How to Tame Stress

Pushkin. I was having my annual medical checkup. The nurse measured my weight in blood pressure, She listened to my heart, and then did some blood work. Most of my test results came back fine except one. My CRP levels were kind of high. But I didn't actually know what CRP levels were, so I turned to Google. Turns out, high CRP levels are a sign of bodily inflammation, which can increase the risk of chronic health conditions like kidney disease, cancer, dementia,

Hey, Steve, I'm in the car because for some reason, all the traffic lights on since sent Boulevard are out.

When scientists studies stress, they often turn to one particular group of very stressed out people, caregivers, and there's no shortage of such research subjects. Around thirty percent of US adults provide some form of care to say a child with special needs, a sick partner, or even an aging parent. It's around the clock job that's often really brutal. Thanks

Let's start right now because I have another appointment.

But I'm thrilled to talk to you, but not as thrilled as I was. You see, I'm not just a fan of Steve's book, Time to Think Caregiving for my Hero. I'm also a fan of Steve's acting. Steve Gutenberg is the star of some of my favorite eighties movies, Three Men in a Baby Cocoon and Short Circuit Number Five is a Lie, and Steve attributes much of his amazing career success to his father.

He was my hero, and my dad was really a very tough guy who was a US Army Airborne ranger, one of the first Jewish ones. And then my dad became a New York City policeman and he actually went to the New York City Police Academy. So when I auditioned for Police Academy the movie, he said, why don't you wear my police Academy shirt? And I said, yeah, that would be great.

The director asked about Steve's shirt and seemed impressed by the actor's attention to detail. After all, Steve was reading for character Kerrie Mahoney, who was also the son of a police officer. It was a great start, but the audition went terribly.

I called my dad and I said, Dad, you know, I wore your shirt, but I don't think I got this thing. You know, nobody laughed, nobody clapped, nothing. He said, well, you never go just give it a little time. My dad was really positive thinker. He just said it'll all work out. Take your time with it. About ten minutes later, my agent called and I said, oh, I feel lousy. I did terrible. He goes, no, you got it. He said what? And that was the phone call that changed

So Steve was going to star in Police Academy. What could possibly go wrong?

Actually, my manager saw Police Academy. He said, this is going to be the worst movie ever. I'm going to put you in a TV series Tomorrow.

Steve landed a role in a spy series made by Blake Edwards.

He was a great director, directed Breakfast and Tiffany's and all the Pink Panthers.

Steve's dad was incredibly supportive of his new role and wanted to join his son on set, but that might have also had something to do with Blake Edward's famous wife.

My dad wanted to come out because he thought maybe you'd get to meet Julie.

Andrews Stanley Gutenberg. Set visit coincided with a short delay in shooting. Steve's character was supposed to jump off a thirty foot roof and Steve didn't want to do the stunt himself.

And my dad was looking up there and said to Blake Edwards, you know I could do that, and the director Blake Edwards said yeah, but you don't want to do it, do you? And he said, yeah, I'll do it. I'm airborn rajor. I jumped from airplane some thousands of feet.

Stanley made the jump, and as he was finishing up the stunt, it became clear that he wasn't the only visitor on the lot.

All of a sudden, this Rose Royce pulls up and out of it comes Julie Andrews, and my dad looks down there and says, Julie Andrews Julia Hedgers and Julie Andrews looked up and I guess asked who that was. He said, oh, was a good bug. And he said, oh my god, I wanted to meet you. He says, well, here I am.

So Steve's dad got to play the hero and meet his movie.

Idol, and that was a big kick for me.

Steve's dad was a caring, positive guy who also took great joy at his powerful physique. But age and infirmity pay little respect to such things.

He said, look at my thigh, Yes, look how big my thighs are. And I would say, dad, but you're still tough, Dad, You're still tough.

Stanley was diagnosed with kidney failure, a disease that immediately reversed the Gutenberg family roles. Steve, along with his sister were now cast as caregivers with all the stress that entails.

And I was a reluctant caregiver because I didn't want to see my dad like that.

As many of us know, being a caregiver is very challenging.

Doctor Alissa Epple is one of many scientists studying stress and caregivers.

