Category : PipLife

Have you ever suffered through a particularly stressful period in work or family life only to find that, as soon as you are able to relax, you have succumbed to every cold and flu virus going? This is probably because your body’s stress system and immune system are integrally linked.

When you are stressed your brain kicks off a process that readies your body to flee or to fight. As part of this the body stops all unnecessary systems like digestion and boosts anything that might come in useful like the immune system. Short-term stress (lasting for a few hours) can therefore protect the body from infection by giving extra resources to the immune system [1].

Remaining permanently in flight or fight mode, however, is not sustainable. We need to be able to digest and to relax when we are safe. Cortisol, the stress hormone, is thought to tell the body to produce more immune defences in times of stress and also to tell the body it can stop when you are relaxed. So what happens when you experience chronic stress? This seems to mess up the body’s ability to regulate the immune system. Cortisol doesn’t know when to turn the immune system off so it remains in a constant state of low-level readiness [1]. As with everything in life you can have too much of a good thing and a constantly primed immune system is just as unhealthy as an unprepared one leading to conditions such as dermatitis, cardiovascular disease and autoimmune diseases. In addition, the immune system becomes less able to fight normal infections.

Some studies have shown this in real-world settings. In relation to short-term stress, for example, researchers showed that medical students had lower levels of protective immune cells 24 hours after exams compared to during exams [2]. In relation to chronic stress, another study compared parents of chronically ill children with those of healthy children. The stressed parents of the sick children had a constantly turned on immune system that they couldn’t turn off [3].

Finally, the term Leisure Sickness has been used to describe the phenomenon whereby people fall ill on their holidays. This is something that 3% of the population report experiencing [4]. It is possible that stress may project your immune system until you go on holiday. However this is still a theory that has to be tested. It is also possible that when you are stress you do not notice the symptoms of ill health until you have less demands on you.

In short, stress can affect your immune system for better and for worse. The key, as with everything in life, is to keep a good balance so you can stay fighting fit.

1. Dhabhar, F.S., Effects of stress on immune function: the good, the bad, and the beautiful. Immunologic research, 2014. 58(2-3): p. 193-210.
2. Uchakin, P.N., et al., Immune responsiveness following academic stress in first-year medical students. Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research, 2001. 21(9): p. 687-694.
3. Miller, G.E., S. Cohen, and A.K. Ritchey, Chronic psychological stress and the regulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines: a glucocorticoid-resistance model. Health Psychology, 2002. 21(6): p. 531.
4. Vingerhoets, A.J., M. Van Huijgevoort, and G.L. Van Heck, Leisure sickness: A pilot study on its prevalence, phenomenology, and background. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 2002. 71(6): p. 311-317.

Emotions are complicated. How do you know that you’re feeling excited and not nervous, for example? Or how do you distinguish anger from fear? The answer is experience. As adults we have experience of a broad range of emotions; we understand how to distinguish them from each other and how to describe them to ourselves and to others. For a child this can be more difficult. If a child hasn’t experienced anxiety before how can we expect them to recognise the complex interaction of psychological and physical symptoms that make up this emotion? On top of that, even if they can recognise the symptoms they may not know how to describe them. For this reason, children often experience and report emotions as physical experiences. A child who is feeling anxious, stressed or tense for example, may report a pain in their tummy, headache or limbs because this is the most accurate way they can describe what they are feeling.

How can biofeedback help? Biofeedback is, very simply, a way to get feedback on the biological processes in your body (see link to blog on biofeedback here). When we are stressed our bodies kick off a complex chain of events that results in many of the symptoms that you recognise as stress – a pounding heart, sweaty palms and tense muscles – as well as many hidden symptoms that you won’t necessarily feel or notice. Biosensors, like the Pip and many others, measure these symptoms of stress and, more importantly, teach you how to control them. For children this is particularly useful because biofeedback gives a child a way to see, on a screen, what is happening in their body. It therefore gives them the ability to recognise the emotion and the language to describe what they are feeling. Even more importantly, if you can teach a child to control symptoms of stress using biofeedback you give them the power to change how they are feeling. This sense of control is hugely important in helping children, and indeed people of all ages, to combat difficult emotions.

