Transforming Stress for Teens

The recent alarming reports that a growing number of American teens are experiencing high levels of stress clearly signals a burgeoning crisis and an immediate need for solutions. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported in June suicide was the second leading cause of death among 15- to 19-year-olds. The widely reported 2014 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey said teens experienced even higher levels of stress than adults. And a study out last year from New York University found “very high levels of chronic stress in a wide number of arenas” among 11th-graders in a private-school setting.

We believe teens, their parents, teachers and counselors will find highly effective strategies in Transforming Stress for Teens - the HeartMath Solution for Staying Cool Under Pressure. Today’s teens are growing up is strikingly different era than past generations. The speed, complexity and deluge of information filling teenage brains is accelerating their stress. World events, wars, refugeeism, global warming and a deteriorating national discourse certainly may be on the periphery of those brains. Among many other more immediate and personal pressures, however, are homework overload, excessive hours of social networking and texting, bullying and harassment. Additionally, high school seniors and graduates report great anxiety about the college application process and leaving home for the first time to attend college.

What is stress? Four hours of homework each night? Being bullied at school or online? Working tirelessly to get into a top-rated college or university? Having your sexual identify questioned? The answer is none of these - directly. As we write in the book, “Stress is not the ‘thing’ that just happened or the situation on the outside. Stress is the feeling or emotion you experience inside yourself in response to the thing, that external event or situation. It’s the emotion that makes you feel lousy, not the thing itself.” Frequently feeling any number of emotions such as anger, anxiety, bitterness, boredom, fear, frustration, helplessness or impatience among others is a sign of elevated stress. Feeling any of these most or all the time is a signal of very serious and unhealthy stress. Central to the solutions presented for dealing with stress successfully is self-regulation of emotions. Learning to self-regulate and slow down on the inside is not just another feel-good exercise. It is a tool decades of scientific research have validated for increasing resilience and lowering harmful stress. Self-regulation is a vital skill teens can learn to function better and be happier during their school years and beyond.

Face stress head-on. Ignore in the hope it will go away invites a lot of unnecessary anxiety, heartache and generally bad days. “Managing stress,” we explain, “means learning to manage your emotions so you can deal with whatever comes your way with more balance, clarity, and self-assurance rather than with anger, impatience, frustration, or anxiety.” Increasing our capacity to self-regulate is the essence of maturing. We are like little kids learning to stop and look for cars before crossing the street, to share and play well with others and not charge more than we can afford as we get older. The fact is, one of the most challenging areas for many teens, and adults is learning to maintain our inner emotional composure when dealing with people, especially those who push our emotion-reaction buttons. A good time to transform stress is before something triggers it, but you also can do it in the moment or even hours later. Preparing for something you know could or will be stressful can save you a lot anguish and heartache.

One teen who recalled doing an exercise at school using HeartMath’s Heart-Focused Breathing Technique, described here: Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathe a little slower and deeper than usual. “Our health education teacher gave us an assignment. We were supposed to practice Heart-Focused Breathing while walking across campus and try not to judge anyone ... to celebrate how unique everyone is and not how they are different from us. That was really fun, to appreciate people rather than judge them.” Said another, “I used Heart-Focused Breathing when I was in an embarrassing moment. I calmed down and then I handled the situation calmly.”

Even when you can’t immediately shake the upset, anger or sadness of something, going to your heart and using the breathing tool hours later can work wonders. The sooner you get the stress hormone cortisol out of your system, however, the better. Transforming Stress for Teens speaks directly to today’s teenagers, addressing what’s causing excessive stress and how to combat it. The science for why stress happens - heart coherence vs. incoherence, heart-brain interactions, energy drain and more - is presented in a format suitable nonprofessionals and professionals alike.

Each chapter incorporates the research-based insight of recognized experts and includes teen-approved exercises and tools thousands have used successfully around the world. Following are benefits teens have reported from these exercises and tools:

• Think more clearly. 
• Better sense of what’s truly important. 
• Bounce back faster after stressful situations. 
• Communicate and talk things through more easily. 
• Enjoy life more. 
• Less boredom. 
• Less drama. 
• More calm. 
• Greater confidence. 
• Focus and concentrate longer. 
• Better decisions

Why Stress Makes Your Hair Fall Out

The times when I’ve pulled fistfuls of hair out of my head in the shower, my life wasn’t particularly stressful—or at least, it wasn’t until my hair started coming out. Then, of course, I assumed I was either balding or belatedly inheriting my family’s matrilineal thin hair. Faced with the stark reality of my hair-related vanity, I would try to comfort myself with the fact that I could at least wear fun wigs. You know, the natural cycle of things.