It's a job that doesn't end twenty four to seven, and that's because we care so much, We're so connected to another's well being, we feel responsible for it, and that doesn't end.

Alyssa is a professor a UCSF and the author of the Stress prescription seven Days to More Joy and Ease. She explained that caregivers, like so many of us, are often harmed by the very biological reaction that's supposed to help us.

Our stress response is the only reason we're all here, the only reason our ancestors have survived.

Thanks to those ancestors, we've inherited a unique biological control center, the autonomic nervous system, which allows our brains to switch instantly from normal processes like breathing or digesting food, to the high energy fighter flight activities we need for emergencies like sprinting away from a tiger or punching an attacker. Whenever our brains perceive a threat, this fighter flight system

Anxious, our bodies really living in a chronically aroused state that we don't even notice anymore.

All this would be bad enough if we only freaked out about our actual daily stressors, but part of.

The problem with our stress today is that we keep it alive with our thoughts, because things aren't always happening, but they can be in our mind if we take them with us and we ruminate about what's happened, or we are worrying about what might happen next, and we're all challenged by that to some extent, and especially right now, because things are more unstable than they used to be.

It's a lot, and as I have definitely experienced in my own life, we usually react to these daily mental dramas in ways that make things even worse.

For so many of us, it really is about rushing, about creating a schedule that has no spaciousness in it, that has no time for breaks, and it doesn't match our value as usually we don't have time for people, we don't have time for health or eating healthy meals. We no longer want to eat normal food. We want to eat highly palatable food, high sugar food, high fat food, and for some of us, high salt food. And we call this comfort food because it is biologically comforting to the body and brain.

Ah comfort food, I could honestly spend a whole episode in this series talking about this happiness challenge. When my Yale students disappeared during lockdown, I comforted myself with whatever sugary food looked good. I wound up putting on the so called COVID nineteen pounds and then some But Alyssa says, this wasn't a willpower failure. It was just my basic

The addition of stress on top of giving rats access to oreos creates this craving an addiction in these rats. So each time they get access to the oreos, they're not just eating leisurely and saying, what a fine meal, this feels great. They're binge eating. They will eat more, and they'll develop greater or intro abdominal fat, and that is just a little disease making machine. To have a lot of introbdominal fat means that We're also having a

But chronic stress doesn't just change the size of our mid sections, as my own heightened CRP marker show, it can also affect our immune systems.

Our immune cells have receptors for cortisol, but when we're chronically stressed and cortisol gets too high, then the immune cells are not turning off inflammation in response to cortisol, and those cells are more prone flammatory during stress.

Chronic stress results in exactly the same inflammation profile that I presented with at my doctor's visit. What researchers are referring to as inflammating chronic stress also damages our DNA. It destroys the part of our chromosomes that we need for cell division.

What are known as teeling telomeres are these caps at the tips of our chromosomes and they protect our genes, so they have this incredibly important role in the cell. Telomeres are basically the sentinels or these guards, and when there's too much stress in the cell, the telomeres tend to shorten quickly. And more excessively.

Telomeres work like the plastic tip at the top of our shoelaces, which the Internet tells me is actually called an ag lit. Did not know that. In any case, if you've ever had a shoelace lose it zag lit, you know what happens next. The lease starts to fray and fall apart. Telomeres at the top of a DNA strand work the same way. When they get messed up, our DNA winds up frayed and broken.

And once they get too short, they start sending out distress signals saying this cell is no longer good. We got to call it quits. Time for this cell to become senescent.

Dyeing sinescent cells, higher abdominal fat levels, long standing anxiety, irritability, inflammating, and an increased risk for premature death. Apparently this is where all my self imposed pressures over the last few years have gotten me. At this point in my conversation with Alyssa, things were starting to sound kind of hopeless, but Alyssa assured me that chronic stress doesn't have to

We've learned more about chroduct stress from these caregiving studies than other types of stressors.

But what lessons can we learn from the painful experience of stressed out caregivers. We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.

When you were a caregiver, beautiful responsibility to be more than a human being, you just do.

When his father Stanley became ill, movie star Steve Guttenberg was forced to trade the glamor of Hollywood for the hard job of a long term caretaker.

