases relaxation.

Other ideas. Unwind with music, take a warm bath by candlelight, or walk through a forest in autumn. You know what relaxation feels like, and you know when it’s happening to you. Different people relax in different ways. Dave relaxes by playing golf and my son enjoys snowboarding, but neither of those would help me relax at all. Discover what relaxes you and make relaxing on purpose part of your daily life. Above all, monitor your emotional state. Your emotions are valid, and if they feel out-of-whack, they need some TLC from you.

Act on It

Which one of the five actions in this key will you take so you can reduce the stress in your life? Write them down, commit to them, and start today.