It could be a morning traffic jam. A deadline at work. A conflict with a family member. Taking care of kids and aging parents.
Stressful situations are all around us, and experts say how we manage stress is key to preventing it from causing long-term health problems — both physical and mental.
“It’s like walking around with a ten or fifteen-pound weight continually on your back and not being able to shed that weight,” psychologist Dr. Zindel Segal told Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC’s The Dose.
There are techniques and strategies to decrease that stressful load, however, and lessen the impact of stress on the body and the mind.
Is stress good or bad?
Stress means that we are unable to use our personal or social resources to meet the demands being placed on us, said Dr. Eli Puterman, a health psychologist and associate professor in the school of kinesiology at UBC.
But not all stress is bad stress, said Puterman.
“It sometimes can motivate you to also move in the direction of, ‘Let’s change our goals,'” he said.
From an evolutionary perspective, our bodies are engineered to handle stress, said Segal, a distinguished professor of psychology and mood disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
But after the stress response, we need a period of rest and recovery, which allows the body to recoup the resources that were used up during the stressful situation.
Chronic stress is when we’re unable to step out of the situation and take advantage of our own natural capacity to restore, said Segal.
It’s a system that is “stuck in the fifth gear without the ability to downshift,” he said.
Connecting with your senses
The first step to managing stress is recognizing it, said Segal, and that means tuning into our bodies.
“Are you noticing that maybe your heart is racing, or that your palms are sweating, or that your temple and forehead are pounding?” he said.
Grounding techniques can anchor us in the present moment and help pull us away from intrusive thoughts or feelings to take a broader view of the situation, said Segal.
Deep breathing and meditation can both help you tune into your senses during stressful moments. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)
“One of the things that we lose the ability to connect with is the sensory world,” he said, which is why so many techniques for managing stress are about reconnecting with your senses.
“Sensations are a way of actually helping us step out of thinking, to ground ourselves.”
A breath of fresh air
Doing yoga, meditating, exercising and deep breathing can all help ground us in our bodies and change our perspectives on stress, said Segal.
However, stress can cause barriers to being physically active, said Puterman, so he prefers to think about moving our bodies as opposed to exercising.
“Getting outside and going for some walks for 10, 15 minutes per day can help us start having those moments where we’re taking care of our bodies,” he said.
LISTEN | Try this guided exercise in box breathing with Dr. Zindel Segal:
Sit in a chair and notice the sensations of sitting: the feet pressing down into the floor, the hands folded in the lap or on the thighs.
Breathe in for four beats (visualize the left side of the box).
Hold for four beats (visualize the top of the box).
Breathe out for four beats (visualize the right side of the box).
Hold for four beats (visualize the bottom of the box).
Repeat as many times as you like.
What stress does to the body
It may be easy to understand how stress can take an emotional and mental toll, but research also shows that stress can have an impact on our physical health — including an increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
“In the short term, it rapidly increases your blood pressure, which can potentially result in a tear in the plaque that is in your arteries and then subsequently cause a heart attack or a stroke,” said Dr. Hassan Mir, a cardiologist at the Ottawa Heart Institute.
When we’re feeling stress, it activates our sympathetic nervous system, the part of our nervous system that carries signals related to our fight-or-flight response.
That can cause an increase in our blood pressure and heart rate, said Mir.
Another reaction to acute stress is a condition called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or a weakened heart muscle, he said.
“When you’re really stressed, you can have this release of adrenaline in your body,” Mir said.
WATCH / We can’t avoid stress, but we can learn how to deal with it:
Stress can create long-term health impacts: ‘It’s all about how you cope,’ says psychologist
6 months ago
Duration 1:49
Mir has seen people who come into the hospital because their partner had a cardiac arrest, and then they suddenly get rushed to the ER because it looks like they’re having a heart attack.
“You go and look inside and the coronary arteries look completely fine, but their heart muscle looks like it’s completely weakened,” Mir said.
If you’re frequently activating your sympathetic nervous system due to stress, that can cause other issues in the body, said Puterman.
“If you’re starting to shift your baseline of the functioning of your physiology, you’re now entering the state where now you have too much cortisol that’s then activating too much glucose release,” he said.
Too much glucose released into the body can cause people to enter a pre-diabetes state, said Puterman.
How much stress is too much?
A little bit of stress could help us handle more stressful events in the future, a theory called the inoculation hypothesis, said Puterman.
“Some stress on a daily basis or in life actually inoculates you to future exposures to stressors,” he said.
But there are some telltale signs that the stress you’re experiencing is causing harmful effects, said Puterman. They include:
Not sleeping well.
Not getting as much exercise as usual.
Consuming more alcohol or drugs.
Withdrawing from others socially.
Getting into more arguments with family or friends.
The trick is finding that sweet spot, said Segal, between having enough stress and too much.
“We don’t want to tip over into a point where the stress that we’re facing is overwhelming,” Segal said.
The Canadian government says it will donate up to 200,000 vaccine doses to fight the mpox outbreak in Congo and other African countries.
It says the donated doses of Imvamune will come from Canada’s existing supply and will not affect the country’s preparedness for mpox cases in this country.
Minister of Health Mark Holland says the donation “will help to protect those in the most affected regions of Africa and will help prevent further spread of the virus.”
Dr. Madhukar Pai, Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health, says although the donation is welcome, it is a very small portion of the estimated 10 million vaccine doses needed to control the outbreak.
Vaccine donations from wealthier countries have only recently started arriving in Africa, almost a month after the World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.
A few days after the declaration in August, Global Affairs Canada announced a contribution of $1 million for mpox surveillance, diagnostic tools, research and community awareness in Africa.
On Thursday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said mpox is still on the rise and that testing rates are “insufficient” across the continent.
Jason Kindrachuk, Canada research chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, said donating vaccines, in addition to supporting surveillance and diagnostic tests, is “massively important.”
But Kindrachuk, who has worked on the ground in Congo during the epidemic, also said that the international response to the mpox outbreak is “better late than never (but) better never late.”
“It would have been fantastic for us globally to not be in this position by having provided doses a much, much longer time prior than when we are,” he said, noting that the outbreak of clade I mpox in Congo started in early 2023.
Clade II mpox, endemic in regions of West Africa, came to the world’s attention even earlier — in 2022 — as that strain of virus spread to other countries, including Canada.
Two doses are recommended for mpox vaccination, so the donation may only benefit 100,000 people, Pai said.
Pai questioned whether Canada is contributing enough, as the federal government hasn’t said what percentage of its mpox vaccine stockpile it is donating.
“Small donations are simply not going to help end this crisis. We need to show greater solidarity and support,” he said in an email.
“That is the biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic — our collective safety is tied with that of other nations.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
HALIFAX – The Nova Scotia government says it could be months before it reveals how many people are on the wait-list for a family doctor.
The head of the province’s health authority told reporters Wednesday that the government won’t release updated data until the 160,000 people who were on the wait-list in June are contacted to verify whether they still need primary care.
Karen Oldfield said Nova Scotia Health is working on validating the primary care wait-list data before posting new numbers, and that work may take a matter of months. The most recent public wait-list figures are from June 1, when 160,234 people, or about 16 per cent of the population, were on it.
“It’s going to take time to make 160,000 calls,” Oldfield said. “We are not talking weeks, we are talking months.”
The interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health said people on the list are being asked where they live, whether they still need a family doctor, and to give an update on their health.
A spokesperson with the province’s Health Department says the government and its health authority are “working hard” to turn the wait-list registry into a useful tool, adding that the data will be shared once it is validated.
Nova Scotia’s NDP are calling on Premier Tim Houston to immediately release statistics on how many people are looking for a family doctor. On Tuesday, the NDP introduced a bill that would require the health minister to make the number public every month.
“It is unacceptable for the list to be more than three months out of date,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said Tuesday.
Chender said releasing this data regularly is vital so Nova Scotians can track the government’s progress on its main 2021 campaign promise: fixing health care.
The number of people in need of a family doctor has more than doubled between the 2021 summer election campaign and June 2024. Since September 2021 about 300 doctors have been added to the provincial health system, the Health Department said.
“We’ll know if Tim Houston is keeping his 2021 election promise to fix health care when Nova Scotians are attached to primary care,” Chender said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Newfoundland and Labrador‘s chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says that so far this year, the province has recorded 230 confirmed cases of the vaccine-preventable respiratory tract infection, also known as pertussis.
Late last month, Quebec reported more than 11,000 cases during the same time period, while Ontario counted 470 cases, well above the five-year average of 98. In Quebec, the majority of patients are between the ages of 10 and 14.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has declared a whooping cough outbreak across the province. A total of 141 cases were reported by last month, exceeding the five-year average of 34.
The disease can lead to severe complications among vulnerable populations including infants, who are at the highest risk of suffering from complications like pneumonia and seizures. Symptoms may start with a runny nose, mild fever and cough, then progress to severe coughing accompanied by a distinctive “whooping” sound during inhalation.
“The public, especially pregnant people and those in close contact with infants, are encouraged to be aware of symptoms related to pertussis and to ensure vaccinations are up to date,” Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Department said in a statement.
Whooping cough can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccination is the most effective way to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the province has expanded immunization efforts this school year. While booster doses are already offered in Grade 9, the vaccine is now being offered to Grade 8 students as well.
Public health officials say whooping cough is a cyclical disease that increases every two to five or six years.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s acting chief medical officer of health expects the current case count to get worse before tapering off.
A rise in whooping cough cases has also been reported in the United States and elsewhere. The Pan American Health Organization issued an alert in July encouraging countries to ramp up their surveillance and vaccination coverage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2024.
