Health & Fitness

If you're feeling tired, cranky, stressed out and overwhelmed, you're likely heading quickly down the slippery slope to burnout. Burnout, which is a term used to describe physical or emotional exhaustion that's typically the result of prolonged stress or frustration,¹ is a common human condition, but definitely not a desirable one.

 A 2018 Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees found that 23% feel burned out at work always or very often, while another 44% said they sometimes feel burned out. That amounts to about two-thirds of full-time employees feeling burnout while they're at work.² Yet, work is only one route to burnout.

Other areas of life, such as control, reward, community, fairness and values³ — and how well each of these is served in your life — also correlate with burnout, some of which are more easily tackled and changed than others. Perhaps the best lesson on burnout, however, is to take action against it before it has consumed you.

Once you're officially burned out, it can be hard to dig yourself out of the hole. But if you make proactive changes ahead of time, on a regular basis and certainly if you feel yourself start to slide downhill, you may be able to avoid burnout entirely, staying emotionally and physically strong instead.

Three Anti-Burnout Foundations: Sleep, Diet and Exercise

Taking care of your body on a physical level is the foundation of avoiding burnout, and this starts with the three pillars of health: proper sleep, diet and exercise. Data from the U.S. CDC suggests one-third of U.S. adults are not getting the recommended seven hours of sleep each night,⁴ and most people likely need closer to eight hours to be healthy.

When you don't sleep, your mood, productivity and inclination to make positive lifestyle choices can suffer, and your body's ability to handle stress will be impaired. Poor sleep lessens a person's self-control, which in turn increases the rate of selfish impulses leading to unwanted behaviors — even workplace theft.⁵

Insufficient sleep, in fact, predicts clinical burnout and combines with other risk factors, namely preoccupation with thoughts of work during leisure time and high work demands, to increase burnout risk.⁶

Not only is getting proper sleep important to avoiding burnout but it can also help you recover from burnout once it occurs.⁷ What you eat is also fundamentally important. A healthy diet that optimizes mitochondrial function and limits inflammation will bolster your body's ability resilience and ability to ward off stress, providing you with the energy for physical and mental strength.

Optimizing your omega-3, vitamin D and magnesium levels can also help reduce stress and positively impact brain health. Exercise is the third essential to avoiding burnout, and exercising three to five days a week for 45 minutes has been suggested as the "sweet spot" that leads to the greatest mental health gains.⁸

In a large study involving 1.2 million U.S. adults, participants reported their activity levels for one month along with rating their mental well-being. On average, people who exercised reported 1.5 fewer days of poor mental health in the past month compared to those who did not.⁹

This may be, in part, because exercise has been found to create new neurons designed to release the GABA neurotransmitter, which inhibits excessive neuronal firing, helping to induce a natural state of calm.¹⁰

Align Your Life With Your Personality

If you're living a lifestyle that's contradictory to your true personality or values, it can also cause mental fatigue and anguish, facilitating burnout. In The New York Times, Robert L. Bogue, co-author of "Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery," explained:¹¹

"Self-care is dependent on the individual. It is based on what helps them to feel more like they're in their natural state, which is the thing, place or feeling that would happen if there were no pressure on them — the thing they would want to do.

When you're operating outside of your natural state, you are consuming energy. The more in alignment you become, the less you're demanding of yourself and the more personal agency you build up."

Toward this end, it's important to take time to recharge in the way that feels right to you. For some, recharging may require spending time with others while some people can only regroup via solitude. Along these lines, prioritize activities that make you feel energized while avoiding those that drag you down.

This likely means you'll need to learn to say "no" and make a point to engage in activities that make you happy and create "flow." Flow, according to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the secret to happiness and occurs when you are completely absorbed in an activity (often one that involves creativity).¹²

When you're immersed in flow, your sense of time becomes distorted because nearly all of your brain's available inputs are devoted to the activity at hand, Csikszentmihalyi states. If you're depressed and unable to fully give your attention to the present moment, and as a result find time is agonizingly slow, mindfulness-based therapies may be very helpful, particularly in cases of a depressed perception of time.¹³

As Csikszentmihalyi said, "The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times … The best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."¹⁴

Taking the time to pursue such moments can be a key to avoiding the burned out feeling that comes from excessive time spent on activities you do not enjoy or which drain you of mental and physical energy.