An added advantage of biofeedback for children is that it can easily be integrated into games that make learning fun. This is something that is becoming increasingly popular with technological advances to biosensors and mobile technology that allow biofeedback to become a part of daily life. To date, biofeedback has been used to help children deal with low mood, anxiety and chronic pain [1-4]. A recent study using the Pip in a school setting found that both teachers and children reported improvements in children’s ability to manage stress after using the Pip for four weeks [5].

1. Palermo, T.M., et al., Randomized controlled trials of psychological therapies for management of chronic pain in children and adolescents: an updated meta-analytic review. PAIN®, 2010. 148(3): p. 387-397.
2. Yahav, R. and M. Cohen, Evaluation of a cognitive-behavioral intervention for adolescents. International Journal of Stress Management, 2008. 15(2): p. 173.
3. Wenck, L.S., P.W. Leu, and R.C. D’Amato, Evaluating the efficacy of a biofeedback intervention to reduce children’s anxiety. Journal of clinical psychology, 1996. 52(4): p. 469-473.
4. Knox, M., et al., Game-based biofeedback for paediatric anxiety and depression. Mental health in family medicine, 2011. 8(3): p. 195.
5. Nall, C., and Fish, M., Stress Suspension: A Biofeedback Stress Management Intervention for At-­Risk Youth. Poster presented to the Engagement and Scholarship Consortium Meeting 2016. Nebraska, 11-12^th

The aims of biofeedback and mindfulness are, to a certain extent, overlapping. Both aim to make you more aware of your body, your mind and how the two interact. In today’s post we write about how the techniques and effects of biofeedback and mindfulness overlap and how you can use them in combination.

Techniques. Mindful meditation can be hard if you’re not used to it. Our brains just aren’t used to or very good at maintaining attention on something that isn’t a work deadline, a chore or an upcoming event. For this reason, mindfulness meditation practitioners and researchers use techniques to give your mind something to pay attention to while meditating. Some of these techniques involve body scanning – becoming gradually aware of your body and all of the sensations it is experiencing – and breathing methods that allow you to focus your awareness on your breaths. These techniques are well established means of improving meditation as well as relaxing the body and the mind. These same techniques can be used when practising biofeedback. Biofeedback also aims to give you an awareness of your body and mind. When you use techniques such as the body scan or breathing methods while using a biofeedback tool you can not only see how your body is responding before you use these techniques but how it responds both during and after. It therefore gives you a window into your body’s reaction to stress and relaxation allowing you to tailor your practice to what works best for you.

Effects. So are mindfulness meditation and biofeedback useful? The research seems to say yes. When used in the right way both techniques seem to have powerful effects on reducing stress. In fact, recent studies have started to compare the two to see if there is any difference between them. Most studies are still in the early stages but the most recent randomised controlled trial found that both mindfulness and biofeedback were equally effective at reducing stress, improving self-compassion and reducing worrying [1].

Combination. So how can you combine biofeedback and mindfulness? If you are already experienced at mindfulness meditation techniques you can try to apply these to a biofeedback tool and see how your body responds. Someone who is more experienced is likely to be able to sink into a state of relaxation, and see this reflected by the sensor, more quickly than someone who is still learning. Whether experienced or not you can use a tool like The Pip and accompanying app, Clarity, that provides guided meditation techniques that you can then apply to biofeedback sessions.

As we always say at Pip stress can be both good or bad, what differs is how you respond to it. Giving yourself a way to relax and take time out when you need it is a powerful means of helping your mind and body survive and thrive in this busy world.

1. De Bruin, E. I., et al. (2016). “A RCT comparing daily mindfulness meditations, biofeedback exercises, and daily physical exercise on attention control, executive functioning, mindful awareness, self-compassion, and worrying in stressed young adults.” Mindfulness 7(5): 1182-1192.

