Transcription:
Everyday Habits for Stress Reduction

Deborah Howell (Host): Stress reduction can be a learned behavior and an everyday habit that helps you lead a more joyful life by regularly practicing mindfulness based stress reduction. You can make time to live more freely in the moment. Focus on the present and give yourself the mind space or the breathing room to positively affect your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Today, we'll speak with Ginny Jump, a nurse practitioner and integrative health professional at UM St. Joseph Medical Center for inspiration advice. And an uncommonly relaxing discussion about stress.

Welcome to The Live Greater Podcast series information for a healthier you from the university of Maryland Medical System. I'm your host, Deborah Howell. Welcome Ginny.

Ginny Jump: Jenny. Hi, Deborah. How are you today?

Deborah Howell (Host): Wonderful. And it's lovely to have you with us. So to begin at the beginning, what causes stress?

Ginny Jump: stress is anything that takes us out of our comfort zone or anything that we encounter or experience that challenges us. So, stress can be, being stuck in traffic when we're late for an appointment. It can be doing a renovation of our home. It can be caring for a loved one. Who's ill, doing, a work assignment or having something do at work or at school. So stress is everywhere and can be anything again that makes you uncomfortable or takes you out of your comfort zone or challenges you.

Many forms

Deborah Howell (Host): and what happens to the body when faced with stress. And what about the brain in paricular?.

in

Ginny Jump: It's the brain that reacts to the stress and when the brain reacts to the stress, it triggers what's called the neuroendocrine system. And with the neuroendocrine system, there's a cascade of reactions. So there are hormones that are release. These are called stress hormones. And then the sympathetic nervous system is activated. And all of these things do to the body and to the mind, things like increase your blood pressure, increase your heart, rate, your breathing, your muscle tone or tension. It helps ups the mind to maybe think more, clearly more, focus, more creatively. So these things can be really good. if you're in a situation where you're in a near car accident or it's a survival situation. And they can help you perform better at work help, you have maybe more, invigorated kind of day. It's when we're not able to turn off these stress responses and there's detrimental effects from having too much of the hormones released or the blood pressure staying elevated or the heart rate. That can cause cardiovascular disease, or the reactions of, your immune system being stressed because of the hormones are out of whack.

Cellular breakdown, oxidative stress, these things can cause cancer and infections. We can have problems with, the hormones not being regulated again, because they're just constantly on and we can have weight gain or digestive problems. We can have, sleep problems. And then just general anxiety, depression, mental health illnesses. So stress really is two things. It can be beneficial and survival and then it can be detrimental. So we need to talk more and we will about stress reduction.

Deborah Howell (Host): So that's kind of the downside of stress. Are there any more benefits of stress? I know you already mentioned a few.

Ginny Jump: Yeah. and you're right. I did mention them. And it's the idea that we have a better reaction time increased focus, and we can use that to drive us in the sense of doing better at work and performing and athletically. So being aware of where the stress is helpful and where it's not is probably what's the benefit of, stress, you know, knowing how it can help you, but also how you need to manage it.

Deborah Howell (Host): Now what's the difference, Ginny, between stress. Stress relief and stress management? Is one better than the than the others?

Ginny Jump: Deborah, I think that they all play. Together and they, all help us to cope with stress. And if you don't mind, I'll talk you through the three in different ways. Stress relief to start, we have a natural stress relief button, an innate it's called the relaxation response, and we can simply do this by taking some deep breaths. And then with that relaxation response, those deep breaths are relaxation techniques. So we want to use deep breathing meditation, guided meditations, things like that, that can help us relieve the stress almost instantly and feel a little bit better.

And then if we go on to stress reduction, it's having an awareness of our day to day life and where we are stressed and where we shouldn't sign up for anything else. If we were having a renovation of our house, we certainly shouldn't say, oh, I'll host Thanksgiving dinner. Or if we have, an ill loved one, we shouldn't be signing up for something at church or at the kid's school. So I see that as stress reduction and then stress management is. We're gonna have stress every day. That's always there. And how do we manage that?

So maybe the idea of on Sunday evenings, the family gets together and does meal prep so that the everyday stress of what's for lunch and what's for dinner are already taken care of. And so I think that there are ways that you can manage it. And again, putting all three together, one relief is kind of instant reduction is looking at where you don't do more. And then management is how you deal with it every day.

Deborah Howell (Host): Say no, deep breaths, make lunch. I love it. Okay. All right. If you're in the midst of a particularly stressful situation, how can you find a bit of peace?

Ginny Jump: I like the work of John Cabbot Zin. he does what is called mindfulness based stress reduction, or he created this program and there's a technique within it that is called stop. So S T O P. And first you stop. S and then T you take deep breaths and then you observe O. And you observe where you're feeling that stress, how you're feeling that stress. And then you observe, where are you? Are you sitting in your office? Are you sitting in your chair, in the car?

Then you observe what's around you. Is it sunny outside? Is it big clouds? raining. notice, the temperature. Are you hot? Are you cold? So this observing gives you a moment to pause and that's the next one P. So you pause, plan and proceed. So again, you observe and then that helps you to pause so that you can have your mind be calm so that you can plan what's next. And that moment in time, you have to not react the way you usually do when you know that that hasn't been good for you.

And then you can proceed. So it's very important to practice this. And it's really hard to practice this because we have neuro pathways, ways that we react that are ingrained in our brain, literally their pathways or their trenches. So we react the same way all the time because of how we've developed those neuro pathways. But science shows us that we can change the brain. this is neuroplasticity and it's the idea of practicing these types of stress, techniques that have different pathways, different, neuro pathways and, ways that we react.

So it can be, a lot of hard work to pause and do these things, and do this stop technique, but it's something that can make a profound change and help you in the midst of a stressful situation.

