Stress, Its Harmful Impact, and Meditation

I have spent some time getting trained to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and have set up and taught a Mindfulness-Based Wellness program... but that doesn't mean I am unaffected by stress! And I pay a lot of attention to the research and science news about the effects of stress on the human body/mind, and about promising methods for reducing those negative effects. I noticed a recent piece in the online Scientific American issue that addresses some of this. It is very well-written and accessible, and I recommend it. Here's an excerpt:

Ohio State University psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her partner, Ronald Glaser, an OSU virologist and immunologist, have spent 20-odd years researching how stress affects the immune system, and they have made some startling discoveries. An easy example comes from their work with caregivers, people who look after chronically ailing spouses or parents (no one would argue that this role is quite stressful). In one experiment, Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues administered flu vaccines to caregivers and control subjects and compared the numbers of antibodies—proteins involved in immune reactions—that the two groups produced in response. Only 38 percent of the caregivers produced what is considered an adequate antibody response compared to 66 percent of their relaxed counterparts, suggesting that the caregivers' immune systems weren't doing their jobs very well—and that the stress of caregiving ultimately put them at an increased risk of infection...

It might seem counterintuitive, but Kiecolt-Glaser believes that stress makes our immune systems less effective because it actually elicits an immune response itself. Stress, she says, causes the body to release pro-inflammatory cytokines, immune factors that initiate responses against infections. When the body produces these cytokines over long periods of time—for instance, as a result of chronic stress—all sorts of bad things can happen. Not only does it hamper our body's ability to fight infection and heal wounds, but chronic inflammation also increases our risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, and autoimmune diseases including type 2 diabetes.

What's more, because regular stress causes a chronic immune response, it can also increase a person's risk for allergies, which occur when the body elicits a chronic immune response against something that's not really dangerous (like pollen). In her most recent study, announced yesterday, Kiecolt-Glaser found that when people are under lots of stress—for instance, when they are forced to deliver a speech or do difficult math problems on the spot—their allergies worsen over the course of the next day.

I am paying a lot of attention to that research these days, in part because I am heavily involved in caregiving for my own elderly mother... and I know how hard it is on me, emotionally. One well-researched method for reducing the many negative effects of stress is mindfulness meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn taught us that, and is still teaching us... Here is a nice short article that presents some of the recent research about meditation and stress reduction (harm prevention).