You have to be superhuman because it takes a superhuman to clean somebody up when they go to the bathroom, when they throw up, when they have a seizure, when they have bouts of true darkness. You have to be more than an average human being.

Step and his sister joined the thirty four million other Americans offering unpaid care to an older person in need.

I would call them angels, super angels, muscular, strong, super powered angels, because when you're looking at somebody at two in the morning and they have to go to the bathroom and you have to pick them up out of bed and they can't make it to the regular bathroom, and you have to put them on their commode, and you have to give them their privacy and their dignity

The range of daily challenges that carers face is immense medical bills, dealing with hospitals and insurance companies, negotiating time off work, and that doesn't include the heartbreaking pain of watching once healthy loved ones deteriorate.

The reason I wrote the book is caregiving is a really lonely occupation. You're basically sitting in the room with that one person who's very ill, and you're looking at them constantly, monitoring their health well and seeing what you can do for them, and at the same time, you're trying to figure out your own life and what you're doing with it and what you have to give up to be part of this process.

The problems caregivers contend with can last day after day after day, and as doctor Elyssa Epple explained earlier, such sustained stress can be really bad for our bodies. Melissa likes to point to one caregiver study in particular.

Showing that their wounds heal almost ten days longer than low stress age matched older controls, And that really is about the chronic stress response, the excesses of the exposure to cortisol.

It wouldn't be surprising if Steve Gutenberg's cortisol levels were through the roof during his time as a caregiver. Steve was living in LA when his father was diagnosed with renal failure, so taking care of him meant regular drives to his father's house in Arizona mile.

Round trip every week. And I started listening to podcasts or music, but quickly I stopped and just started thinking. So what I would think about was when my dad was younger, and my dad was really fit and young and healthy and enthusiastic, sitting.

Behind the wheel for long hours isn't ideal, but ruminating about his father's physical decline during those long drives was bound to trigger even more stress.

My dad was in such pain, physical pain, mental pain, he did not want to die.

Steve says his father's final years were the most depressing period of his entire life. And Steve's not alone. It's estimated that half of caregivers have major depression, a rate that's twice as high as the general population. Even more shockingly, twelve percent of dementia caregivers die before their sick loved. One one study estimated that a caregiver's mortality risk was

It fell by the wayside. I did not exercise for so many years. I didn't sleep very well at all. There was about a month before he passed where he would be up all night, that he would be screaming all night. So my self care did go to the side.

But researcher Alyssa Apple has found that not all caregivers succumbed to the effects of stress.

The good news is that there are ways to be with this life situation.

Alissa studied caregivers telomeres, that part of our DNA that gets prematurely shortened by chronic stress. She found that many of her subjects telomeres were badly affected. They showed all the expected hallmarks of inflammating, but the telomeres of some caregivers were fine. Even though the these people face the same stresses as those with the shortened tail of mirrors, their bodies weren't affected in the same way. How is

I don't control outcomes. I don't control the disease course. I don't control someone else's behavior. I can control X and Y. So really separating out a situation to understand there is a little bit that we can control. We can control our response, and we can do things to show compassion, to be with someone with a loving presence,

If you're a caregiver, you might be saying, well, that's easier said than done. Radical acceptance was definitely something Steve Gutenberg struggled with.

I was reluctant to accept the reality of the situation. I just couldn't accept it. I wouldn't accept it. Everyone else knew my dad was dying. I knew it, but wouldn't accept it, so I never talked about it. I always said, he's going to get better, He's going to come through this, even at the very end.

Alyssa shared one strategy we can use to bring a healthier narrative to times of stress. We can try out what's known as expressive writing. Take time to journal about all the crap on your plate and how it makes you feel.

I suggest just starting off with a massive list without any editing or censoring, just writing down everything that you feel bothered by, worried by, pressured by, and then thinking about your day. You know what stresses you out most during the day. We often don't give ourselves the opportunity to step back and reflect on the level that we're carrying.

The act of putting all your stresses down on paper can also reveal all the things you're doing that inadvertently add to your stress levels.

We're very routine animals, you know. We get into this I'll call it a daily stress routine, and we can break that routine. We can see where we're creating unnecessary stress.

