24 replies to this topic

[ImmortalSpace]

Assuming you have a healthy diet, excercise and you're drinkning enough water and sorts...

what's worse having too much stress or too much sunlight? I know both are bad.

This is a real struggle for people with anxiety disorders because anxiety is a constant thing. 

[niner]

Too much sun will be worse cosmetically, and that damage is permanent, but at least it will make you some vitamin D, and in many people has positive psychological effects.  It's easy to protect yourself with sunscreen, clothing, window tints and the like, but "too much" implies that whatever use you're making of such things is not enough.  Or perhaps you're worried about something that happened in the past?  (forget it.  the past is the past.)   I don't see any positives at all for too much stress, the harm of which is spread throughout the body.  You can do things to compensate, like exercise, eating well, and addressing sleep issues. 

Edited by niner, 11 June 2015 - 07:45 PM.

[Dolph]

Mmm, where... exactly... is the connection between stress and sun exposure??? The question seems to me a bit like: "At night it's colder than outside."

[sthira]

I think being both stressed and in the sun sucks. Like the combo -- when on the beach, when you're supposed to be enjoying the waves but you're not? Totally sucks. Staring at the wine dark sea, listening to crying gulls, dreaming about some long lost nape of neck that once curved in my way, plus all that damned UV damage.

[Duchykins]

The stress is likeliest to kill you faster in many different ways.  At least getting too much sun everyday won't shrink your prefrontal cortex like chronic stress would.

[Gerrans]

I do not think there is such a thing as too much sunlight--but I live in a country where we do not get that much sun. Obviously it is bad to get sunburnt, but I strongly believe being out in the open air is much better for us than being indoors in an artificial environment--all other things being equal. So I find this comparison between too much sunlight and stress somewhat false.

 

As far as stress goes, there is stress and stress. Normal stress is good for us. In fact, we seek it, because we soon tire of lounging around in a stress-free environment. Too much stress--ie., more than we can handle--is obviously very unpleasant. And it can harm us both physiologically and mentally. So we need to find a balance, with a lifestyle that is stimulatingly challenging but not overwhelmingly so.

[Duchykins]

To the brain and body, there is no such thing as "good stress."    It's also not awesome for learning and "higher" thinking.  Eg, when the brain is put in a stress state, even a mild one like typical boredom, the sensory information you receive that must first be routed through the reticular activating system and limbic system which filters that information in accordance with your mood or emotional state.  Negative experiences power up the amygdala to where it consumes much more of the brain's oxygen and nutrients and puts the brain more into a reactionary survival mode. This interferes with the uptake of new information in the prefrontal cortex until the crisis has passed or stressor has disappeared.  This means not only with information processing, organizing, reflecting, but with memory encoding too.  In calm, focused and/or positive mood states, the amygdala will allow more information through to the cortex, and all of your executive functions operate more effectively.

 

There is a difference between stimulation and stress.

Edited by Duchykins, 17 June 2015 - 04:06 PM.

[Mind]

Stress is worse. No contest.

[pamojja]

Having very little resilience against occupational stress left (due to a few chronic issues), I found a few weeks sun-bathing somewhere closer to the equator along with swimming in the sea, especially in the coldest winter time, helps me to recover again.

 

Have to add that since starting a comprehensive orthomolecular regimen against my chronic issues 6 years ago I didn't experience any sun-burn since.

[Darryl]

The British civil servant studies are clear, its not job stress that's hazardous, or 'A' type personalities, but stress and responsibility, without the authority to address the conflicting interests. Its the middle managers who die early, not the CEOs.

 

Hemingway, H., Shipley, M., Macfarlane, P., & Marmot, M. (2000). Impact of socioeconomic status on coronary mortality in people with symptoms, electrocardiographic abnormalities, both or neither: the original Whitehall study 25 year follow up. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 54(7), 510-516.

Kuper, H., Singh-Manoux, A., Siegrist, J., & Marmot, M. (2002). When reciprocity fails: effort–reward imbalance in relation to coronary heart disease and health functioning within the Whitehall II study. Occupational and environmental medicine, 59(11), 777-784.

 

I'd say being stuck in middle managment in an enterprise that's treading water or falling behind is a lot worse than sunlight, for longevity. Most skin cancers are very treatable when caught early. Something like 50% of first heart attacks are fatal.

