Learning to Recognize Symptoms of Stress

The nagging headache starts at the office. You feel tired. You’re having trouble concentrating. Your productivity starts to suffer, and you begin to wonder if you’re coming down with the flu. By the time you get home you’re ready to tuck yourself into bed. The chills and fever never materialize but your symptoms don’t go away.

While persistent headaches, fatigue, frequent forgetfulness and decreased productivity can be signs of illness, stress is often the culprit. Stress can affect your body physically, can impair thoughts and emotions, and can impact behavior.

• Physically, excessive or long-term stress can cause headache, back pain, chest pain, high blood pressure, erratic heart beat, stomach and intestinal problems, and sleep problems. Persistent stress can decrease your immunity to disease and cause heart disease.
• Emotionally, persistent stress can cause anxiety, restlessness, excessive worry, irritability, sadness, anger, feelings of insecurity, inability to concentrate and forgetfulness. Left untreated, stress can lead to serious depression.
• Behavior changes associated with constant stress include overeating or undereating, problems managing and controlling anger, drug or alcohol abuse, increased smoking, social withdrawal, crying spells and relationship conflicts.

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms of excessive or chronic stress, it is important to seek medical help. Naturally, a trip to your primary care physician to rule out and address any physical illness that may be responsible for your symptoms is in order. However, if chronic stress is the source of your symptoms, you will have to go beyond your primary care physician to cure what ails you. 

Chronic stress can be treated and overcome and you can learn to live a happier, more balanced, relatively stress-free life. With the help and guidance of a psychiatrist experienced in stress management, you can learn to recognize your personal stressors and how they impact your life and health. Through cognitive-behavioral therapy, an experienced psychiatrist can help you learn to recognize and control your reaction to stress. With expert guidance, you can learn new techniques for responding to stressful situations and people. You don’t have to let control your life. With help, you can learn to control stress and regain control of your life.

Hypereaters Can’t Stop Craving Bad Foods

America’s love affair with unhealthy food may be more disturbing than we realized. According to research conducted by the former chief of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as many as 70 million Americans probably suffer from some degree of “conditioned hypereating.”  Dr. David Kessler defines hypereating as a willpower-sapping compulsion to eat high-fat, high-sugar foods, even when you’re not hungry. Kessler says the phenomenon accounts for the unhealthy food cravings that plague most Americans.

Hypereaters aren’t lured by carrots and celery sticks. Analysis of numerous brain studies led Kessler to conclude that foods loaded with sugar, fat and salt override the brain’s normal hunger cues and trigger the desire to overindulge. Neuroscientists have found that fat and sugar combinations activate the brain’s dopamine pathway — the pleasure-sensing center — in the same way as addictive drugs and alcohol. Kessler says that, like addiction, hypereating is a conditioned response. Each pleasurable experience encourages repetition. The more sugary, fatty foods you eat, the harder they are to resist.

Kessler says it’s a vicious cycle, but one that provides a new way of looking at America’s obesity epidemic. Calling obesity America’s “next great public-health campaign,” Kessler hopes a new perspective will lead to new methods that will help people fight obesity and tame their food cravings. While the problem is multi-fold, Kessler says the food industry must share the blame for America’s widening waistline. “The food industry has figured out what works. They know what drives people to keep on eating,” Kessler told the Associated Press in an interview earlier this year.

Overeaters must also take responsibility for their actions, Kessler said, and retrain their brains to resist the lure of sugar and fat. Just like alcoholics and drug addicts need help leaving their addictions behind, hypereaters may need help from psychiatrists or addiction specialists to retrain their brains before they can successfully resist the fat and sugary foods they’ve been conditioned to crave.

Of course, physical activity, metabolism and hormones all play a role in obesity, and any campaign to fight obesity in America will have to address these contributory issues. But to successfully fight obesity, Kessler believes that America will first have to change its love affair with unhealthy food and recognize the deadliness of the health danger obesity presents.

Hoodia Can Feel Good or Bad

Hoodia is a cactus-type plant from Africa that has many uses, however the native populations of South Africa have used it for indigestion or infection.  The plant Hoodia gordonii has been recognized as an appetite suppressant since the late 1970’s in Africa, but in the US there have been no definitive studies establishing it as a safe and effective appetite suppressant.

Despite this, media hype about the drug began around 2004 when 60 minutes aired a special on it’s effectiveness and since then others have followed suit such as the Today Show and Oprah catapulting it’s popularity.  To protect consumers, Hoodia exporters must be issued a CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) certificate by the office of Western Cape Nature in order for Hoodia to be legally exported abroad from Africa.  It is illegal to export Hoodia without this certification.

Why is a psychiatrist talking about Hoodia?  Having treated patients who took Hoodia (at their own initiative), I’ve seen how it has benefited most and also had some negative effects.  Most established appetite suppressants available in the US are stimulants and stimulants as a side effect can lessen one’s desire to eat.  It’s not clear what the active ingredient (P57) does, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not a naturally occuring stimulant.  As such, it can also have the unwanted affects of agitation and anxiety.  If you already have anxiety, this could really worsen your condition.

Some people have dealt with this by taking less than the recommended dose.  The pills are usually capsules and can’t be split, but rather than taking it three times a day, some people have taken it once a day at the time of their worst cravings.  I have heard some people say Hoodia “takes the edge off” their cravings giving them enough contol to choose not to eat junk or munch unneccessarily.

We know there is no magic pill to control weight, as controlling your eating requires behavioral change.  So for some who recongize that long term control of eating is a lifetime, lifetstyle adjustment, Hoodia can be something that gets them started in the right direction long enough to get used to a new way of eating and using food.

Of course, as with any drug (and herbal remedies are drugs too, just naturally occuring ones), a person considering starting it should check with their health care provider prior to taking it.