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I was trained as a neuroscientist, took me over a decade to realize two important, basic, biological facts I wasn't taught: 1) Stress is always on - always. It
by robg 10y ago
I was trained as a neuroscientist, took me over a decade to realize two important, basic, biological facts I wasn't taught:
1) Stress is always on - always. It's the survival instinct that can be reduced but not turned off.
2) Sleep is quite simply the recovery from stress. Without proper sleep, we don't recover.
Now as we develop technologies for stress management, I'm still amazed that #1 and #2 are not as commonly understood - and talked about - as the need for good nutrition and hydration. The body was designed to stress and sleep. We ignore those primal drives to our short- and long-term peril.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> Stress is always on - always. It's the survival instinct that can be reduced but not turned off. This idea goes back decades ago to Hans Selye. He even postulated that there are optimal levels of stress that promote the most well-being - not too much, no too little. These become sort of self-evident when you think of the need to exercise and so on.
- BooneJS 10y agoI'm not a neuroscientist, but I have noticed in my life that there's certainly times where stress and internal drive form a loop which interferes with sleep. Crunch time, changes in employment, or trying to get something new off the ground with issues you don't yet know how to solve all adds up. Fight-or-Flight is a valuable response to actual life-and-death danger, but for some the brain turns too many innocuous things into saber tooth tigers.
- Practicality 10y agoThe worst is when you are so tired you can't sleep. I get that way if I stay awake ~36 hours or more. I try not to do that anymore though.
- shostack 10y agoif stress is chemical, is there not a good way to dampen or come close to removing it chemically? Would there be major health downsides to working to reduce stress in your life to this degree?
- robg 10y agoTrue. Alcohol and sedatives work really well. Both are addictive. Best natural approach appears to be exercise, which also helps us sleep better.
- thatcat 10y agoAdrenaline uptake can be prevented with beta blockers[0], such as propanolol[1] which is often prescribed for blood pressure, arrhythmia, and performance anxiety. The down sides are when you stop taking it, you may be hypersensitive to stress since other methods of dealing with the adrenaline have been neglected. Exercise and meditation are better ways to reduce the effects of stress in the long term. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol
- DigitalJack 10y agoI take propranolol for both BP and stress. I also meditate. I can attest to propranolol's effectiveness for acute anxiety. Meditation is about equally effective for me, but not always practical.
- peterDeranger 10y ago"The body was designed to stress and sleep" robg, tell me – What kind of nonsens is this? Designed by whom? God? That's just fiction mongering my friend.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoI think sleep is talked about - but it is not understood. Specifically, unlike nutrition and hydration, we seem to be struggling to define conditions necessary for getting good sleep. And while I agree that exercise helps, there have been times when I used to tire myself out a lot via exercise and still struggled to fall asleep.