From a Study by Penn State

How you perceive and react to stress is more important to your health than how often you encounter stress, and even the source of the stress itself.

It is known that stress and negative emotions can increase the risk of heart disease, but the reasons why are not well understood. One potential pathway linking stress to future heart disease is a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system — a case of a person’s normally self-regulated nervous system getting off track.

Nancy L. Sin and colleagues wanted to find out if daily stress and heart rate variability — a measure of autonomic regulation of the heart — are linked. Heart rate variability is the variation in intervals between consecutive heartbeats.

“Higher heart rate variability is better for health as it reflects the capacity to respond to challenges,” said Sin, postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Healthy Aging and in the department of biobehavioral health at Penn State. “People with lower heart rate variability have a greater risk of cardiovascular disease and premature death.”

Depression and major stressful events are known to be harmful for health, but less attention has been paid to the health consequences of frustrations and hassles in everyday life. Prior to this research, very few studies have looked at the relationship between heart rate variability and daily stressful events.

Sin and colleagues analyzed data collected from 909 participants, including daily telephone interviews over eight consecutive days and the results from an electrocardiogram. They report their findings online in Psychosomatic Medicine. The participants were between the ages of 35 and 85 and were drawn from a national study.

During the daily phone interviews, participants were asked to report the stressful events they had experienced that day, rating how stressful each event was by choosing “not at all,” “not very,” “somewhat” or “very.” They were also asked about their negative emotions that day, such as feeling angry, sad and nervous. On average, participants reported having at least one stressful experience on 42 percent of the interview days, and these experiences were generally rated as “somewhat” stressful.

The researchers found that participants who reported a lot of stressful events in their lives were not necessarily those who had lower heart rate variability. No matter how many or how few stressful events a person faces it was those who perceived the events as more stressful or who experienced a greater spike in negative emotions that had lower heart rate variability — meaning these people may be at a higher risk for heart disease.

“These results tell us that a person’s perceptions and emotional reactions to stressful events are more important than exposure to stress per se,” said Sin. “This adds to the evidence that minor hassles might pile up to influence health. We hope these findings will help inform the development of interventions to improve well-being in daily life and to promote better health.”

David M. Almeida, professor of human development and family studies, Penn State; Richard P. Sloan, professor, and Paula S. McKinley, assistant professor, both of behavioral medicine in psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center also worked on this project. The National Institute on Aging supported this work. Original Article

Continuing Education Courses on Stress

A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook This CE test is based on the book “A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook” (2010, 224 pages). Stress and pain are nearly unavoidable in our daily lives; they are part of the human condition. This stress can often leave us feeling irritable, tense, overwhelmed, and burned-out. The key to maintaining balance is responding to stress not with frustration and self-criticism, but with mindful, nonjudgmental awareness of our bodies and minds. Impossible? Actually, it’s easier than it seems. In just weeks, you can learn mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a clinically proven program for alleviating stress, anxiety, panic, depression, chronic pain, and a wide range of medical conditions. Taught in classes and clinics worldwide, this powerful approach shows you how to focus on the present moment in order to permanently change the way you handle stress. As you work through A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, you’ll learn how to replace stress-promoting habits with mindful ones-a skill that will last a lifetime.

Mindfulness: The Healing Power of Compassionate Presence This course will give you the mindfulness skills necessary to work directly, effectively and courageously, with your own and your client’s life struggles. Compassion towards others starts with compassion towards self. Practicing mindfulness cultivates our ability to pay intentional attention to our experience from moment to moment. Mindfulness teaches us to become patiently and spaciously aware of what is going on in our mind and body without judgment, reaction, and distraction, thus inviting into the clinical process, the inner strengths and resources that help achieve healing results not otherwise possible. Bringing the power of mindful presence to your clinical practice produces considerable clinical impact in the treatment of anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic pain, high blood pressure, fibromyalgia, colitis/IBS, and migraines/tension headaches. The emphasis of this course is largely experiential and will offer you the benefit of having a direct experience of the mindfulness experience in a safe and supportive fashion. You will utilize the power of “taking the client there” as an effective technique of introducing the mindful experience in your practice setting. As you will learn, the mindfulness practice has to be experienced rather than talked about. This course will provide you with an excellent understanding of exactly what mindfulness is, why it works, and how to use it. You will also develop the tools that help you introduce mindful experiences in your practice, and how to deal with possible client resistance.

Breathing: The Master Key to Self-Healing The breath is intrinsically linked to the nervous system and has a powerful effect on both the mind and body, yet has been largely overlooked as a mechanism of change within medicine and mental health. This course is based on an audio book by Andrew Weil, MD, Breathing: The Master Key to Self-Healing (1999), in which he describes the physiological mechanisms by which the breath affects the mind and body. After an introductory lecture, he teaches several calming, relaxing breathing techniques, as well as an energizing breathing technique. This audio book is a valuable resource for therapists and medical professionals to learn these techniques and to use with clients.