NYT: Health

I like mental health stuff, like anyone who knows me can attest to. I also really like the New York Times, but that's tangential to the point of this entry. The articles that I've been reading today are about stress, and how chronic stress is very dangerous to your health. The article Giving Stress More Respect (Tara Parker-Pope) reports that "stress is linked to an increased risk for heart attacks, depression, cancer, and the progression of HIV...workplace stress may be as bad for your heart as smoking and high cholesterol. And marital strife also poses a major risk to your heart health..." The article suggests a good health book on stress by Robert Sapolsky called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. The point that the article talk about from the book is that though Zebra's lead lives of acute stress episodes (e.g. running away from lions) but the majority of their lives are spent in low-stress, grass grazing contentment. Humans on the other hand often spend a majority of their downtime worrying about stressors that are not necessarily immediate.

Another NYT article I read today (The Value of a Friend in the Next Cubicle (Tara Parker-Pope)) was about job stress and how having friends at work decreases stress levels. "Employees who feel social support at work are far less likely to suffer serious depression problems, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health."
Another interesting fact from the article was that men who endured high job stress were more than 2 times likely to be depressed than men with minimal job stress. Women who had little decision making power had twice the depression risk compared to women with more authority. But people who said they felt supported by their colleagues were often spared a high degree of job stress. The unfortunate thing is though, which I've personally experienced at work, is that managers do not like fraternizing among employees as they see it as a distraction from productive work. However, this article argues that having social support at work may lessen depression risks that sap away productivity in workers. So be friends with your coworkers!

Also, socializing appears to delay memory problems, especially for those people with the least years of formal education. Time to start hosting more dinner parties.

And finally, eating fatty foods makes you dumb! Well, at least for a bit. New research shows that eating fatty foods decreases cognitive and exercise performance in rats. Theories for this decline in performance is that a high-fat diet can trigger insulin resistance, thus impacting brain function negatively. Also, high-fat diets decrease the efficiency of metabolism which makes it more difficult for muscles to get the energy they need while exercising.


Giving Stress More Respect

The Value of a Friend in the Next Cubicle

Socializing Appears to Delay Memory Problems

Fatty Foods Affect Memory and Exercise