You can then take stock of all the neglected stuff you can control about your situation practices like sleep, or food or time with friends. You can also take some time to count your blessings. Gratitude, it turns out, is a powerful tool for tackling stress. Fortunately, this was a practice that did come naturally for caregivers. Steve Gutenberg his dad was a gratitude role model.

Oh yeah, my dad was grateful for anything. Had told get a cup of coffee. H coffee. My dad taught me, you know, Stephen, enjoy your life. Enjoy your life. Be happy. That's it. Just be happy. Everything else will come.

Steve called his book a Time to Think, because in spite of his father's difficult illness, he still managed to remember all the many ways in which he was fortunate.

Thank god I have a job that I could stop and just sit there with my dad all the time. How lucky I was that I didn't have to be in some office hearing about my dad on the telephone.

Steve hated seeing Stanley's physical decline, but the time Steve spent with his dad in those final months allowed him to remember the dead of gratitude. He owed the old man.

I think gratitude it's a verb. I think like love is a verb. You know. My dad used to say to me, you could either love someone or you can love someone and show up. You know. That's that's gratitude. That's gratitude. That's the deep part of gratitude.

Research shows that strategies like gratitude and radical acceptance can protect us from the negative effects of chronic stress. But as I read through a list is work, I learned one additional way to handle stress that sounded kind of odd. It turns out we can fight stress by looking for new chances to get stressed out. This is the insight behind what effective scientists call hermetic stress.

Her Medic stress is absolutely fascinating because it's so counterintuitive. We know very well from fly studies that organisms like a little shock of moderate repeated stress, and in fact it's strengthening. It's like a vaccination, so it really is building up biological resistance. It's exercise for our nervous system.

What you're looking to create is a short episode of stress, something that will get your heart racing and blood pumping, but also an episode that you can stop so you can train your autonomic nervous system to go back into recovery mode. And it doesn't have to involve finding true fight or flight danger. Hermetic stress can be way easier than that.

The best example, of course, is extra and we know exercise is good for our health, but we haven't thought about the fact that short bursts of exercise are creating that positive hormetic stress response.

One study found that caretakers who were asked to exercise three to five times a week showed less short in telomeres than those who didn't move their bodies. The blast of stress that comes from exercise seems to slow down and possibly even reverse the effects of inflammating Exercise was another strategy that came easily to the Gutenberg family. When Steve's great grandfather first came to the US, his physical fitness came in handy.

What he would do for extra money is he would go down to the Brooklyn Bridge and he feats of strength. He would carry people on his dock. He would carry huge weights and at the end he had a Shetland pony and he would pick up this little Shetland party walk around it.

Steve's grandfather was a powerlifter who then passed on the jim bug to his son Stanley.

My dad started lifting weights when he was twelve years old. My dad was a handstand king. My dad could do a handstand for by four straight.

As a skinny teen, Steve turned to his dad for exercise tips. Under Stanley's tutelage, Steve was able to put on fifty pounds of muscle. I'm building a mean, lean monster, his dad had announced proudly. But like many stressed out folks, Steve let his usual exercise routine slide at exactly the time he needed it most. As Steve explained just how infrequently he hit the gym during his time as a caretaker, I felt a bit called out. I mean I rarely

Your heart is facing your pomps or sweaty or butterflies in your stomach, so of course, in that circumstance, it feels like self evidence the stress is bad.

Right, This is ut Austin psychologist David Yeager.

Your stress could be viewed in a debilitating way that it's a sign your body is preparing for damage and defeat.

Who wants damage and defeat? Seems like we're all agreed. Then stress sucks. But David says that's not the whole story.

There are lots of times when we face a stressor and we're thrilled and excited, and that energy allows us to show what we know. I mean, if you talk to great athletes, right, they talk about performing at the level of your preparation, and one of the ways they do that is they kind of get in a zone in their heads and they're like amped up before a performance, right.

