Improve your stress management and lessen your MS symptoms

Stress management is a term frequently use in connection with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The degree in which stress have an effect on the course of your illness can determine how well you are living with MS.

Do you know that stress has an almost instantaneous impact on your body and your mind?

This reaction to physical as well as mental demanding situations has been in our genes forever. Through evolution, our bodies are much attuned to stress since it’s very important for survival purposes to have a stress response.

So having a stress response is of no harm to us if we follow stress management techniques to help us deal with it. It is a good idea that we practice stress management as much as possible to live a better and enjoyable life despite having MS.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU EXPERIENCE STRESS?

Whenever we are faced with a stressful situation, we start developing a sympathetic nervous system arousal and blood flow changes throughout your body.

A normal response in our bodies to any stress factor means:

• Adrenalin is released
• Cortisol (a stress hormone) is released to our bodies to get us ready to deal with the stressful situation

  This stress hormone is released from the adrenal gland during periods of enhanced stress.

  There's a circuit in the central nervous system (CNS) called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal cortical circuit talking to the adrenal gland in charge of performing this automatic stress management function when faced with a stressful situation.

• Blood sugar along with other hormonal activity takes place to prepare us from possible injury or to escape injury.

This type of automatic response or internal prepping, as I called it, has been instrumental in our survival efforts throughout history.

HAVE THERE BEEN ANY STUDIES ON STRESS & MS?

There have been many studies on the impact that stress and stress management might have on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and, furthermore, if you have MS or ask any MSer you will hear that MSers feel a worsening of their MS symptoms when facing a stressful situation.

That much is true but the feeling of more or stronger symptoms doesn’t necessarily mean that there is any change in the underlying disease.

Some studies have confirmed the existence of a correlation between a stressful life event and the risk of having an exacerbation during the following 6 months after such an event but no definite conclusion has been reached because:

1. Studies were done mostly on a small scale
2. The definition of stress is not the same in all these studies
3. The reactions of people to stress are different
4. The different reactions can cloud the interpretation of the data

In conclusion I will say that from the point of view of most neurologists out there they will tell you that there is no hard or solid scientific data that can show a direct link between stress and Multiple Sclerosis but from the point of view of one MSer I am inclined to think that some connection exists.

The reason that supports my conclusion is simple: The worsening of many MS symptoms precisely at those moments.

WHAT HAPPENS IN MSers?

In folks that don’t have MS the normal reaction goes something like this:

During any stressful situation, the hypothalamus becomes stimulated and sends a signal to the pituitary gland which in turn starts signaling for the production and release of a corticotrophin releasing hormone which will then contact the adrenal gland, having it release cortisol.

In other words, you can think of cortisol as being your body’s natural steroid which is released during periods of stress.

In our case, the hypothesis is that in folks with a chronic illness such as MS, this natural stress response signaling in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) becomes impaired.

In other words, the hypothalamus becomes less responsive to feedback, to the cortisol that is in the brain and in the body, because the body was really only evolutionary conceived and developed to respond to short periods of stress where you have a very heightened arousal for a temporary period of time and the body prepares itself to deal with that and then the stress goes away.

But that's not frequently what happens in modern life. And that's not frequently what happens with MSers, where you could have chronic daily stressors or chronic worries or concerns and if you have an elevated sympathetic response, there is some evidence that the HPA axis and the cortisol release can become chronic in nature causing the regulation of the stress response in the body to become deregulated.

To help you with this you can use stress management techniques like The Agless Yoga instructional DVDs by John Schlorholtz principal instructor Harvard University Center for Wellness plus you can click the following text link to purchase

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED LATELY?

There is a widespread belief that stress is associated with disease worsening but from a scientific perspective, scientists are still in their infancy on making all those connections and looking at the causal threads and the mediating and moderating factors that could potentially influence the relationship between stress and disease worsening.

If you wish to know more about Stress and Multiple Sclerosis you can go and watch part One of Two of a video webcast that explores:

• The impact of stress on the body and mind
• The relationship between stress and MS
• What we are learning about stress from research

New! Comments