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Feeling stressed ?  Take deep breaths.  Close your eyes and imagine your favorite beach spot.  Try to put what you're worrying about out of your mind, think of releasing it like a balloon. Everything fail?  Try playing a video game. I kid you not.  That's what a new study is saying, according to newswise.com. It doesn't much matter if you're an executive assistant or marketing manager, sitting in an office.  But what if you're a commercial pilot, responsible for hundreds of lives?  Or a surgeon? More than half of Americans regularly experience cognitive fatigue related to stress, frustration, and anxiety while at work. Those in safety-critical fields, such as air traffic control and health care, are at an even greater risk for cognitive fatigue, which could lead to errors, the web site reports.  Given the amount of time that people spend playing games on their smartphones and tablets, a team of human factors/ergonomics researchers decide...

Who hasn't panicked when there's a new boss? Big duh but whenever there's a change at work , employees tend to feel stress and distrust and may even want to quit. According to newswise.com, almost one-third of U.S. workers are cynical about organizational changes and management's motives. At a time of change and uncertainty across the country, American adults who have been affected by change at work are more likely to report chronic work stress, less likely to trust their employer and more likely to say they plan to leave the organization within the next year compared with those who haven’t been affected by organizational change, according to a survey released by the American Psychological Association, as reported by the website. Half of American workers say they have been affected by organizational changes in the last year, are currently being affected by organizational changes or expect to be affected by organizational changes in the next year, according to  ...

Admit it. You're sick to death of the election.  And yet people at work are still talking about it at the water cooler (and in the lunchroom and the bathrooms and walking in and out of the front doors).  Now a new study says it's hurting workers and causing stress. American workers are more likely to say they are feeling stressed and cynical because of political discussions at work now than before the 2016 presidential election, according to survey results released today by the American Psychological Association, according to newswise.com. The survey found that 26 percent of full-time and part-time employed adults said they felt tense or stressed out as a result of political discussions at work since the election, an increase from 17 percent in September 2016 when they were asked about political discussions at work during the election season. More than one in five (21 percent) said they have felt more cynical and negative during the workday because of political ta...

Who knew? Enduring "mild" stress is healthy. But what's "mild"?  Newswise.com reports that research identifies a cellular recycling process that links to beneficial aspects of mild stress. Biologists have known for decades that enduring a short period of mild stress makes simple organisms and human cells better able to survive additional stress later in life. Now, scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) have found that a cellular process called autophagy is critically involved in providing the benefits of temporary stress.  Autophagy is a means of recycling cells’ old, broken, or unneeded parts so that their components can be re-used to make new molecules or be burned for energy. The process had previously been linked to longevity. The new results suggest that long life and stress resistance are connected at the cellular level. “We used C. elegans—tiny roundworms used to study fundamental biology—to test the i...

I'm one of those people who likes to spend, spend, spend, married to someone who doesn't like to part with a dime.  Cause stress?  You'd better believe it. And now a new study is saying that stress affects our spending and saving habits. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out but a new study proclaims that if you're feeling overwhelmed? Stressed about work, a family illness or election season? It turns out that worry and anxiety can have an impact on your wallet. “Stress leads consumers to favor saving money,” says Kristina Durante, an associate professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School who researches the effect of hormones and consumer behavior. Although stressed consumers want to save, when faced with a spending decision, stressed consumers will pay for necessities they think will help restore control rather than splurge on non-necessities, according to newswise.com. The study found that stress leads consumers to save money in ge...

Well, this is encouraging.  Did you know that when your partner is under stress , you gain weight? Really.  Isn't that depressing?  But according to a new study, older adults gain weight when a spouse is stressed out. Oh my.  A new University of Michigan study looked at how the negative quality of marriage can be detrimental for weight gain—possibly leading to obesity—when couples 50 and older are stressed. The results varied by gender, newswise.com reports. The study specifically focused on chronic stress, which is an ongoing circumstance occurring for more than a year and threatens to overwhelm an individual's resources, such as financial problems, difficulties at work or long-term care-giving. The sample included 2,042 married individuals who completed questions about their waist circumference, negative marriage quality, stress levels and other factors in 2006 and 2010. Couples were married for an average of 34 years. Greater negative quality ...

Have the kind of boss who thinks nothing of emailing you at 2 a.m. -- and expecting you to answer? Well, now, not so surprisingly, a new study done in France has found a link between organizational after-hours email expectations and emotional exhaustion.  Big deal, you might say.  But, big duh, it affects productivity.  Workplace technologies may be hurting the very people they're set up to help, according to newswise.com. Using data from 365 adults, researchers looked at the role of "off-hour" organizational emailing and discovered that it leads to burnout and diminished family life-work balance.  I could have told them that! Being the OCD person that I am, when I worked for a very large corporation that did a lot of this, I found myself checking my email every hour (or oftener) after getting home from work till bedtime -- and sometimes, even in the middle of the night.  Those who didn't were shamed and sometimes punished. Those who are exhausted but un...