David is an expert on the power of mindsets, the beliefs we have about things like our abilities and how our brains respond to challenges. David's work has shown that how we think about things has a huge impact on how we behave His early research focused on what's known as the growth mindset, the belief that our abilities and talents can improve over time if we're willing to put in some work in practice. But these days David has started thinking about a different type of mindset, the beliefs

Scarlet, we when water skiing in Wisconsin, and she'd never keep She's a fourth or fifth grader, and She's sitting there bobbing in the lake and I'm holding the back of her skis and she says, Daddy, I'm so nervous. I have butterflies on my stomach. I don't think I can do this. And I was like, well, Scarlet, you know that that's stress and that energy that's just getting oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain, and those muscles with that oxygenated blood are going to be stronger.

Justice Scarlet initially interpreted her stress response as a signal that she shouldn't try water skiing. David says that many of us greet the early signs of stress the wrong way.

In general and society, people tend to have a stress is debilitating mindset. You see that if you just google image s, stress and well being memes, they all take this assumption that stress is always bad and should be avoided. Right. It's like depleting you. It is something that you need to suppress. Most people are convinced there's only one way to look at stress, which is that it's always bad, and when they do that, it spirals on itself and

Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb was the first to show the harmful effects of the wrong stress mindset. She found that people who expected stress to be debilitating experienced more anxiety and lower happiness ratings than people who thought stress was enhancing. The people she studied who believed that stress was good for them also showed more optimism, better performance at work,

Could you just tell people what their physiology means one way or the other and could that change their performance when they're in a stressful situation.

David and a colleague, Jeremy Jamison, recruited college students planning to take the Jerry Exam and presented them with a practice version of the test. Everyone was reminded that it's normal for people to feel stressed out before an exam. Behalf of participants were given a list of reasons why their stress response might improve their performance.

You know, the bodies releasing catecola means and those catacola means are going to enhance performance. And the reason your heart is pumping so much is because it's getting more blood to your brain and to your muscles. It's going to help you perform better.

The results were striking. Students who reappraised their stress response as beneficial showed way better scores than those in the control condition. On some parts of the exam, their scores were more than one hundred points higher.

But the interesting thing is that a month later students went and took the real gre and brought their scores back, and they did much better. The difference is like the difference between getting into a mid tier top fifty graduate program or a top five graduate program.

But GIRE exams are acute stressors. David wanted to know whether the same mindset shift could also reduce the chronic stress that dogs people like me day after day. So he turned to a group of high school students from low income backgrounds.

And these are almost exclusively black or Latino students whose parents had not gone to college. And we explicitly wanted to choose this situation because we know kids experienced lots of stressors. They might experience racial discrimination, prejudice, but also for kids whose parents are experiencing poverty, food and security, things like that, So could a little mindset shift have an impact in that kind of population.

David's students watched a thirty minute video that explained both the importance of a growth mindset and why stress can have beneficial effects on performance. Would this be enough to change how they great stress? Would the video help students react better to the annoying challenges of everyday life.

So, over the course of the first semester of high school kids completed daily diary surveys three times a day, provided cortisol samples several times per day, And what we find is that on days in which kids say, yeah, this is a really stressful day, like I'm feeling judged and evaluated by my teachers, I'm feeling left out by my friends, kids were saying I can handle this, I'm feeling good about myself, I feel positive. So it's by

This is an amazing finding. By merely thinking of stress not as a prelude to damage and defeat, but is something helpful and useful, You can prevent your boy from chronically releasing the very substances that cause the inflammating effects usually experienced by stressed out people like me. That is really cool, But there is a trick to getting the benefits of the right stress mindset. You need to practice long term. You need to carry over that positive mindset

Fast forward two years later and she's getting in the car on the way to a cello audition. She's like, Daddy, I'm so nervous, Like I don't know if I can do well in this. I was like, Scarlett, you know what I'm going to say. She's like, yeah, you're going to say that. The butterflies on my stomach are there just to pump, you know, good energy through my body and give me adrenaline and oxygen et cetera, et cetera.

Making this episode has made me realize that I'm way too negative about stress. I can remember lots of times in my own life when small bursts of stress have felt good. That rush I get before a big talk, or that push I experienced during a tough yoga session. The adrenaline I experience in those moments doesn't feel stressful or debilitating. It feels exciting. A reaction's going to help me perform better. I need to harness that and apply