Work With Your Reality

To some extent, you have to learn to be happy and manage stress within your existing reality. You can take steps to start a new career or otherwise change aspects of your life that are contributing to burnout, but in the immediacy it's important to, at a bare minimum, use strategies to control your day-to-day work stress. This may include meditation, exercise or time with family and friends.

Ideally, find work that suits your personality and gives you meaning and purpose, but if you don't have that, remember that you can find purpose in nonwork pursuits including volunteering and hobbies. Elizabeth Grace Saunders, a time management coach and author of "The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment, How to Invest Your Time Like Money, and Divine Time Management," wrote in The New York Times:¹⁵

"Another alternative is to stop expecting satisfaction in these areas within your job and, instead, seek opportunities outside of work that fulfill these core needs. For example, maybe you volunteer with an organization where you feel appreciated, find the activities intrinsically rewarding, have values alignment and a strong sense of community.

Or maybe you invest time in your family or friends to cultivate a feeling of belonging, fulfillment and autonomy. When you're 'filled up' by how you invest your time outside of work, and you feel supported by people who know and care about you, you have a buffer against the drain that may exist in the office.

You may not have the ability to change everything you don't like about your job, but you do have the ability to improve how good you feel about yourself and life in general."

Foster Self-Acceptance

Self-acceptance is an important part of psychological health and involves accepting all of your attributes, both positive and negative. "Self-acceptance enables an individual to appropriately evaluate his/her efficient and inefficient features and accept any negative aspects as parts of their personality," researchers wrote in the journal PLOS One.¹⁶

Self-acceptance includes three main attitudes, including love for your body, even if you're not completely satisfied with your weight, fitness level or any other physical attribute. It also involves the ability to protect yourself from others' negative judgments, such that you don't let it phase you if other people judge you.

Self-acceptance also involves recognizing and appreciating your own capabilities and believing in yourself. People who have high levels of self-acceptance tend to also have higher levels of self-esteem and interpersonal satisfaction. They're also less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders and obesity.¹⁷

In the video above, Julie Schiffman demonstrates a simple technique to help you love and accept yourself — something most of us can benefit from. Schiffman is a practitioner of the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), which is a form of psychological acupressure that involves tapping with the fingertips on specific meridians in order to clear negative emotions and thought patterns. This is but one way to bring more self-love into your life, akin to giving your inner critic a giant bear hug.

How to Heal Burnout

Preventing burnout is easier than recovering from it, but it's possible to get better by focusing on balance in key areas of your life, namely physical, spiritual, work and relationship aspects of your life. First, it's important to be aware of the signs of burnout and take action as soon as (or ideally before) they occur:¹⁸

• Physical exhaustion, signaled by chronic fatigue, insomnia, forgetfulness, impaired concentration, inattentiveness, physical illness and loss of appetite
• Emotional exhaustion, a "feeling of internal collapse," loss of perspective, detachment, irritability, frequent anger, loss of enjoyment, pessimism, increasing isolation, apathy and hopelessness
• Reduced performance and productivity despite best efforts, loss of self-esteem, feeling like a failure
• Depression

Burnout predicts a number of physical and psychological effects as well, including the following, which highlights the importance of preventing and healing from this deleterious condition:¹⁹

Type 2 diabetes	Coronary heart disease	Hospitalization due to cardiovascular disorder
Musculoskeletal pain	Changes in pain experience	Prolonged fatigue
Headaches	Gastrointestinal issues	Respiratory problems
Severe injuries	Mortality before the age of 45 years	Insomnia
Depressive symptoms	Use of psychotropic and antidepressant medications	Hospitalization for mental disorders
Job dissatisfaction	Absenteeism at work

In the interview above, Dr. Joseph Maroon, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and author of "Square One: A Simple Guide to a Balanced Life," speaks on the topic of burnout — something he, too, once struggled with.

He explains that recovering from burnout (or avoiding it in the first place) boils down to finding and maintaining a balance between your work life, physical activities, relationships and spirituality or mindfulness. Only by nurturing all aspects of life can you feel truly fulfilled and centered, so if you find yourself feeling off balance, place your attention on the areas you've been neglecting. As Maroon noted:

"The point is we can't escape adversity. We can't escape stress. But what happened to me is I didn't recognize how bad off I was in a unidimensional [all work] life.

I didn't recognize it until I was working at a truck stop as a pump jockey … I think the most important thing I missed was mindfulness. I didn't have insight into where I was; insight on how I got there, when everything was lost."

