Having said that, here are 5 ways to cope with stress:

1. Before setting out for an activity (shopping, parties, family gatherings) stop and think. Have a game plan for coping with the things that may crop up. If you know that Uncle Bernie is going to ask you about your job, have a ready answer (or a way to change the subject).
2. Spend some time breathing. There’s nothing mystical about this one: If you focus on your breathing, you are more likely to relax.
3. Set aside 10 minutes every day for your self. Break into the holiday headlong rush through days and nights and give yourself the chance to reflect.
4. Be sure you include activities that you like as well as those you feel you have to do. Torn between going to a family gathering and a friend’s party? Set a time limit on the family gathering, be ready for any negative fallout about leaving, and then go to your friend’s party, guilt free.
5. Take the time to consciously enjoy the things about the holidays that you like. Whether it’s time with friends or family, or giving presents, or holiday music, don’t allow the time slide buy while you focus on the day to day craziness.

Now a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows that losing weight may be harder if you don’t get enough sleep. Researchers at the US Food and Drug Administration showed that people on a diet and who were deprived of enough sleep (they only got 5 1/2 hours a night)  lost less fat than a similar group who got 8 1/2 hours of sleep. Worse in some ways was the fact that the sleep-restricted group lost weight from lean body mass (for example, muscle) more than the group who got enough sleep. People who are dieting and exercising in order to cut down fat and increase lean body mass should thus definitely be getting enough sleep.

In the past decade, researchers have focused interest on a neurohormone called ghrelin. It’s involved in sleep, appetite regulation, and energy metabolism. So once again the body’s neurochemistry links sleep and appetite. Both getting enough sleep and maintaining a healthy body weight are key to brain fitness.

Reference:

Nedeltcheva AV et a. (2010). Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Annals of Internal Medicine, 153;435-441.  Read the abstract here.

At the Cognitive Aging Summit (sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and featuring NIA-supported research), Martin Sliwinski reported data that show that the specific aspect of emotional distress that may be linked to problems in thinking and memory is something called unconstructive repetitive thought (URT).

Although the term reeks of jargon, it is helpful because it helps us understand the difference between various types of worry, ruminating, or obsessing. URT means that someone thinks a lot about something that is upsetting, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

It’s a little like pushing at a sore tooth in your mouth – you know that you shouldn’t, and that if you don’t leave it alone, you may make it worse. But still, it’s hard to stop.

It’s easy to guess that repeatedly thinking about upsetting things (your boss or spouse yelling at you, an especially bad ride home on the freeway that involved someone cutting in front of you) might cause repeated releases of stress-related neurohormones and immune factors.

Since we know that many of these substances have the capacity to be neurotoxic, it’s a simple (though unproven) link from URT to cognitive impairment.

How do you deal with URT?

• First, pay attention to thoughts that bother you and are upsetting. You may be engaging in URT without realizing it. Ask yourself, Is thinking about this making my heart race or making me feel jumpy and angry? Notice what you’re thinking about.
• Second, decide whether thinking is going to resolve anything. Sometimes, thinking about something over and over can help you figure out a solution to a problem. But worrying over and over about something in the past or future that you can’t control just makes you miserable. No matter how much you think about something, you can’t change the past or control the future.
• Third, make a commitment to deal with thoughts if you can’t deal with the problem. If you’re want to spend time going over something in your mind over and over, schedule a time (maybe 15 minutes) and do so. Don’t do the thinking any other time. Usually, people who learn to relax through meditation or breathing can learn to stop their URT. Regular mediation practice can also help you stop.

The study is part of ongoing research on British civil servants and is usually called Whitehall II.The researchers are following more than 6,000 men and women who were first evaluated in the early 90’s. Eleven years later whether they had died from a heart attack, had a heart attack but survived, or had significant pain from their hearts (angina). People who regularly worked an extra 3 to 4 hours had 1.6 times the risk of having coronary heart disease than were those who did not.

I’ve written in the this blog and said in my talks that more and more evidence shows that the things that are heart healthy are probably also brain healthy. If you think about how many blood vessels are in your brain, it makes sense that the same things that can have a bad effect on the blood vessels of the heart can also hurt the ones in your brain.

I would say the message is clear: maintain a balance between work and the rest of your life. If you do have to work more than may be good for you, be sure to have a clear strategy for stress management. Close your eyes once or twice a day and just breathe. Maybe you can picture yourself on a beach or sitting by a mountain lake. Doing this regularly can have a surprisingly big impact on your stress levels, even if you are working until 10:00 a night.

Reference:

Virtanen M et al. (2010) Overtime work and incidence coronary heart disease: the Whitehall II prospective cohort study. European Heart Journal advance access, published online May 11, 2010.doi: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehq124

Brain fitness may help you avoid the risk of being bored, and that’s almost undoubtedly a good thing. In an ongoing study in the UK, researchers found that those who reported the most boredom when they were evaluated in the late 1980s were two and a half times more likely to die by 2009.

But it’s not clear exactly why boredom might increase someone’s risk of death. The authors of the study in the International Journal of Epidemiology suggest that a report of boredom probably represents some other problem. Bored people may be depressed or anxious, for example, factors that have already been related to disease risk in a number of studies. They may be more likely to drink excessively or smoke and less likely to exercise, all factors that might increase risk for cardiovascular disease.

An important part of any brain fitness program is staying actively engaged with friends and the community. Other studies have shown, for example, that having friends or being involved in a volunteer program can reduce the risk of cognitive decline. This finding underlines the fact that your thoughts, feeling, and behavior can have significant effects on your health.

Reference:

Britton A, Shipley MJ. Bored to death? International Journal of Epidemiology, available online February 1, 2010.

Available online (free) at the journal website.