 

 

[Brett Black]

It's difficult enought to get any reasonably reliable information on the the long term health impacts of something as physical and concrete as particular diets/foods/nutrients. Just take a look at John Ionnadis' work to get an idea of how deeply mired in limitations the world of nutritional science is.

 

It's likely to be far harder still to try to extract meaningul information about the long term effects of something as difficult to measure and quantify as subjective emotional states like stress.

 

At this point I'm not convinced that all the "common sense" ideas about the supposedly serious health outcomes of stress have much scientific backing beyond old wive's tales. 

 

I say this having done almost no reading in the area, but I think my understanding of the principles and study techniques involved allow me some significant confidence in my conclusions.

 

It was not all that long ago that common sense held that sun bathing was inherently healthy. Once you start considering possibilities like hormesis too, it can potentially become very difficult to predict if something is going to be damaging or not.

[Duchykins]

 

 

At this point I'm not convinced that all the "common sense" ideas about the supposedly serious health outcomes of stress have much scientific backing beyond old wive's tales. 

 

I say this having done almost no reading in the area, but I think my understanding of the principles and study techniques involved allow me some significant confidence in my conclusions.

 

 

 

Wow.  Just... wow.

[ImmortalSpace]

My context for this question was mainly in the outer appearance of aging, to rephrase what I meant.. what causes more wrinkles stress or sunlight assuming all other areas of your life are healthy?

 

[niner]

My context for this question was mainly in the outer appearance of aging, to rephrase what I meant.. what causes more wrinkles stress or sunlight assuming all other areas of your life are healthy?

 

Sunlight, hands down.

[Brett Black]

At this point I'm not convinced that all the "common sense" ideas about the supposedly serious health outcomes of stress have much scientific backing beyond old wive's tales.

I say this having done almost no reading in the area, but I think my understanding of the principles and study techniques involved allow me some significant confidence in my conclusions.

Wow. Just... wow.

Can you provide any peer-reviewed studies that manage to overcome the major limitations and deficiencies I refer to?

We know that people can't even be relied upon to accurately report their own food intake. Still, at least with food intake there are decent objective validation measures potentially available; 100g donut = 100g donut, 200g apple = 200g apple.

Do you think asking people to pluck subjective, essentially imagined, non-calibrated measures of internal emotional states, that currently have no even remotely proven objective validation methods, seems like good science?

What does it mean if someone says their stress level is 3 on a scale of 1 to 10? How does that self-rating compare to other people's self stess rating? How well does that rating coincide with the unbelievably complex neuro-biological underpinnings of "stress", which science currently has almost no understanding anyway? How repeatable and reproducable is all this? What are such subjective enquiries even really reflecting?

There are some serious philosophical issues at the core if this - where science tries to probe subjective states. Maybe with major advances in neuroscience a greater degree of confidence can emerge in the intersection between objective empirical scientific methods and subjective individual experience, but that doesn't look like happening any time soon.

Take a read of this:

1. Mayo Clin Proc. 2015 Jun 5. pii: S0025-6196(15)00319-5. doi:
10.1016/j.mayocp.2015.04.009. [Epub ahead of print]

The Inadmissibility of What We Eat in America and NHANES Dietary Data in
Nutrition and Obesity Research and the Scientific Formulation of National Dietary
Guidelines.

Archer E(1), Pavela G(2), Lavie CJ(3).

Author information:
(1)Office of Energetics, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, University of Alabama
at Birmingham, Birmingham. Electronic address: archer1@UAB.edu. (2)Office of
Energetics, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, University of Alabama at
Birmingham, Birmingham. (3)Department of Cardiovascular Diseases, John Ochsner
Heart and Vascular Institute, Ochsner Clinical School-the University of
Queensland School of Medicine, New Orleans, LA.

The Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee was
primarily informed by memory-based dietary assessment methods (M-BMs) (eg,
interviews and surveys). The reliance on M-BMs to inform dietary policy continues
despite decades of unequivocal evidence that M-BM data bear little relation to
actual energy and nutrient consumption. Data from M-BMs are defended as valid and
valuable despite no empirical support and no examination of the foundational
assumptions regarding the validity of human memory and retrospective recall in
dietary assessment. We assert that uncritical faith in the validity and value of
M-BMs has wasted substantial resources and constitutes the greatest impediment to
scientific progress in obesity and nutrition research. Herein, we present
evidence that M-BMs are fundamentally and fatally flawed owing to
well-established scientific facts and analytic truths. First, the assumption that
human memory can provide accurate or precise reproductions of past ingestive
behavior is indisputably false. Second, M-BMs require participants to submit to
protocols that mimic procedures known to induce false recall. Third, the
subjective (ie, not publicly accessible) mental phenomena (ie, memories) from
which M-BM data are derived cannot be independently observed, quantified, or
falsified; as such, these data are pseudoscientific and inadmissible in
scientific research. Fourth, the failure to objectively measure physical activity
in analyses renders inferences regarding diet-health relationships equivocal.
Given the overwhelming evidence in support of our position, we conclude that M-BM
data cannot be used to inform national dietary guidelines and that the continued
funding of M-BMs constitutes an unscientific and major misuse of research
resources.

Copyright © 2015 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. Published by
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PMID: 26071068 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/26071068

[Duchykins]

 

Can you provide any peer-reviewed studies that manage to overcome the major limitations and deficiencies I refer to?

 

 

 

I never acknowledged the existence of whatever flaws you were referring to.

 

I just wanted to highlight what you irrationally said for the benefit of everyone else reading this thread, in case they start taking your opinions on the topic of stress seriously.

 

Why are you bringing statistics about food into this topic when I referred specifically to changes in the brain in response to stress?  There's other stuff like long-term exposure to stress and how it can affect brain development like enlarging the amygdala (makes sense because it's very active in stressed out people).  

 

Oh, we just made that up, right?  No MRIs and whatnot from various university studies.  I won't cite specifics like Stanford since they don't really know what they're doing, right?  It's just an old wives tale from decades past, a myth that refuse to die.

 

And how do you know all of this?  Because you haven't read anything in the scientific literature about stress and the body.  

 

Makes perfect sense.

 

Don't ask me to waste my valuable time for you, to comb though the scientific literature for the dozens of recent studies when I believe you will immediately start reaching for some reason to dismiss them instead of actually reading them.  If you were curious enough you would look for the studies yourself.

Edited by Duchykins, 29 June 2015 - 06:23 AM.

[Brett Black]

Can you provide any peer-reviewed studies that manage to overcome the major limitations and deficiencies I refer to?

I never acknowledged the existence of whatever flaws you were referring to.

I just wanted to highlight what you irrationally said for the benefit of everyone else reading this thread, in case they start taking your opinions on the topic of stress seriously.

Why are you bringing statistics about food into this topic when I referred specifically to changes in the brain in response to stress? There's other stuff like long-term exposure to stress and how it can affect brain development like enlarging the amygdala (makes sense because it's very active in stressed out people).

Oh, we just made that up, right? No MRIs and whatnot from various university studies. I won't cite specifics like Stanford since they don't really know what they're doing, right? It's just an old wives tale from decades past, a myth that refuse to die.

And how do you know all of this? Because you haven't read anything in the scientific literature about stress and the body.

Makes perfect sense.

The principles underlying the scientific method and an understanding of the philosophy of science can, potentially, allow one to spot fatal flaws in studies(and even whole fields of study) without having to know the specifics.

The field of the study of human psychology, which includes research into stress, has had long ongoing problems in this regard.

Here's an extract from a short and straightforward article describing some of the major problems involved, hopefully you can see how this might apply to stress research:

http://articles.lati...cience-20120713

Psychology isn't science.

Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability.

Happiness research is a great example of why psychology isn't science. How exactly should "happiness" be defined? The meaning of that word differs from person to person and especially between cultures. What makes Americans happy doesn't necessarily make Chinese people happy. How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can't use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale. Today, personally, I'm feeling about a 3.7 out of 5. How about you?

The failure to meet the first two requirements of scientific rigor (clear terminology and quantifiability) makes it almost impossible for happiness research to meet the other three. How can an experiment be consistently reproducible or provide any useful predictions if the basic terms are vague and unquantifiable?.....

---

Don't ask me to waste my valuable time for you, to comb though the scientific literature for the dozens of recent studies when I believe you will immediately start reaching for some reason to dismiss them instead of actually reading them. If you were curious enough you would look for the studies yourself.