Stress has a bad reputation. Most of the time it is seen as a health-destroying, confidence-busting exhausting ordeal best avoided at all costs. But this isn’t entirely fair. Stress can also make us stronger, smarter and better able to face the challenges that life throws at us. So when is stress the bad guy and how does it become the hero? This is the subject of The Stress Test, a book outlining the good and bad of stress by Professor Ian Robertson, psychologist at Trinity College Dublin and chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Galvanic, creators of the Pip [1].

Like many things in life there is a happy medium, or a ‘Goldilocks’ zone of stress. Too much stress or too little is bad for us but just the right amount can push us into our own personal ‘sweet spot’ at which we perform at our optimal level.

Stress is personal. What you find stressful may not be what your friend finds stressful and vice versa. The same applies to the ‘sweet spot’, everyone’s level is different. What seems to be the key difference in good stress and bad stress is how you frame it. Professor Robertson shows that people who have coped with adversity in the past tend to be more resilient to stress in the future. Learning that you can cope with and survive something, and developing the tools to do so, leaves you better able to face challenges in the future. ‘Challenge’ is also a key word when it comes to framing stress. Professor Robertson cites a number of studies that illustrate how we interpret a stressful event can determine whether it will help or harm us.

For example, one research team recruited people to make a speech before an audience. They told half the group to quell their anxiety and to ignore their sweaty palms and shaking muscles by telling themselves ‘I am calm’. The other half of the group were told to reframe the physical sensations they were feeling and tell themselves ‘I am excited.’ This second group were rated as being more persuasive, competent and confident than the first group [2]. This is because they reframed a stressful event as a challenge rather than a threat which pushed them back down the stress curve to their personal stress ‘sweet spot.’

Stress is unavoidable but you can harness the power of it to help you achieve what you want. The key to this is finding the sweet spot. Some challenge is good pushing you from ‘too low’ stress to ‘just right’. Too much anxiety, however, can push you to the other ‘too high’ side of the curve. Learning when to reframe stress as a challenge to get you through the task ahead and, equally importantly, when to take a step back to refocus, calm down and recharge the batteries are important tools in learning how to take control of stress rather than letting it take control of you.

1. Ian Robertson (2016) The Stress Test. Bloomsbury (London: UK).
2. Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144.

We all know that stress can have negative effects on mental and physical health but another important question that we need to ask is how does stress affect performance and decision making abilities in the workplace? This is something that many employers find themselves worrying about when their employees are stressed.

Like many things in life there is a fine balance between when stress is good and when stress is bad. There is a lot of research showing that stress affects people’s abilities to make decisions but whether this provides an advantage or disadvantage depends on the task at hand. For example, when a stressful task is seen as a challenge rather than a threat it can enhance the cognitive abilities that people need to make a good decision [1]. Often, however, work pressure can be such that stress starts to impair people’s abilities to make good decisions. When people are stressed they are more likely to make hasty decisions without considering all of the possibilities [2].

Secondly, when people are stressed they are more likely to succumb to what is called the ‘reflection effect’. This is the tendency to make conservative decisions when there is a chance of gaining something and risky decisions when there is a chance of losing something [1]. Thirdly, the more decisions that people have to make the more likely they are to suffer from what is called ‘decision fatigue’ or the inability to make any further decisions due to a depleted amount of self-control. For example, researchers found that people who are faced with multiple decisions, no matter how inconsequential, were more likely to give up on tasks early than those who had not previously had to make multiple decisions [3]. Add stress to the mix and you may find employees who end up making hasty, risky, fatigued decisions. Not something that you want to encourage in the workplace.

So what can be done to improve decision-making under stress in the workplace? We have already written about the benefits of building resilience to aid decision making (see link here). In our next installment we will discuss other methods that may reduce stress and improve decision making in your workplace.

1. Starcke, K. and M. Brand, Decision making under stress: a selective review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2012. 36(4): p. 1228-1248.
2. Keinan, G. (1987). Decision making under stress: Scanning of alternatives under controllable and uncontrollable threats. Journal of personality and social psychology, 52(3), 639.
3. Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2014). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: a limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative.