November Editorial- How Stressed Are You?

by Dr. Lisa Doran, ND

I am preparing to deliver a lecture at the Ontario Association of Naturopathic Doctors convention in a few weeks on the topic of how stress affects fertility, pregnancy and birth.  I have enthusiastically delved into my subject matter – we all know that a severe stressor is detrimental during pregnancy so my hypothesis seemed to be backed up well in the literature.  What I was not prepared for was the magnitude of the effect of every day little stressors on us all.  We are all so busy, so time crunched, so stressed.   Busy is now seen as normal, and busy-ness seems to be a constant in everyone’s lives –   as if we are trapped in a situation not of our own making.

Ask a friend you meet how they are doing and the reply more than likely will be “crazy busy”.  I know that I certainly am guilty of doing too much, of saying yes too often and of occupying my time sometimes with things that really don’t matter in the bigger picture.  It’s easy to loose focus with all the distractions around us.  Email, Social media, the internet, reality tv shows, constant live news, music  always in our ears and podcast and information overload.  All of these things create this need to be “plugged in” at all times and create an underlying sense of anxiety and stress.  We feel we are constantly behind, that we can’t get the important things in life done.  Most of us simply don’t have the life skills for coping in the type of world we have created.

All of this adds up to people who are constantly living in the stress response and are never able to get themselves out of it.   I see a lot of women in my practise who talk to me about insomnia, about their incredibly busy and scheduled lives, about low energy and about anxiety and depression and about many of the systems of the body simply shutting down.  Their blood pressure is up, their sugars are up, their cholesterol is up, their thyroid is not working well, their digestion is not working well (sound familiar?)  Frequently the cause is stress.  Not huge life event stressors but the stress of catching the 6:30 am GO train and running flat out at work the whole day and then catching the 5pm GO train home in time to make a very quick dinner and take their kids to one activity or another and then fall into bed at 11 or midnight only to get up the next day and do it all over again.

The solutions that are recommended for stress in all of the stress-reduction workbooks all seem inaccessible to people who are really stressed out because they ask for one thing these people don’t have:  TIME.  Exercising takes time, journaling takes time, relaxation or meditation takes time.  Engaging in one or all of these activities has definitively been shown to lower stress levels but sometimes finding the time to do them is more stressful than the benefits.   I was listening to a wonderful radio program in the car the other day and I heard someone discussing meditation and how when you can carve out the 20 minutes a day to try to meditate that it actually makes it feel like time slows down and that you have room in your life to fit healthy activities in.  He quoted Arthur C. Clark who described meditation as “the force of will to sit and do nothing”

When I was in naturopathic medical school we learned that health was all about balance.  Yin and Yang, light and darkness – learning about that still point that keeps us in wellness and prevents us moving toward disease.  This is balance.   My advice if you think that you might have too much stress in your life?  For three days keep a stress journal and every time you feel the stress response kick in and that surge of cortisol flood your body – write it down.  Start to think about the things in your life that are causing you stress and perhaps how you can reduce or change those things.  I’ve had people make remarkable changes in their lives doing this exercise and make empowering decisions – more down time, less TV, starting an exercise program, learning how to breathe, new jobs, shorter commutes, working from home, less evening activities.  Each of these things made a profound difference is someone’s life.

If you feel that your life is so busy that you can’t keep up start to look at the things that you may be doing in your life that could be causing the stress or occupying time that you could better be using for something else.  Learn to prioritize the things in your life that are important or essential and perhaps let some of your other commitments fall by the wayside.  You can create less busy-ness and more contentedness by focusing on those activities that help you to achieve balance and wellness.