"Stressed spelled backwards is desserts. I discovered this in 1991 while doodling on a piece of paper waiting for an experiment to be completed in my lab at the National Institutes of Health. I laughed out loud, and made it a mission to figure out why people eat under stress. That’s how I wrote my first book, Fight Fat after Forty: The Stress-Fat Connection. Just remember, it’s not tuna on a bed of greens you reach for when you’re stressed. Stress pushes you to eat refined sugars and fat. The solution is to learn to nip it in the bud before the raging stress appetite gets hold of you."
Practice Safe Stress
In the past few decades, with the rise of cell phones, email, the Web, laptops, Palm Pilots and "Crackberries", we’ve evolved into human beings that are on 24/7. To see how far we’ve come - so fast! - consider this: there wasn’t even the term 24/7 ten years ago. The quality and quantity of the stresses in our lives have changed dramatically, but our bodies’ response has remained the same for a million years. And that, dear friends, is a big part of why we’re presently in so much trouble.
All of us are now constantly dealing with irritating traffic jams, annoying interruptions, and endless global competition resulting in corporate restructurings and layoffs that create increased workloads for some of us and low paying jobs or unemployment for others. Not to mention, we’re flooded with so much information that we’re paying “continuous partial attention” to everything, a term (coined by my friend, former Microsoft executive Linda Stone) that describes how we are all constantly scanning the environment, rather than focusing on any one thing. This, say scientists, negatively affects our brain’s capacity to learn and recall information later.
Information Overload, Anyone?
The amount of information the world produces doubled between 2000 and 2003 to 5 exabytes of information yearly. Five exabytes is equivalent to 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress.
AOL blocks 780 million pieces of junk e-mail daily, or 100 million more e-mails than it delivers.
Bottom line: We’re under siege by mostly unimportant data. We need to focus and prioritize in order to manage stress.
Next: We're also working a LOT more than we used to...
