Sake Bombs or Kale? Vacation Review

At the risk of sounding insufferable, I have to share some thoughts on two side-by-side vacations.

 
Let me preface our discussion with two disclosures:  I have adrenal dysregulation and two young kids. While I'm in adrenal "recovery," as many of you know who are on this path with me -- recovery takes a long, long time.

Vacation #1: Bolinas. We rented a small house on the mesa in late December. We slept a lot and watched deer (here's a YouTube of watching deer as meditation). We ate incredibly food that was picked that day from the local Gospel Hills farm stand, which operates on the honor system. You can see some of the chard and kale in the foreground of the photo I took (above). We did some serious chillaxin'. We hung out. We walked. We did lots of sleeping. We came home after 5 days, tanks full.

 

I kid you not about the honor system. Here's where you put your mula - at $2 for organic dino kale, life is good.

Vacation #2: Tahoe. We rented a tiny condo in Northstar Village but double the cost of the Bolinas house. We tried to gather used gear for the kids to ski but could only find weird bits and pieces so we spent 3 evenings before we left spending about $500 to outfit the kids fully. We were worried about taking our little Prius on big mountain passes so we rented an SUV for another $400. We left early because we were worried about traffic (my last trip took 9 hours in traffic on a Friday afternoon from Berkeley). We got up early to haul our semi-reluctant kids to ski school. We stayed out late drinking too much with friends. Sake bombs, anyone? I learned they can ruin a good liver in record time.

I think you know where this is heading.

I was thinking about a sweet 4-mile hike in Bear Valley with our kids versus the cold, exhaustingly agro-ness of hustling around Tahoe. But it is awfully pretty to be in the mountains.

Let me add that I was super fun to be around while in Tahoe: donning my one organic wool sweater and leggings for 4 days straight and scouring every menu in Northstar for something I could eat that aligns with both my organic experiment and the Gottfried Cleanse I began last Wednesday. Been around folks who are detoxing? One word: I - R - R - I - T - A - B - L - E .

While body weight is an arguable criterion for ranking vacation, it's a great proxy for cortisol: I lost 5 pounds in Bolinas, maintained it for 3 weeks, then gained it all back in Tahoe.

More worry  = high cortisol = more sugar cravings = weight gain + muffin tops. More on that this Sunday at our Stress Resilience workshop.

At the end of the day, I only have two compelling reasons to go to Tahoe: I love to cross-country ski, and I'd love for my kids to be proficient at skiing (or snow-boarding) down a mountain. It's one of those nice sports that adds to your social card and it's a fun way to burn calories.

But I found it also burns out adrenals, at least my adrenals. Yours?

Stress Resilience....

Our ability to cope with stress peaks at 25 & 65. Where does that leave us in-betweeners? Perimenopause in particular catapults into a state of half our normal stress resilience, mostly due to the hormonal chaos of wildly fluctuating estrogen and dropping progesterone levels.

Recently I offered an interactice teleconference for Up2yoga on Stress Resilience. Listen to the podcast right here. Learn natural ways of creating more stress buoyancy with adrenal support and balancing your sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone). Join me for our next interactive teleconference on July 8, 2010 at 10am from anywhere in the world for $1 right here.

The Work of Byron Katie

"The Work" by Byron Katie - a series of inquiries to ask of any stressful thought.

1. Is it true?

• The answer is a “yes” or a “no” only.
• If your answer is “no,” continue to question #3.

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? 

3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? (Occasionally people find the following sub-questions helpful.)

• What emotions happen when you believe that thought? (Depression, anxiety, etc. If needed, an Emotions and Reactions List is available on www.thework.com.) 
• Does that thought bring peace or stress into your life? 
• What images do you see, past and future, when you believe that thought? 
• Describe the physical sensations that happen when you believe that thought. 
• How do you treat that person and others when you believe that thought? 
• How do you treat yourself when you believe that thought? 
• What addictions/obsessions begin to manifest when you believe that thought? (Alcohol, credit cards, food, the TV remote?)  
• What do you fear would happen if you didn’t believe that thought? (Later, take this list of fears to inquiry.)  
• Whose business are you in mentally when you believe that thought? 
• Where and at what age did that thought first occur to you? 
• What are you not able to do when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without the thought?
Close your eyes and observe, contemplate. Who or what are you without that thought? 

Turn the thought around.
Statements can be turned around to the opposite, to the self, and to the other, and occasionally there are other variations as well. When dealing with an object, you can replace the object with “my thinking” or “my thoughts.” Find a minimum of three genuine, specific examples of how each turnaround is as true as or truer than your original statement.

Female Brain & Stress

Check out this new study that shows the female brain reacts to stress differently then the male. Maybe this will help us understand the double rate in depression in women vs. men. The bottom line is that in women, the LIMBIC SYSTEM (our prehistoric part of our brains that is the controller of emotions) activates under stress. A longer-lasting response was seen in women. And what about our adrenals?

STUDY RESULTS--Penn researchers use brain imaging to demonstrate how men and women cope differently under stress

**Findings have implications for identifying gender differences in mood disorders

PHILADELPHIA – According to a study that appears in the current issue of SCAN (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine discuss how men and women differ in their neural responses to psychological stress.

“We found that different parts of the brain activate with different spatial and temporal profiles for men and women when they are faced with performance-related stress,” says J.J. Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor or Radiology and Neurology, and lead author of the study.

These findings suggest that stress responses may be fundamentally different in each gender, sometimes characterized as “fight-or-flight” in men and “tend-and-befriend” in women. Evolutionarily, males may have had to confront a stressor either by overcoming or fleeing it, while women may have instead responded by nurturing offspring and affiliating with social groups that maximize the survival of the species in times of adversity. The “fight-or-flight” response is associated with the main stress hormone system that produces cortisol in the human body – the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Thirty-two healthy subjects – 16 females and 16 males – received fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans before, during and after they underwent a challenging arithmetic task (serial subtraction of 13 from a 4 digit number), under pressure. To increase the level of stress, the researchers frequently prompted participants for a faster performance and asked them to restart the task if they responded incorrectly. As a low stress control condition, participants were asked to count backward without pressure.

The researchers measured heart rate, cortisol levels (a stress hormone), subjects’ perceived stress levels throughout the experiments, and regional cerebral blood flow (CBF), which provides a marker of regional brain function. In men, it was found that stress was associated with increased CBF in the right prefrontal cortex and CBF reduction in the left orbitofrontal cortex. In women, the limbic system – a part of the brain primarily involved in emotion – was activated when they were under stress. Both men and women’s brain activation lasted beyond the stress task, but the lasting response in the female brain was stronger. The neural response among the men was associated with higher levels of cortisol, whereas women did not have as much association between brain activation to stress and cortisol changes.

“Women have twice the rate of depression and anxiety disorders compared to men,” notes Dr. Wang. “Knowing that women respond to stress by increasing activity in brain regions involved with emotion, and that these changes last longer than in men, may help us begin to explain the gender differences in the incidence of mood disorders.”