DHEA-disinformation and stress-confusion
While browsing through stress and happiness related sites I come across odd pieces of advice, like e.g. in “Stress-Proof Your Life” by Elizabeth Wilson.
(You can search inside this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stress-Proof-Your-Life-Brilliant-Control/dp/190490260X )
On the first pages Ms Wilson praises DHEA, making references to unquoted research results. The Wikipedia knows more about this, talking about disputed effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehydroepiandrosterone
In the United States, dietary supplements containing DHEA or DHEAS have been advertised with claims that they may be beneficial for a wide variety of ailments. DHEA and DHEAS are readily available in the United States, where they are regulated as foods rather than as medications. Given the lack of any proven benefit from DHEA supplementation, a 2004 review in the American Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that “The marketing of this supplement’s effectiveness far exceeds its science.”[18]
Some in vitro studies have found DHEA to have an anti-proliferative or apoptotic effect on cancer cell lines.[12][13][14] The clinical significance of these findings, if any, is unknown. Higher levels of DHEA, in fact, have been correlated with an increased risk of developing breast cancer in both pre- and postmenopausal women.[15][16]
A 2002 review found that DHEA was difficult to study in an animal model. The authors concluded that there was no evidence that DHEA was beneficial for any of the conditions for which it had been studied to that point, that it was associated with significant side effects, and that based on these findings, “there is currently no scientific reason to prescribe DHEA for any purpose whatsoever.”[17]
Ms Wilson confuses stimulation with stress. She opines that “stress is caused by change” whereas most of us agree on the definition offered by the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28medicine%29
“Stress is the consequence of the failure to adapt to change. Less simply: it is the condition that results when person-environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy, whether real or not, between the demands of a situation and the resources of the person’s biological, psychological or social systems. In medical terms, stress is the disruption of homeostasis through physical or psychological stimuli. Stressful stimuli can be mental, physiological, anatomical or physical reactions.”
After the false information on DHEA and her personal definition of “stress” Ms Wilson reveals that a bit of stress is actually good for us, never telling us exactly how much is a “bit” and now much is “much”.
On page 5 there are two questions and answers: one about unsatisfactory sex life and the other about “How do you know when you’re stressed positively as opposed to stressed dangerously?” Ms Wilson says “The answer is easy” – but I cannot understand it… Can you?
But as much stress must be dangerously too much, she goes on giving expert advice on how to deal with it, enumerating all the popular household remedies for stress-reduction she could think of and read about.
All in all Ms Wilson’s book is still valuable: it gives us the precious ingredients of how to write another “how to” book: disinformation, confusion as well as the capacity to copy-paste other authors’ disinformation and confusion.
Being an employee is stressful
I read that working to make others richer is stressful:
http://cbr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/2/57
Managing Envy and Jealousy in the Workplace
by Kim Dogan and Robert P. Vecchio
Negative emotion is a common experience for many employees. Competition for rewards, resources and recognition drives much of the animosity and ill feelings associated with employee envy and jealousy. In this article, the causes and consequences of employee resentment are highlighted. Factors that contribute to greater levels of employee resentment include reengineering, diversity and generational conflicts. In addition to reduced performance, dysfunctional consequences of negative emotion include stress, job dissatisfaction, withdrawal, retaliation and poor citizenship. The article concludes with a set of five specific suggestions for reducing and managing negative emotion at work: (a) giving consideration to emotional maturity at the time of hire, (b) using teams and participative management, (c) implementing an incentive system that supports employee cooperation, (d) encouraging open communication and (e) placing high achievers in mentor positions.
My conclusions:
Being an employee – i.e. working to get others richer – implies competition, animosity, resentment, jealousy and envy. Its consequences are stress, job dissatisfaction, withdrawal, retaliation and poor citizenship.