I'm open to the possibility that I may have prematurely dismissed this area of study. Are you open to the possibility that the flaws I have discussed apply to your current views on stress research?

You seem to be better versed in the specifuc details of stress research than me, and probably know the literature better. It could be helpful for me(and you) and the spread of knowledge more generally, if you could point to some of the more high quality references that you claim contradict my position and support yours. It'd be a shame if you consider this a waste of time.

Edited by Brett Black, 30 June 2015 - 05:03 AM.

[Duchykins]

Blah blah blah, psychology and food statistics.

 

I'm talking biology here; neuroscience, and perhaps neuropsychology, not psychiatry or psychology.

 

I still have no idea what flaws in my sources you're talking about.  Pointing to food studies, psychology studies don't interest me very much since I consider those to be of the "softer" or "social" sciences and expect a certain level of inaccuracy in most studies falling under that category.   That is probably a snooty bias I have from choosing a "hard" science as a career for myself.

 

I'm very tired tonight after just posting a lengthy reply somewhere else.   Sorry.  I'll see if I can return when I have rested.

Edited by Duchykins, 30 June 2015 - 06:55 AM.

[Brett Black]

Blah blah blah, psychology and food statistics.

 

I'm talking biology here; neuroscience, and perhaps neuropsychology, not psychiatry or psychology.

 

I still have no idea what flaws in my sources you're talking about.  Pointing to food studies, psychology studies don't interest me very much since I consider those to be of the "softer" or "social" sciences and expect a certain level of inaccuracy in most studies falling under that category.   That is probably a snooty bias I have from choosing a "hard" science as a career for myself.

 

I'm very tired tonight after just posting a lengthy reply somewhere else.   Sorry.  I'll see if I can return when I have rested.

 

As I said in a previous post, I'm under the impression that neuroscience also has a long (long) way to go in regards to being able to confidently and accurately identify, quantify and understand psychological phenomena like "stress." Only once that capability is sufficiently developed can neuroscience begin to try to find relationships between "stress" and any long-term health effects.

 

I'm skeptical that neuroscience currently has the necessary tools/technologies/techniques. It seems to me that there has been a lot of hype surrounding FMRI and other types of brain imaging technologies, and what they are currently (and perhaps ever) capable of in regards to studying human psychology. Other methods attempting to characterize biological underpinnings of psychological states, such as the study of neurochemistry, also currently seem very limited in this capacity.
 

[Duchykins]

 

 

 

As I said in a previous post, I'm under the impression that neuroscience also has a long (long) way to go in regards to being able to confidently and accurately identify, quantify and understand psychological phenomena like "stress." Only once that capability is sufficiently developed can neuroscience begin to try to find relationships between "stress" and any long-term health effects.

 

I'm skeptical that neuroscience currently has the necessary tools/technologies/techniques. It seems to me that there has been a lot of hype surrounding FMRI and other types of brain imaging technologies, and what they are currently (and perhaps ever) capable of in regards to studying human psychology. Other methods attempting to characterize biological underpinnings of psychological states, such as the study of neurochemistry, also currently seem very limited in this capacity.
 

 

 

 

Are you implying that things like chronic stress or depression don't cause brain atrophy and diminish memory, cognitive functions?  

 

Last time I checked, a year or two ago, a genetic cause of this was discovered by some university study.

 

I'm just curious about how far your "skepticism" goes.

[Duchykins]

I mean if you go back to my first two posts here, that's all I talk about: the effects of stress, and chronic stress on the brain only, not the rest of the body. 

 

So in my first post I said:  "At least getting too much sun everyday won't shrink your prefrontal cortex like chronic stress would."

 

Why would I say that?  Did I just make that up?  Did I read from some quack journal?  Are each of those different research teams that independently discovered this pattern with stress and the brain too stupid to see changes in brain mass or structure?   Or is neuroimaging so unreliable that you can't measure atrophy in any part of the brain?  But then why would we find a genetic link to this phenomenon?   

 

 

I really don't understand what you're getting at here.  You're making a lot of vague and general statements about this.

[Brett Black]

I mean if you go back to my first two posts here, that's all I talk about: the effects of stress, and chronic stress on the brain only, not the rest of the body. 

 

So in my first post I said:  "At least getting too much sun everyday won't shrink your prefrontal cortex like chronic stress would."

