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OP-ED: Be like the zebra and relax

4 min read
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In the book, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” Robert Sapolsky exposes us to the concepts of stress management and biology. When addressing diet and stress management, he gives the example of a young lawyer who decides that “red meat, fried foods, and a couple of beers per dinner constitute a desirable diet, and the consequences are anything but clear – a half a century later, maybe he’s crippled with cardiovascular disease, or maybe he’s taking bike trips with his grandkids.”

Sapolsky goes on to explain the various “nuts-and-bolts factors” that will help determine which of these outcomes will occur. He explores the liver’s role in the making of cholesterol, the enzymes in fat cells, and potential congenital weaknesses. Then he hits the motherload, which is personality and how we individually deal with the stress generating problems between the mind and body.

We know that the predominant diseases we deal with today are those resulting from, as the author explains “a slow accumulation of damage – heart, cancer, cerebral vascular disorders.” We’ve also come to learn the fact that these inflammatory diseases are fed by a “complex intertwining of our biology and our emotions.” And there is zero doubt that “extreme emotional disturbances can adversely affect us.” In other words, “stress can make us sick.”

I was recently invited to give a presentation to selected deans and directors from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Indiana Regional Medical Center. The presentation was titled, “The Role of Integrative Health and Medicine in Rural Hospitals,” and it was based on my work both at Windber Medical Center during the first decade of the 21st century, and then nationally and internationally in integrative medicine, wellness and prevention.

Because my goal was to help build a stronger even more co-operative relationship between IUP and IRMC, I addressed how a combined effort between these two strong neighboring organizations could foster improved health in their workplace, for their patients and students, in the communities they served and finally, in the local school districts. As Sapolsky stated in “Zebras,” “We are certainly aware of the extraordinary amount of physiological, biochemical, and molecular information available as to how all sorts of intangibles in our lives can affect very real bodily events.” My presentation was directed toward the steps we, as education and health-care professionals, can take to assist our stakeholders in their life journey.

Because “sustained psychological stress is a recent invention mostly limited to humans and other social primates, we can experience wildly strong emotions linked to mere thoughts.” These fight-or-flight emotions were originally intended to assist all mammals during their lives but especially when being chased by saber tooth tigers. (That doesn’t happen much anymore.)

The purpose of both my presentation and the efforts we made to help our stakeholders was to provide them the tools needed to deal with our daily ongoing stressors. It’s all about diet, moderate exercise, non-judgmental social support, and stress management via mindfulness activities. In many cases, we can decide every day in every way what should be worth dying over and, for the most part, determine what types of things knock you out of your homeostatic balance?

Inactivity can be as harmful as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Obesity can kill as many people as smoking, and smoking is still life-ending annually for over 450,000 people in the United States alone, but stress? There’s no limit to the amount of people who are harming their health and limiting their futures by not learning any type of mind-calming, stress management techniques. It doesn’t matter if it’s yoga, the rosary, worry beads, meditation, or calmly nurturing a pet.

Find what stops your amygdalae from pushing your emotional buttons to stop making you think that a tiger is chasing you.

My former Chief Medical Officer, an emergency room physician, used to look at me when I was stressing and say, “Everything’s OK. No one died.” And, indeed, it was, and even I’m still here.

Nick Jacobs of Windber is a health-care consultant and author of two books.

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