Likewise, Saunders also suggests following your inner truth as a key to fulfillment: "By investing your time based on the truth of your body, personality and reality, you can reduce your risk of burnout."²⁰

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If you're like most people, chances are you're consuming unhealthy amounts of sugar on a regular basis. Even if you're not big on candy, most processed foods will provide you with an excessive amount of added sugars.

As noted in the BBC One report "The Truth About Sugar," a serving of Pad Thai noodles contains 9.5 teaspoons of sugar and a package of sweet and sour chicken with rice contains 12.5 teaspoons, which is more than a can of soda.

A can of baked beans contains 6 teaspoons of sugar, which would ideally be your grand total for the day, so it's important to realize that it's not merely cakes, cookies, candy and ice cream that get people into trouble.

Even many baby foods contain shocking amounts of sugar,^1,2 which can set your child on the path of lifelong sugar addiction and the health problems that go along with it. The idea that sugar is addictive is not new. A number of studies have shown it acts much like other addictive substances.

One of the latest studies looking at the addictive potential of sugar was published in the November 2019 issue of Scientific Reports,^3,4,5,6,7 in which they point out that "Excessive sucrose consumption elicits addiction-like craving that may underpin the obesity epidemic."

Sugar Alters Your Brain Chemistry

By using PET imaging along with beta-opioid and dopamine receptor agonists, the researchers were able to show how sucrose affects the brain chemistry in miniature pigs. The miniature pigs were chosen for the fact that they have well-defined subcortical and prefrontal cortical regions, which "enable a more direct translation to human brain function." As explained by the authors:⁸

"After 12 days of sucrose access, BPND [non-displaceable binding potentials] of both tracers had declined significantly in striatum, nucleus accumbens, thalamus, amygdala, cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex, consistent with down-regulation of receptor densities … The lower availability of opioid and dopamine receptors may explain the addictive potential associated with intake of sucrose."

Even a single exposure to sucrose produced as much as a 14% decrease in carfentanil (a beta-opioid receptor agonist) binding in the nucleus accumbens and cingulate cortex, which is consistent with opioid release.

In more layman terms, sugar consumption triggers the release of natural opioids and dopamine in your brain, thus lowering the availability of those receptors. Reduced receptor availability is a sign of overstimulation, as when your brain gets overstimulated, it downregulates the receptors in order to protect your brain from damage.

The drawback of this protective mechanism is that you now need a higher dose of the substance to get the same pleasure response, and this is a key mechanism by which addiction develops.

You can learn more about the mechanics of addiction in my interview with Dr. Pamela Peeke, author of "The Hunger Fix: The Three-Stage Detox and Recovery Plan for Overeating and Food Addiction."

Sugar Affects Your Brain Like Other Addictive Drugs

Figure 4 from the Scientific Reports study shows how carfentanil binding potential changed from baseline levels over the course of 12 days. Figure 6 shows the change in raclopride, a selective antagonist on dopamine receptors.⁹

Figure 4: Regional analysis of carfentanil bonding potential between baseline and after 12 days of sucrose water exposure.

Figure 6: Regional analysis of raclopride bonding potential between baseline and after 12 days of sucrose water exposure.

According to the authors, "The results clearly demonstrate that sucrose affects reward mechanisms in a manner similar to that of drugs of abuse."¹⁰ In the discussion section of the paper, they further explain:

"The intake of sucrose as a palatable substance is known to release DA [dopamine] and induce dependency in rodents, with sucrose shown to be even more pleasurable than cocaine in rodents in certain contexts. Thus, rodents work more intensely to obtain sucrose than cocaine, even in the absence of food deprivation.

However, the effects of sucrose are regulated both by the homeostatic system and by hedonic reward circuits that may mediate the distinction between nutritional and hedonic aspects of sucrose action.

We opted for a one-hour per day schedule in order to promote 'binging' … Behavioral studies of food intake often target food-restricted animals, but the design may not necessarily reflect the same neural mechanisms active in obesity. Pigs in the present study were not food restricted and were fed the usual amounts of their normal diet in addition to access to sucrose.

Opioid receptors (OR) are widely expressed in the brain, specifically in structures known to modulate eating and reward processes. ORs have been shown to be important in the rewarding and relapsing effects of cocaine … Previous studies have shown that palatable food can lead to feelings of pleasure by stimulating opioid release.