Deborah Howell (Host): What a wonderful exercise. Now we've mostly been talking about short term stress, but what happens if you're stressed for a long time? What are the best ways to manage stress long term?

Ginny Jump: So long term stress, I mentioned a little bit of the negative effects of stress and when it doesn't turn off and again, that can be that we have, Cardiovascular illnesses. We have, hormone imbalances that cause weight gain and digestive problems, sleep problems, cell breakdown or immune system doesn't work as well. Again, just to elaborate the negative effects of long term stress are profound, and we really wanna work on not having that. And so ways to manage some of that long term stress are what we said earlier.

The stress relief, stress reduction, stress management, bringing in some of those different things and quite simply Meditation, mindfulness practices, deep breathing, yoga practice, doing different things like acupuncture, massage, all of those things help us to decrease some of that stress, turn down those stress hormones, those stress response, and, not have the negative effects of long term stress.

Deborah Howell (Host): Sure. Now for me it was useful just hearing you say your brain can change. Knowing that it's just not locked in a fixed position. Ah, that suddenly helps you breathe a bit better right.

Ginny Jump: Right. Good. Yeah. It's very empowering. Very motivating.

Deborah Howell (Host): Is it possible to avoid stress altogether? Has there ever been such a person that's been able

Ginny Jump: that's been able to do I can't imagine. No, I don't think so. I mean, look at our world, look at our life. Everything is more stimulating that then can create, our stress. So, I don't think it's possible to avoid it all together, but I think, it can be somewhat helpful as we've said a couple times, the idea that it can be, stimulating to us, help us to perform better, help us to think better, be more creative. But it's the idea of when is it, too much. And when do we need to find ways to cope with the stress that we have in our lives better.

Deborah Howell (Host): Sure. We've mentioned many already, but what are some other ways to reduce stress?

Ginny Jump: Just the idea of having a daily practice of, finding some type of meditation that you practice each morning so that you can set your day in a way that will serve you best or keep you, not as stressed and cope better with stress. Having support from family and friends, having a social group that you can talk to, different things that you can do, or, art therapy, music therapy, coloring, all of those things can help us deal better with stress. And then again, finding ways to manage it and reduce it as well.

Deborah Howell (Host): We keep an adult coloring book at our office and we pass it around and it's been a good, good thing. People really enjoy it. And when we finish that thing at the end of the month, we're like, yay. Everything. , We did it.

Ginny Jump: That's great to hear good for your office.

Deborah Howell (Host): Yeah. Any other tips

Ginny Jump: Any other tips

Yes, absolutely. I'm full of tips and I love giving tips and it would be that, the mindfulness based stress reduction that I talked about from John Cabbot Zin, that work is really foundational and you can start your. Mindfulness your ability to be more aware and deal with the stresses in life through that program. But we're really, really fortunate in that there's a free online version. It's called Palouse and it's P A L O U S E Mindfulness. And so just Google that, and it's free, as I said, it's eight sessions. So it says that it's eight weeks, but you can do it at your own self-paced, way.

And I think, again, it's a really helpful way to get started with mindfulness. I know there are many meditation apps out there. There's insight timer, Headspace calm, and you do need to give yourself some, patience or have some patience with learning them because it takes a lot to find the different fineses of them that work better for you. I'm stuck on one of those three and love it. And I've looked at the other two, but I'm so used to the first one, my neuro pathways have been ingrained for. First one and I use it.

Please if you want to try these apps or any type of meditation app, the first thing you would wanna do is see where it has a timer so that it can alert you three times a day to maybe just take some deep breaths or have a three minute meditation. You can also look at the app for where there are guided meditations. A lot of people think that meditation is sitting like a Buddha and not thinking or not doing anything. And they're like, I can't do that. Well, I don't think anybody can really do that, not except the monks and Buddha himself.

So, the guided meditations keep you focused on. Meditating and taking deep breaths and calming the mind. so you need to look through these apps and figure out how they can work best for you. And I wanna mention with the guided meditations, you can then go into categories. You can go into a category of stress. Or anxiety or of grief, so they can be really, really helpful and, a critical part of your, daily activities and routine. And then finally, as a yoga teacher instructor, I really believe in yoga and the profound effects of that mind, body practice. the idea that we use prone Yama or breathwork to help calm the mind.

And then we use asanas or poses that help the body to stay limb, to stay, more able to have a good equilibrium, to, prevent you from having injuries. So yoga is union and it's using the breath to bring the body and the mind to together so that it can, deal with stress and help you to have an everyday habit for stress reduction.

Deborah Howell (Host): And yoga inside is a wonderful thing, Jenny, but yoga outside with a breeze in your hair, the sun on your shoulders. I don't know

Ginny Jump: I dunno when I've ever

Deborah Howell (Host): Oh, that's

Ginny Jump: beautiful. Deborah, have you done beach yoga?

Deborah Howell (Host): Yes. Yes. Just incredible. And then the dolphins show up on cue, and you think, okay, life is not so bad, is it

Ginny Jump: Is it? Oh, that's

Deborah Howell (Host): But even if you just have a little patch of carpet in your house somewhere, and a yoga mat, you can get many of the same benefits. But if you can, I like doing those guided meditations outside on a walk or a hike. I think that ups the anti on them

Ginny Jump: Well, thank you. I agree. That's wonderful input.

Deborah Howell (Host): Well, Ginny, it's been fascinating and helpful and just wonderful talking to you. Thanks so much

Ginny Jump: Thanks so much for being Oh, Deborah. Thank you.

Deborah Howell (Host): And you can find more shows just like this one at umms.org/podcast. Thanks for listening to Live Greater. A health and wellness podcast brought to you by the University of Maryland Medical System. We look forward to you joining us again.