Don’t Let Anger Give You a Heart Attack.

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

What should we do with anger bottled up inside of us? A recent article in the Washington Post discussed a serious effect of one option, that of letting out the raw anger, even to the point of throwing things and threatening to hurt other people.

A common theme for some mental health professionals has been that we should get the anger out. For these therapists, sessions can consist of banging a pillow (usually representing  parents who were taken as having failed the client), with a bat that has many of the properties of a nasty club, but is in fact safely padded.

The Washington Post article describes a study in which about 4000 people who had heart attacks were asked about their experiences of anger. Heart attacks were twice as likely to occur after an episode of anger. There was a tendency for the heart attacks to occur within two hours of the anger episode.

Patients were also asked to rate how intense their anger episode had been, and the more intense the anger episode, the more likely patients were to have a heart attack.

So we have therapists trying to help us get the anger out versus research showing that expressing anger can lead to a heart attack.  So what are we to do? Should we bottled up our anger or express it?

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Posted in Effective Communication, Expressing Feelings, Focusing, Resilience and Health | Leave a comment

Overthinking No More.

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

I don’t remember where I first ran into the concept of overthinking, but it appealed to me. Both Debbie and I understand the limitations of the parts of the brain that underlie thinking. We also are aware of the often unrecognized strengths of the “emotional brain”, which is commonly regarded as a giving birth to mere “fluff”.

Emotion is certainly not “fluff”. Antonio and Hannah Da Massio have shown that we need cooperation between the emotional brain and the thinking brain in order to deal with the real world. They showed that people with brain injuries that left both their thinking and their emotional brains intact, but blocked them from cooperating with each other resulted in smart people with extremely poor judgment.

These people could do very well on IQ tests, and even give intelligent answers to questions like “How many giraffes are there in the United States” that require creative and complicated thinking strategies.

So, when I ran into several articles about overthinking, I already knew that placing too much emphasis on thinking and too little on feeling and emotions would lead to poor outcomes. So the word “overthinking” grabbed my attention.

The go-to book on overthinking is one called “Women Who Think Too Much” by Prof. Susan Noel-Hoeksema. (Why just women? She pointed out that women are more likely than men to overthink. That is true, but actually, the few available research sources indicate a small, though statistically significant difference. So the book is also useful for guys).

As I began working my way through the book, I was impressed, and I recommended it to Debbie.

But, eventually I saw that reading the book is like taking a ride on a roller coaster, with the excitement and fun of learning alternating with pages of tedium. (This was my experience, not necessarily the objective truth.)

The best thing about the book is that it is full of methods for reducing overthinking.

So, here is my take:

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Posted in Exercise, General Resilience Topic, Resilience Skills, Self-Compassion, Self-Soothing, Self-Understanding, Skills | Leave a comment

How to Teach Your Worrier Brain to Function Like A Warrior Brain

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Jerry and Debbie Sheridan

Our last two posts focused on research showing that there are two variants of a gene that result in your having either a “worrier brain” or a “warrior brain”. However, the research also shows that a “worrier” can function like a “warrior” with the right kind of training. Extensively exposing worriers to simulations of the stressors they need to face enabled many of them to deal with stress as effectively as warriors.

This “exposure training” has been used widely by psychotherapists, and its efficacy is well established.

A second approach that improves performance under stress is “reappraisal”. An excellent example of reappraisal is teaching people about the helpful effects of our bodily stress responses. For example, blood glucose can be increased due to stress, and that can help when facing challenges like taking tests. Again, this is not new to psychotherapists; commonly they point out that what a person is experiencing as fear or anxiety can also be seen as “excitement”. This kind of shift in perspective has been shown to work.

In this post we want to point out some other things that both of us feel are particularly useful in dealing with stress.

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Posted in Effective Resilience Training, Exercise, Genes and Resilience | Leave a comment

Your Stress Responses and the Wisdom of the Body

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

In our last post, we discussed genetic variations that result in our having either a “worrier” or a “warrior” brain. We also mentioned that worriers can handle stress effectively, even function at the level of Navy Seals, if they are properly trained. Sufficiently trained, worriers can deal with demanding situations as well as warriors.

What makes this possible? Despite the bodily stress reactions we have that are inborn, how we interpret those reactions can dramatically shift how we react.

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Posted in Adversity and Resilience, Genes and Resilience, Resilience Research, Resilience Skills | Leave a comment

Genetic Variants That Can Determine Whether We Have a “Worrier Brain” or A “Warrior Brain” and What We Can Do About Them.