After 12 days of sucrose access, we observed decreased carfentanil binding, which has several possible explanations, including endogenous opioid release and binding to μOR [beta-opioid receptors], μOR internalization as a result of increased opioid binding, and increased DA D2/3 receptor activation leading to heterologous desensitization of μOR …

In a study of acute feeding behavior in healthy men, feeding led to robust and widespread endogenous cerebral opioid release, both in the presence and absence of hedonia, suggesting that opioid release reflects metabolic and homeostatic, as well as hedonic, responses."

Other Brain Changes Triggered by Excessive Sugar

Other research has shown daily sugar consumption impairs spatial memory and inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory processes.¹¹

Research¹² on rats has also shown a high-sugar diet tends to alter inhibitory neurons in the prefrontal cortex, where decision-making and impulse control are centered. Aside from impaired impulse control and the inability to delay gratification, this alteration may also increase the risk of mental health problems in children and adolescents. As noted in a 2015 study:¹³

"We found that sucrose-exposed rats failed to show context-appropriate responding … indicative of impairments in prefrontal cortex function. Sucrose exposed rats also showed deficits in an on object-in-place recognition memory task, indicating that both prefrontal and hippocampal function was impaired.

Analysis of brains showed a reduction in expression of parvalbumin-immunoreactive GABAergic interneurons in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, indicating that sucrose consumption during adolescence induced long-term pathology, potentially underpinning the cognitive deficits observed.

These results suggest that consumption of high levels of sugar-sweetened beverages by adolescents may also impair neurocognitive functions affecting decision-making and memory, potentially rendering them at risk for developing mental health disorders."

Eliminating Sugar Is a Quick Route to Improved Health

Needless to say, a high-sugar diet will also take a toll on your health by packing on unwanted pounds, and the pace can be remarkably rapid. As noted in the BBC program, "The Truth About Sugar" (hyperlinked at the beginning of this article), drinking three cups of tea or coffee per day with 2 teaspoons of sugar added to each cup can result in a 9.9-pound weight gain (4.5 kilos) in a single year, provided you don't increase your physical activity to burn off the extra calories.

When you consider that most consume five or six times more added sugar than that each day, it's easy to see how obesity has become more the norm than the exception.

The World Health Organization recommends limiting your daily sugar consumption to 10% of your total intake, or better yet, 5%, which equates to about 6 teaspoons or 25 grams, if you want to really optimize your health.¹⁴

The good news is research^15,16,17 shows reducing added sugars from an average of 27% of daily calories down to about 10% can improve biomarkers associated with health in as little as 10 days — even when overall calorie count and percentage of carbohydrates remains the same.

While this sounds simple enough, it can be tricky business if your diet consists primarily of processed foods. According to SugarScience.org, added sugars hide in 74% of processed foods under more than 60 different names. For a full list, please see SugarScience.org's "Hidden in Plain Sight" page.¹⁸

When you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to avoid any and all of these, as they all have similar effects, although processed fructose — such as high fructose corn syrup — tends to have the most adverse health effects and is a primary driver of obesity and diabetes.¹⁹

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How to Break Your Sugar Addiction

If you find yourself struggling with sugar cravings, intermittent fasting can help. For optimal results, you'll want to replace the calories from sugar and non-vegetable carbs with vegetables and healthy fats, as this will help reset your body's metabolism, allowing it to effectively burn fat for fuel again. When sugar is not needed for your primary fuel and when your sugar stores run low, your body will crave it less.

Another helpful technique, which addresses the emotional component of food cravings, is the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). If you maintain negative thoughts and feelings about yourself while trying to take physical steps to improve your health and body, you're unlikely to succeed.

While traditional psychological approaches may sometimes work, EFT has shown to be a far better, not to mention inexpensive, solution. If you feel that your emotions, or your own self-image, may be your own worst enemy when it comes to altering your relationship with food, I highly recommend you read my free EFT manual and consider trying EFT on your own.

A version of EFT specifically geared toward combating sugar cravings is called Turbo Tapping. For further instructions, please see The Epoch Times article, "Turbo Tapping: How to Get Rid of Your Soda Addiction."²⁰

My previous article, "EFT: Tapping for Weight Loss" also offers helpful guidance. To get an idea of how it works, see the video below, in which EFT practitioner Julie Schiffman demonstrates how to use EFT to fight food cravings of all kinds.