 

Why would I say that?  Did I just make that up?  Did I read from some quack journal?  Are each of those different research teams that independently discovered this pattern with stress and the brain too stupid to see changes in brain mass or structure?   Or is neuroimaging so unreliable that you can't measure atrophy in any part of the brain?  But then why would we find a genetic link to this phenomenon?   

 

 

I really don't understand what you're getting at here.  You're making a lot of vague and general statements about this.

 

Plenty of studies are published that are based upon extremely weak study designs. Weak to the point that for all intents and purposes they can be dismissed.

 

In the case of studies purporting to study stress, much of my skepticism is based on the basic problems of first, accurately defining, and then accurately quantifying, "stress" - particularly in humans. These problems are fundamental to any study of the impact of stress, and to my knowledge have not been adequately addressed - they thus present a fatal flaw.

 

My previous posts to this thread point out some of the more obvious general fundamental philosophical and methodological issues involved: psychology is not a science, neuroscience is currently at a very primitive level of understanding, subjective internal experience is not available for objective empirical measurement etc.

 

Are these quite general criticisms? Sure. That's really the point: the scientific method is based upon general principles, and failing to conform to these principles can mean the activity being done is not science.

[Brett Black]

Many of my criticisms(and some extra ones) of stress research in humans can certainly be applied to the following paper too, but it happened to pop up on the CR Society forum recently and I thought it might be of value to post a study that claims a position counter to the widespread "common sense" view of stress:
 

1. Exp Gerontol. 2015 Jun 17;69:170-175. doi: 10.1016/j.exger.2015.06.011. [Epub
ahead of print]


Repeated exposure to stressful conditions can have beneficial effects on
survival.

Marasco V(1), Boner W(1), Heidinger B(1), Griffiths K(1), Monaghan P(2).

Author information:
(1)Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, Graham Kerr
Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. (2)Institute of
Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, Graham Kerr Building,
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. Electronic address:
Pat.Monaghan@glasgow.ac.uk.

Repeated exposure to stressful circumstances is generally thought to be
associated with increased pathology and reduced longevity. However, growing lines
of evidence suggest that the effects of environmental stressors on survival and
longevity depend on a multitude of factors and, under some circumstances, might
be positive rather than negative. Here, using the zebra finch (Taeniopygia
guttata), we show that repeated exposure to stressful conditions (i.e.
unpredictable food availability), which induced no changes in body mass, was
associated with a decrease in mortality rate and an increase in the age of death.
As expected, the treated birds responded to the unpredictable food supply by
increasing baseline glucocorticoid stress hormone secretion and there were no
signs of habituation of this hormonal response to the treatment across time.
Importantly, and consistent with previous literature, the magnitude of hormone
increase induced by the treatment was significant, but relatively mild, since the
baseline glucocorticoid concentrations in the treated birds were substantially
lower than the peak levels that occur during an acute stress response in this
species. Taken together, these data demonstrate that protracted exposure to
relatively mild stressful circumstances can have beneficial lifespan effects.

Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc.

PMID: 26093051 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/26093051

Edited by Brett Black, 10 July 2015 - 03:48 AM.

[Duchykins]

I don't get it.  They take some birds and vary the amount of food the birds are given each day, and the bird's bodies responded to this in a generally positive way.  Why should this be surprising?  All they did was partially mimic what actually happens with birds of the same species in the wild; some days you find more food than other days, some days you hardly find anything at all.  ... Gee I wonder if a little return to normalcy, the kind of feeding habits their bodies are best accustomed to dealing with, had anything to do with their positive results.

 

It's an interesting study but they should chose to put "mild" stressors on their lab animals that don't align with their evolutionary histories and physiology.  Maybe playing some noise next time.  Annoying rap music, at low volume, for an hour or two, twice a day.  Or something like that.

 

All of this is really gearing up toward: mild stress is good for humans.  What "mild stress" aligns with our evolutionary physiology, and what is an unnatural "mild stress" source?  

 

I have a strong suspicion we are trying to prove that "mild stress" that goes against the grain of our biological makeup can be beneficial to us.  

 

That's the study I'll be interested in reading about, and ready to change my position on the matter.

Edited by Duchykins, 10 July 2015 - 07:15 AM.

[Gerrans]

I think mild stress can be good for us. It can motivate us to do something about challenges, such as a lack of food, say, or money.