Julie Beck

But the explanation for this actually lies in another cycle—the life cycle of a hair.

Basically, a hair grows, then stops growing, then falls out. (Revelatory, I know. But stay with me.) The growth phase, or anagen, of a human head hair can last two to six years, which is why our head hairs can get so long. Other hairs have much shorter growth phases—an eyelash’s, for example, is 30 days. After anagen, a hair goes into catagen, a very short phase lasting just a couple days, in which the follicle shrinks a little bit. That’s followed by telogen, when the hair pretty much just sits there, doing nothing. Then, at last, exogen, when it falls out.

This process is always happening, and it’s totally normal for a person to lose between 50 and 100 hairs a day this way. That’ll plug your drain up, but compared to the 90,000 to 150,000 total hairs on the average person’s head, it’s pennies.

Stress is thought to disrupt this process, prematurely kicking hairs out of the growth period. Rather than leaving anagen at their own pace, they all go through the resting phase at the same time and fall out together in bigger numbers—up to 10 times more than usual, according to the dermatologist Kurt Stenn, the author of the new book Hair: A Human History. This has been shown in mice, when the stress of being exposed to loud noises led their hairs to go into catagen prematurely.

“Stress does affect the human hair follicle as well, and we assume that what we see in the mouse is the same thing we see in the human—the same transition occurs,” Stenn says.

What exactly kicks the hairs into resting isn’t totally clear, but a review of the literature suggests neurotransmitters or hormones produced under stressful situations may be the cause. And a study done on rhesus macaque monkeys found that monkeys with more cortisol (a stress hormone) in their hair were more likely to have hair loss.

Because there’s a delay between when a hair stops growing and when it falls out, there’s likewise a delay between a stressful event (which can be physical, like surgery or trauma, or emotional, like a divorce or loss of a job) and when hair loss might occur.

In human head hair, this delay lasts three months, the combined length of the the catagen and telogen phases. It’s like clockwork. And indeed, those times when I was pulling my hair out in the shower, I was always able to trace it back three months to something atypically stressful, like a breakup or a death. (I asked Stenn if body hair falls out too. “That’s a wonderful question,” he said. “I don’t know that!” Even if it does, the resting period length is different for different kinds of hair.)

Mass shedding is also often seen after women give birth. (About three months after, most likely.) That’s thought to be hormone-related, Stenn writes—pregnant women have higher levels of hormones, which prevent shedding during pregnancy, and once they go away, so goes the hair. The American Academy of Dermatology ascribes it to “falling estrogen levels.” Giving birth is also, you know, a stressful event.

Post-pregnancy hair loss may be caused by a similar mechanism to other stress-induced hair loss, or it may not be. But “it’s a rule of thumb,” Stenn says, that if a patient comes into a dermatologist’s office worried about hair loss, the first thing they’ll ask is, “What happened three months before?”

Doing small acts of kindness may lower your stress

MARY BROPHY MARCUS

Those "Practice random acts of kindness" bumper stickers may be preaching more wisdom than we realized.

While performing small, kind gestures every day helps others, a new study by Yale and UCLA researchers suggests it may also diffuse our own stress, improving our mental health.

"The take-home message is that when we are stressed and we help others, we can also end up helping ourselves," study author Emily Ansell, assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, told CBS News.

Lab-based studies have shown that giving to others can help people cope with stress and boost their positive emotions, said Ansell, but she and colleagues wanted to investigate whether the same holds true in the real world. They asked 77 adults, ranging in age from 18 to 44, to use a study-provided smartphone to report their daily feelings and experiences over a two-week period.

Every night, the participants received an automated phone reminder that prompted them to complete a daily assessment: to report any stressful life events they experienced that day at work or school or in their personal lives at home, including any financial problems or health issues. The total number of events was the measure of their daily stress level, said Ansell.