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Osteopath Fiona Hooper explains exactly what that 'popping' sound is, how it could impact existing injuries and why you should never, ever do it as a party trick. 

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Although a link has been established between chronic inflammation and neurodegenerative diseases, there have been many open questions regarding how cellular senescence, a process whereby cells that stop dividing under stress spew out a mix of inflammatory proteins, affects these pathologies. Researchers report that senescence in astrocytes, the most abundant cell type in the brain, leads to damaging ''excitotoxicity'' in cortical neurons that are involved in memory.

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A new study has revealed how the gut's protective mechanisms ramp up significantly with food intake, and at times of the day when mealtimes are anticipated based on regular eating habits. Researchers found that eating causes a hormone called VIP to kickstart the activity of immune cells in response to potentially incoming pathogens or 'bad' bacteria. The researchers also found that immunity increased at anticipated mealtimes indicating that maintaining regular eating patterns could be more important than previously thought.

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Just like every virus before it, coronavirus is spreading.

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Researchers have established how sugar is taken up by the malaria parasite, a discovery with the potential to improve the development of antimalarial drugs.

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Mixing drinking water with chlorine, the United States' most common method of disinfecting drinking water, creates previously unidentified toxic byproducts.

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The importance of getting enough sleep has been emphasized by hundreds of studies in recent years, and we’ve covered the topic many times on this blog.

Inadequate sleep has been linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other health problems. And, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, up to 72,000 car accidents and 6,000 deaths occur each year due to sleep-deprived drivers.

But what about too much sleep? Could that be bad for you, too? According to a new study, the answer may be yes.

More sleep, more strokes?

Researchers publishing in the December 11, 2019, online issue of Neurology describe an analysis of stroke risk among nearly 32,000 adults with an average age of 62. The study’s authors compared rates of stroke with study subjects’ self-reported sleep habits.

Their findings were surprising (at least to me) and included:

• Those who reported sleeping nine or more hours each night had a 23% higher risk of stroke than those sleeping less than eight hours each night.
• Stroke risk was 25% higher among those who took midday naps for at least 90 minutes compared with those napping for less than 30 minutes.

Poor sleep quality was also linked to higher stroke risk

Combinations of these factors had an even more dramatic effect on stroke risk, including an 85% higher risk among those who slept at least nine hours each night and also took midday naps for at least 90 minutes. Similarly, an 82% higher stroke risk was observed among those who slept longer at night and also reported poor sleep quality.

Does this mean too much sleep causes strokes?

If you are a person who sleeps more than nine hours each night, takes long midday naps, and feels your sleep quality is poor, these results may be troubling. But before trying to change your sleep habits, keep in mind this study did not conclude that more sleep actually causes strokes.

This study found an association between stroke risk and longer sleep, longer midday napping, or poor sleep quality. But an association is not the same as causation. Rather than longer sleep duration causing strokes, there are other possible explanations for the findings. For example, people who sleep more at night or nap more during the day may have other risk factors for stroke, such as:

• A higher incidence of depression. Excessive sleeping or poor sleep quality may be symptoms of depression, and prior studies have noted higher stroke rates among depressed individuals.
• A more sedentary lifestyle. Those who are not active may sleep or nap more and also have more cardiovascular risk factors (such as smoking or hypertension) than those who exercise regularly. Past research has noted less favorable cholesterol levels and larger waist circumference among long sleepers and nappers.
• Sleep apnea. Longer sleep duration, more napping, and poor-quality sleep may be more common among people with sleep apnea, a condition linked to an increased risk of stroke. This new study did not ask subjects about sleep disorders such as sleep apnea.

In addition, this study had weaknesses that could call its findings into question or limit its applicability. These include reliance on self-reported sleep habits and quality, and inclusion only of middle-aged and older Chinese adults without prior cancer or cardiovascular disease; the results might have been quite different if others were included in the study.

The bottom line

Sleep is a mysterious thing. It’s often unclear why some people sleep more or less than others, or why certain sleep disorders (such as insomnia or sleep apnea) affect so many people while sparing others. At a time when there’s so much media emphasis on the importance of getting enough sleep, this new study raises the possibility that more sleep may not always be a good thing. Still, we’ll need additional research on the question of whether more sleep is hazardous before making any firm recommendations to limit sleep duration.

The post Are you getting enough sleep… or too much? Sleep and stroke risk appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.

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