121–130 of 132 posts
Is the summary accurate? It says "A new study sheds light on how the brain changes as a result of chronic stress", but the rest of the article only mentions acute stress.
It's not uncommon to see such basic flaws or misinterpretations in various articles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
Thanks for the advice. And not to be argumentative, but I think it's fair to say that neither you nor anyone else on the planet knows with certainty the full range of possible benefits and detriments to exercise, psilocybin (particularly, in no small part because it is illegal to even formally study for the most part), or anything else for that matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It takes a long pause from stress for you mind and body to stop over-producing stress hormones. I can vouch for this, I feel like I have been permanently damaged from a multi-year stressful job. Speaking of stress hormones, does anyone in this thread know if there's some quantitative way to measure stress hormone levels, even if it's only somewhat accurate? The best real relief I've managed to find is microdosing p…
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
No it really isn't, even if it might seem that way in the short term.
Source: Personal. Xanax for occasional stress turned into Xanax for sleep sometimes turned into Xanax every night or insomnia. Kicking the habit now and it really sucks.
Stick to exercise and meditation. Actually agree with grandparent about the benefits of psilocybin, but you probably shouldn't listen to a stranger on the internet about that anyway.
Throwaway for obvious reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It takes a long pause from stress for you mind and body to stop over-producing stress hormones. I can vouch for this, I feel like I have been permanently damaged from a multi-year stressful job. Speaking of stress hormones, does anyone in this thread know if there's some quantitative way to measure stress hormone levels, even if it's only somewhat accurate? The best real relief I've managed to find is microdosing p…
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
> If anything the drug you are looking for is Ativan or Xanax. No it really isn't, even if it might seem that way in the short term. Source: Personal. Xanax for occasional stress turned into Xanax for sleep sometimes turned into Xanax every night or insomnia. Kicking the habit now and it really sucks. Stick to exercise and meditation. Actually agree with grandparent about the benefits of psilocybin, but you probably…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so interesting, thank you for sharing. I was recently thinking about affection in my own early childhood - I grew up with loving parents (and grandparents) who were happy to hug me etc. The only 'weird' thing that stands out in terms of affection offered by my family is that my mom was apparently afraid to hold me for the first few days after my birth - I was her first child and she was worried she'd drop or…
We know human touch is important and that a lack of it will cause severe psychological problems. The evidence is from Russian orphans with kids who were never held or touched. There is also evidence with monkeys and the wire doll mothers. This falls under the wider psychological theory Attachment and need for the infant to have its needs met which is very dependent on the parent. Attachment is probably a life long th…
Either way I fear I'm going down a path of the kind of self-analysis that is best left to a professional, so I'll leave it at that and enjoy feeling well-adjusted even if it's all an illusion :D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Approaching age 50, there are a lot more "I should have walked away sooners" than "I should have stuck with thats" in the rear view mirror. But I can't say it's generally good advice to walk away frequently because I'm not sure what the outcome of so much walking away would have been.
That's very true. From my mid 50s perspective there's been a couple of big, "I really should have stuck with thats", but mainly "life's too short to put up with that garbage". Which of course makes it really hard to generalise into advice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find my stress reactions are still coloured by a long past sustained period of stress, about twenty years ago. That's despite a life fairly free of it in the intervening period, and no remaining symptoms of that time. With hindsight I should have walked away long before I started questioning my situation.
Approaching age 50, there are a lot more "I should have walked away sooners" than "I should have stuck with thats" in the rear view mirror. But I can't say it's generally good advice to walk away frequently because I'm not sure what the outcome of so much walking away would have been.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It takes a long pause from stress for you mind and body to stop over-producing stress hormones. I can vouch for this, I feel like I have been permanently damaged from a multi-year stressful job. Speaking of stress hormones, does anyone in this thread know if there's some quantitative way to measure stress hormone levels, even if it's only somewhat accurate? The best real relief I've managed to find is microdosing p…
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
be very careful, these drugs don't fix the problem but rather solve panic attack type situations. if you can breathe, you do not need these medicines. there are lots of other medicines that are not benzos that treat the anxiety at the source.
i am speaking from experience, i was taking ativan "as needed" and ended up in an overnight psych hold as my stress outbursts kept getting worse until my family feared for my safety. stopped all medication for a month, switched to an anti-depressant to sleep temporarily, switched to less agitated medicine, 10 months later i feel like i'm on top of the world and have started taking back ownership of activities in my business.
ativan and xanax wont' stop the stress, it masks it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
> If anything the drug you are looking for is Ativan or Xanax. No it really isn't, even if it might seem that way in the short term. Source: Personal. Xanax for occasional stress turned into Xanax for sleep sometimes turned into Xanax every night or insomnia. Kicking the habit now and it really sucks. Stick to exercise and meditation. Actually agree with grandparent about the benefits of psilocybin, but you probably…
> Actually agree with grandparent about the benefits of psilocybin, but you probably shouldn't listen to a stranger on the internet about that anyway.
You certainly shouldn't base your opinion on one comment on the internet. What you should do they is consider it a possibility and do your own research, at which time you will discover there is significant discussion on the internet among both layman and professionals about not just the observed benefits (sometimes bordering on the profoundly amazing [1]), but also increasing detailed, science-based theories about the underlying physiological and neurological causes for the observed successes.
You will also realize the ratio of successful outcomes to unsuccessful (no result or harmful) are heavily skewed towards successful stories. Is this ratio driven by a bunch of drug-addled delusional lunatics, or might there be something interesting going on here?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment
-------------------------------------------------
As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.
“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”
-------------------------------------------------
"But this can't possibly be true", one might semi-reasonably propose, "because if it was we would surely know about it!"
Incorrect. That is an logical/epistemic error, something that is at the foundation of a large portion of any common disagreement in society, from politics to finance to personal relationships.
As the saying goes: "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So"."
One reason "because if it was we would surely know about it" should not be taken for granted is in the same article:
-------------------------------------------------
“I felt a little like an archeologist unearthing a completely buried body of knowledge,” he said. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, psychedelics had been used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. “Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding,” Ross said.
Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects. (These figures don’t include classified research.) Through the mid-nineteen-sixties, psilocybin and LSD were legal and remarkably easy to obtain. Sandoz, the Swiss chemical company where, in 1938, Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD, gave away large quantities of Delysid—LSD—to any researcher who requested it, in the hope that someone would discover a marketable application. Psychedelics were tested on alcoholics, people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressives, autistic children, schizophrenics, terminal cancer patients, and convicts, as well as on perfectly healthy artists and scientists (to study creativity) and divinity students (to study spirituality). The results reported were frequently positive. But many of the studies were, by modern standards, poorly designed and seldom well controlled, if at all. When there were controls, it was difficult to blind the researchers—that is, hide from them which volunteers had taken the actual drug. (This remains a problem.)
By the mid-nineteen-sixties, LSD had escaped from the laboratory and swept through the counterculture. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and put most psychedelics on Schedule 1, prohibiting their use for any purpose. Research soon came to a halt, and what had been learned was all but erased from the field of psychiatry. “By the time I got to medical school, no one even talked about it,” Ross said.
-------------------------------------------------