They were also asked to report whether they had engaged in various helpful behaviors, simple acts such as opening a door for someone else, helping a child with schoolwork, loaning money or an item of value to someone else (clothes, a car, or a tool, for example), or asking another person if they needed help that day.

The participants also completed a daily survey that measured their emotion, and they were asked to rate their mental health each day, rating it from 0 for poor to 100 for excellent.

Helping behaviors seemed to buffer the negative effects of stress on a person's well-being, the authors found. Those who reported performing more acts of kindness showed no dips in positive emotion or mental health. And they had lower increases in negative emotion in response to high daily stress.

"People overall did one or two acts of kindness per day, but what was most important was when they did more than one or two per day, we saw a benefit to their well-being," Ansell said.

People who reported lower-than-usual helping behaviors also reported lower positive emotion and higher negative emotion in response to high daily stress.

It was surprising how strong and uniform the effects were across daily experiences, said Ansell, whose research is published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Ansell plans additional research involving more ethnically and culturally diverse populations.

Another avenue for future study, she said, is to determine whether actively encouraging people to engage in more acts of kindness and helpfulness can improve mood and mental health.

"It may be particularly relevant for people dealing with a lot of stress who are at risk for depression relapse," she said.

Ansell said the findings are especially appropriate for this time of year, the season of giving.

"A lot of the time, we find that our daily stress goes up over the holiday season. We have a lot going on. There can be a lot of different social gatherings and things like that. So when you're out and about having a stressful day, think about doing one of these helpful things: help someone out at the store, hold a door or elevator," said Ansell. "It might help you feel a little better in terms of your own mood or stress this holiday season."

5 Best Free Apps To Reach New Year's Resolutions: Lose Weight, Increase Happiness And More

By  Abigail Elise

We’re barely into 2015, but many have undoubtedly compiled a list of resolutions that they hope to stick to this year – maybe lose a few pounds, snag a few more hours of sleep or eat a healthier diet. Though some of these may require some good old-fashioned willpower and planning, technology has made some of these tasks significantly easier, and there are a ton of apps that can help people reach their goals in no time. Check out our list below of the best apps to help reach and stick to New Year’s resolutions.

5. Pact

Like a personal trainer, Pact will make sure you don’t skip your daily workouts. Users commit to exercising a certain number of times per week, and if they miss a day money will be subtracted from their credit card or Paypal accounts. Payouts are small, but consistent gym-goers can expect to earn a little extra cash if they don’t skip. Users can also participate in challenges that encourage them to eat more vegetables or keep a food diary, two factors that scientists believe contribute to lasting weight loss.

4. Mint

Those who hope to get their finances on track should download Mint. The personal finance app allows users to place all of their bank accounts, credit card information and student loan data in one place. Users can track where they spend most of their hard-earned cash, and the app will also allow them to set budgets on different categories of spending – clothing, dining out, groceries, etc. Mint will alert has alters if users go over their spending limit. It will also help identify patterns in spending, as well as help users discover what their financial priorities are.

3. Sleepbot

Don’t want to purchase an expensive sleep tracker? Sleepbot is a free app for Android and Apple smartphones that monitors sleep patterns – a virtual sleep journal. Sleepbot even has sound and motion recording that allows users to fully understand what wakes them up at 3 a.m. or why they toss and turn. Forgetful? The app will remind users to set it to sleep mode before they turn in for the night.

2. MyFitnessPal

Not sure how those 12 pounds crept on last year? Studies show that dieters who keep careful record of what they eat are much more likely to lose weight. MyFitnessPal has a wealth of nutritional data for thousands of fresh and packaged foods, including counts for carbohydrates, fat, calories, sugar and protein. If users can’t find a food in the database, they can always add it, along with custom meal plans they often eat. MyFitnessPal can also be linked to a number of other apps and is compatible with fitness bands like the Jawbone UP24.

1.Happier

Who couldn’t do with a little more happiness in their lives? The Happier app is bright and cheery, from its festive orange color to its positive subject matter. The app is highly social – users subscribe and can submit their moments of happiness and gratitude for others to read. Happier also has online courses that users can take to learn a number of useful skills – from how to stress less to basic yoga moves.