My suggestions:
Avoid working for making people rich altogether. If you feel like working, do it :
- to make yourself happy i.e. to get the “flow” experience
- to make your friends and/or family and/or community happier
Good perspectives to practice stressFREEDOM in Germany
The news: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in Germany too: roughly 25% of the population has to live at subsistence level:
http://de.news.yahoo.com/dpa2/20080518/twl-analyse-kluft-zwischen-arm-und-reich-210805f.html
The bad news: this segment of the population is continually increasing.
The good news: those who train and practice the exercises and attitudes recommended and coached by stressFREEDOMguide will continue to feel stressFREE and relaxed, calm and collected, cool-headed and detached, unperturbed and imperturbable, nonchalant and possessed, unflappable and unruffled, yea, even truly happy!
homo naturaliter epicureus
Tertullian (CE 160-225), the prolific early Christian author opined that the human soul is basically Christian: “anima naturaliter christiana”. The Catholic PR has generalized this belief further, maintaining that the whole human being is basically Christian, not only his /her soul: “homo naturaliter christianus”. They mean that everybody is a natural born Christian but later, influenced by her/his environment and/or her/his own sins they sort of turn away from the their natural religion.
Observation of human behavior and some knowledge of Epicureanism have convinced me, however, that the natural religion/attitude of – at least of a significant part of – human beings is rather Epicurean than Christian:
- most people want to stay alive and enjoy their lives;
- prefer pleasure over pain;
- do not really believe in an afterlife (at least when they care to give this problem at least 5 minutes of thought),
- realize that most of our infinite desirers are artificially generated by PR/publicity and that our real needs are much simpler and easier to satisfy (at least when they care to give this problem at least 5 days of study and reflection)
“It is not surprising that Epicureanism should have some modern appeal as a faith, and that some people are attempting to revive it. It has the charm of antiquity to recommend it, and the fact that it was for seven centuries a living faith; unlike most extinct religions, we have a clear idea of what the tenets of Epicureanism were; and its religious and ethical doctrines are compatible with the naturalism of modern science, while their scientific doctrines prefigured it. ”
(see more about this in SkepticWiki)
Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of modern America, was too an Epicurean as he described in one of his letters. He, like Epicurus, treated slaves as equals and advocated natural human rights.
It is difficult to say, what proportion of humankind tends to cultivate freedom, friendship, reflection, honesty and tolerance instead of power, status, bigotry and manipulation. The socio-cultural environment we grow up in has certainly a major, perhaps determinant influence on our beliefs and behavior patterns. I read somewhere that some American Indian tribes burnt all the belongings of a tribe member who died, so that her/his relatives, friends and acquaintances should have no ground to develop greedy thoughts. I think socio-cultural anthropology (especially the ethnography of some of the American Indian, African. Eastern Polynesian cultures) could furnish us a long list of tried and true socio-cultural mechanisms to counter -balance our also natural tendencies to dominate, fight, hate, be greedy, jealous, envious. That is if we really cared to change our socio-cultural environment.
Another promising resource for the development of a sustainable socio-cultural evironment that fosters happiness could be Manfred Max-Neef’s “Human Scale Development”:
http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/background/maxneef.htm
http://www.rightlivelihood.org/max-neef.html
the world is not flat for the losers and the non-competitors
Reading (well, most of) Thomas L. Friedman’s ” The World is Flat ” I was surprised by his practically ignoring the victims of the global greed of about 0,2-2% of the world’s population: for the author it is only the sick and the misgoverned who will not profit immediately form the brave new flat world. I also thought that it is a quite obvious fact that making the rich richer does not result in any “trickle down effect”.
And as for his theory of a new middle class: it is exactly the contrary of what you can observe in India, China and the ex-Communist countries, where a very thin social stratum of the new rich winners is exploiting ruthlessly an ever growing class of losers. I am glad that people more informed and literate than me, like Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo have drawn attention to the reality-gap in Mr Friedman’s utopian dreams: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/25/030027.php
It is also interesting to notice that both Friedman and his critics move strictly within the winner/loser paradigm of competition, ignoring the thin but stressFREE class of non-combatant non-competitors, conscienstious obejectors of the competitors’ unsustainable economic wars.
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