Big surprise. Men and women react differently to stress . Researchers focused on an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which has a number of functions, among them helping the body adjust to stressful situations, controlling hunger and satiety, and regulating blood glucose and energy production. When stress hits, cells in the hypothalamus step up production of a receptor. It was known that this receptor contributes to the rapid activation of a stress-response sympathetic nerve network – increasing heart rate, for example. But since this area of the brain also regulates the body’s exchange of materials, the team thought that the receptor might play a role in this, as well.  The receptor is expressed in around half of the cells that arouse appetite and suppress energy consumption. After some pretty complicated experiments involving mice and the receptor, researchers found that male and female bodies may exhibit significant differences in the ways that materia...

We know that stress can harm relationships, make us ill, even make us sad or depressed.  But did you know it can also erode your memories? A new study says that, sustained stress erodes memory, and the immune system plays a key role in the cognitive impairment, according to a new study from researchers at The Ohio State University, newswise.com reports.  “This is chronic stress. It’s not just the stress of giving a talk or meeting someone new,” says lead researcher Jonathan Godbout, associate professor of neuroscience at Ohio State. Mice that were repeatedly exposed to an aggressive intruder had a hard time recalling where the escape hole was in a maze they’d mastered prior to the stressful period.  They also had measurable changes in their brains, including evidence of inflammation brought on by the immune system’s response to the outside pressure. This was associated with the presence of immune cells, called macrophages, in the brain of the stressed m...

Your mobile phone.  It links you with friends, lets you know about events, even tells you the (bad) news that Trump's probably going to win the Republican nomination for president. But did you know using it can also cause lead to anxiety and depression?  According to newswise.com, a new study from the University of Illinois finds that addiction to, and not simply use of, mobile technology is linked to anxiety and depression in college-age students.  Researchers surveyed over 300 university students with questionnaires that addressed the students' mental health, amount of cellphone and Internet use, and motivations for turning to their electronic devices. Questions included: "Do you think that your academic or work performance has been negatively affected by your cellphone use?" and "Do you think that life without the Internet is boring, empty and sad?"  "People who self-described as having really addictive style behaviors toward the Inte...

Now this is depressing. A new study says that you can affect not only your kids with any stress you may be feeling, but your grandkids, too. Exposing female adolescent rats to stress before they even become pregnant leads to changes in behavior and the hormonal system not only among their children but also among their grandchildren when they reach adulthood; this according to a new study from the University of Haifa.  he researchers also found a gene related to stress which expresses itself differently in the brain of individual offspring from the moment they are born. According to the researchers, this finding suggests that it is not maternal care which influences variations in offspring, regarding stress, according to newswise.com. As in previous studies, the researchers exposed the female rats, when still adolescents, to minor stress involving changes in temperature and routine for a week. Their direct offspring grew up without any stress-inducing intervention,...

Admit it.  Seeing 50 likes on our Facebook post thrills us(I'm lucky to see five!). But a new study has found that, for kids, liking something is a lot less stressful than being liked.  Huh? According to newswise.com, liking on Facebook is good for teens' stress levels, but not so much being liked. In fact, teens who have more than 300 Facebook friends have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, researchers say. As we all know, Facebook can have positive and negative effects on us, and teens' levels of the stress hormone, say researchers at the University of Montreal and the Institut universitaire de santé mentale de Montréal.  Too many likes hikes the levels of cortisol.  But teens who act in ways that support their Facebook friends – for example, by liking what they posted or sending them words of encouragement – decreased their levels of cortisol.  Makes sense.  I've always found that it makes me feel good to help others feel the s...

You've got that deadline glaring down your neck.  Your boss keeps looking over at you.  You're late to pick your kid up from soccer.  And who knows what's going to happen for dinner? We've all been there.  Workplace stress is a killer.  And now it might literally be, too.  Did you know work stress can cause a stroke? According to an analysis of studies , having a high-stress job may be linked to a higher risk of stroke. "Having a lot of job stress has been linked to heart disease, but studies on job stress and stroke have shown inconsistent results,” says Dingli Xu, MD, with Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, at newswise.com. “It’s possible that high-stress jobs lead to more unhealthy behaviors, such as poor eating habits, smoking and a lack of exercise.” The analysis looked at all of the available research on job strain and stroke risk. The six studies analyzed involved a total of 138,782 participants who were followed for thre...

What do you do when you're stressed ? Reach for a half-pound bag of M&M's, like I do, or a couple glasses of merlot like my friends do?  Or maybe watch a Housewives Reunion where they all scream at and accuse each other of everything from copying their Jimmy Choo Belgravias to calling each other's kids spoiled? Well, the sad truth is that feeling stressed may prompt you to go to great lengths to satisfy an urge for a drink or sweets, but you're not likely to enjoy the indulgence any more than someone who is not stressed and has the same treat just for pleasure, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association, as reported by newswise.com.  "Most of us have experienced stress that increases our craving for rewarding experiences, such as eating a tasty bar of chocolate, and it can make us invest considerable effort in obtaining the object of our desire, such as running to a convenience store in the middle of the night,...

We just don't get a break. A new study is saying that worry, jealousy and moodiness in women are linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's. Now if only the men in our lives weren't causing us to have these emotions!  Just kidding. But it's a fairly serious finding.  Women who are anxious, jealous, or moody and distressed in middle age may be at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in life, according to a nearly 40-year-long study, according to newswise.com. “Most Alzheimer’s research has been devoted to factors such as education, heart and blood risk factors, head trauma, family history and genetics,” said study author Lena Johannsson, PhD, of the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden. “Personality may influence the individual’s risk for dementia through its effect on behavior, lifestyle or reactions to stress.” For the study, 800 women with an average age of 46 were followed for 38 years and given personality tests that looked...

It makes perfect sense.  Early life stress may damage our brains. According to newswise.com, a little stress is good for kids because it helps them learn to overcome it, and cope.  But "chronic, toxic stress like poverty, neglect and physical abuse — can have lasting negative impacts." A study has showed that these kinds of stressors, experienced in early life, might be changing the parts of developing children’s brains responsible for learning, memory and the processing of stress and emotion. These changes may be tied to negative impacts on behavior, health, employment and even the choice of romantic partners later in life. As a person who experienced this kind of stress as a child, I can attest to its truth.  It affects how you view life and shapes your perspective, for better or worse.  I was lucky.  I had people around who helped me through it  and over time, I learned to cope.  Did it affect me for life?  Yes. "We haven’t really u...

Big surprise.  Being married can make you more likely to get depressed . All I wanted, when I met my husband, was to get married.  (It only took 10 years.)  But once we were, I didn't like it quite as much.  For one thing, I now had a mother-in-law.  And for another, it seemed so, well, permanent. I can remember driving home from work one day and thinking, well, I've made it through a month. A new study has found that m arital stress may make people more vulnerable to depression, according to a recent study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and their colleagues, newswise.com reports. I suppose it's a no-brainer but people who experience chronic marital stress are less able to savor positive experiences, a hallmark of depression, the Web sie notes. They are also more likely to report other depressive symptoms. “This is not an obvious consequence, if you will, of marital stress, but it’s one I think is extraordinarily important because of the...

Feeling blue?  Get some green. That's what a new study in Wisconsin has found.   According to newswise.com, " The more green space in the neighborhood, the happier people reported feeling." In the study,  “Higher levels of green space were associated with lower symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress," the Web site quotes  Dr. Kristen Malecki, assistant professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. (I spent one blustery, freezing winter in Minnesota and nearby Wisconsin.  Maybe it's the end of snow that does it?  Just a thought.) In the study ab out 2,500 Wisconsin residents from 229 neighborhoods answered an assessment that asked them to rate their symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.   Researchers found t hat across all strata of society, people who lived in a neighborhood with less than 10 percent tree canopy were much more likely to report symptoms of depression, ...

Want relief from you allergies? Get stress out of your life. According to newswise.com, " Stress doesn’t cause allergies, but easing your mind might mean less allergy flare-ups this spring." “Stress can cause several negative effects on the body, including causing more symptoms for allergy sufferers,” said allergist Amber Patterson, MD, lead study author and ACAAI member. “Our study also found those with more frequent allergy flares also have a greater negative mood, which may be leading to these flares.” In a recent study , w hile there were no significant findings between allergy flares and stress on the same day, a number of sufferers reported allergy flares within days of increased daily stress, the Web site reports. “Symptoms, such as sneezing, runny nose and watery eyes can cause added stress for allergy sufferers, and may even be the root of stress for some,” said Dr. Patterson. “While alleviating stress won’t cure allergies, it may help decrease episodes of i...

I remember when I was trying to get pregnant being told by everyone that all I had to do was relax.  That alone stressed me out.  Every procedure I failed, I'd tell myself it was because I didn't relax enough.  Really great for the cortisol level. Now it's turning out that stressing out and fertility are linked. Well, infertility.  A new study has found, according to Deborah Netburn at The Los Angles Times, that s tressed out women do have more difficulty getting pregnant than women with less stress, according to a new study.  In fact, 29 percent more, Fox news reports. This, of course, contradicts earlier studies that say they don't! From 2005 to 2009, researchers followed 401 reproductively healthy couples who were trying to get pregnant.  Over a period of 12 months, researchers recorded each couple’s time-to-pregnancy and observed that by five to six months into the study, the couples who had yet to conceive were those with the highest levels of c...