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

This post is based on an article I recently found in the New York Times. It makes several important claims:

  1. There are two variants of a specific gene that influence how quickly we recover from stressful experiences.
  2. We get one from our mother and the other from our father.
  3. The pattern of these genes we inherit determines whether we will be “worriers” or “warriors”.
  4. Worriers are people who have to struggle with stressful experiences and warriors are people for whom stress reactions quickly pass by.
  5. Whether we have the genetic pattern that gives us a warrior brain or a worrier brain, there is at least one simple technique that can make us deal efficiently with stress.

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Posted in Attitudes of Resilience, Effective Resilience Training, Genes and Resilience | Leave a comment

Can Foreseeing a Dark Future Result in Less Disability and Lower Likelihood of Death?

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

About a week ago, Debbie came back from her morning run and said she heard on the radio that a study had been published supporting the idea that pessimism is more conducive to physical health than optimism.

She went on to say that, based on the description of what was being called “pessimism”, it struck her as “anticipation”, which is a well-known successful way of coping with life. Anticipation means looking ahead to the future so that you can avoid being blind-sided by events.

There is abundant research showing that optimism is much more helpful than pessimism, e.g. this article. If there are circumstances in which pessimism beats optimism, we need to know about them.

In this post we will tell you about the results of our search for the details of this study and our interpretation of the results.

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Posted in General Resilience Topic, Harvard Grant Study, Positivity/Negativity | Leave a comment

Does Secure Attachment to Others Lead to High Resilience?

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

There is interesting research showing that how securely we attach to our caregivers as young children plays an important role in our resilience as adults. Children who develop a secure attachment to their mother (or other caregiver) tend, as adults, to be resilient in the face of challenges.

Does this mean that your level of resilience became a settled matter when you were little, and nothing can be done about it now? We don’t think so.

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Posted in Adversity and Resilience, Attitudes of Resilience, How Hard Is It To Change Resilience?, Resilience Training | Leave a comment

Some Things You Can Learn From Abraham Lincoln about How to Manage Your Life.

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

A recent article in the New York Times showed that Abraham Lincoln’s methods of managing the country can serve as a guide to managing a business.

It struck me that each of us is the CEO of her or his own life. Could it be that Lincoln’s way of managing the country can teach us something about managing our own lives?

I think it can, and the purpose of this post is to explain why I believe that, and to show how you can try it out.

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Ways to Slow Down the Pace of Your Aging and Function Better Despite Your Biological Age

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

This may appear to be a preposterous claim, but there is good reason to believe that, through building your resilience, you can slow your body’s rate of cellular aging, and also that, regardless of your cellular age, you can match the functional level of young people if you have good resilience skills.

“Illusory Aging”

I frequently hear my friends complain about loss of memory, being tired, or lacking energy, which they attribute to aging. I am convinced that many of the symptoms they attribute to age are really due to a lack of exercise, or to making unreasonable demands on the brain in an era of information overload. Usually this kind of “aging” can be dealt with moderate exercise and easing up on the demands we make on our brains, e.g. quieting the mind through meditation. We could as well say it can be dealt with by reducing stress and improving our resilience skills.

Real Aging and What You Can Do About It.

Of course, there is also real aging, even down to the cellular level. For example, there are little end caps on chromosomes, called telomeres. Telomeres shorten each time a cell divides, and therefore they are an index of biological aging. There is clearly nothing illusory about that kind of aging.

In fact, in a study by Elissa Epel and her colleagues, women who reported being highly stressed had telomere lengths that indicated ten more years of aging than the telomeres of less stressed women.

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Hazards of a Life That is All Work and No Play.

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Jerry Sheridan

For some time now, it has been obvious that Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was exhausted. She has coped with many extreme stresses for years. Recently she collapsed and suffered a concussion. Then she had a blood clot near her brain. She has recovered, and we do not need to tell her she needs to lighten up her life. Even before her collapse she had made it clear that she would no longer be U.S. Secretary of State.

It is a shame that so many people work so hard that they damage themselves. I wonder how many other people out there are pushing themselves to such damaging levels?  Why do we not refuse to continue when stress has obviously reached those risky levels?

There are many good reasons to demand so much of ourselves.

Many people have to do it just to make ends meet.  Others may push themselves out of personal ambition. Many sacrifice their personal well-being on behalf of people they care about, ranging from friends and family to fellow citizens.

When we choose to make such sacrifices, it is important to be aware of the risks to our health, and even our lives.

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Posted in Happiness, Positivity/Negativity | Leave a comment