Easy Does It

Check this out!

"The word epidemic gets tossed around promiscuously these days. I recently heard somebody refer to an "epidemic" of bad reality television shows, and someone else complain about an "epidemic" of people willing to be seen in public wearing Crocs. But the word does have a medical meaning—it's a condition or disease that affects an unusually large number of people. I guess that could apply to bad footwear. It certainly applies to stress. Last fall, the American Psychological Association released a major study that told us what we already knew—21st-century America is the most stressed-out place on Earth. A third of American adults are living with "extreme stress," and nearly half believe that their stress levels have increased in the past five years.

That's just the beginning of the bad news. The rest is what we tend to do about stress, which in most cases is nothing, self-denial being another great American tradition. When we do react, it's almost always in ways that are destined to make things worse: We drink too much, eat way too much, and rarely exercise enough. Consequently, we are a nation of jittery insomniacs. I consider myself a (somewhat) normal middle-aged urban adult with all the usual reasons to melt down and, perhaps, an extra dollop of impatience. Like a few million others, I have a teenager, aging parents, and a demanding job. I try to exercise regularly and eat properly, but the evidence seemed to call for a more fundamental solution. "Dad," my daughter pleaded not long ago, in a ticket line at JFK, where I had just begun to light into a representative of the airline that had accidentally deleted our reservations. "Please don't have an airport fit," she begged.

Needless to say, I had the fit, and then spent the flight absorbing the shame of knowing that, thanks to me, my daughter actually has a category in her brain labeled "Airport Fits." The episode stressed me out so badly that I went to a yoga class. No luck: All it managed to induce was an odd combination of humiliation, boredom, and pain.

But I've always had faith in gadgets, so, seeking relief in technology, I bought a gizmo called the StressEraser. Yes, it sounds like something a man with a bad toupee would hawk on cable television at four in the morning.

Guess what, though? It erased my stress. The little biofeedback machine, which is about the size of a BlackBerry, has an infrared fingertip sensor that monitors the way you breathe by translating pulse beats into waves that you can watch roll across the StressEraser's LCD. (Just typing those words makes me calmer.) The machine essentially decodes various nerve signals—it's complicated, but there are stimulating nerves that increase your heart rate and lead to faster breathing patterns, and pacifying nerves that do the opposite. We want the opposite. To get there, you simply slip your finger into the slot and monitor your breathing patterns on the LCD, counting softly as you shed your stress. The waves are supposed to come in gentle arcs; at first mine looked more like a series of daggers. By sounding a little beep when it's time to exhale, the StressEraser teaches you how to calm yourself.

After just a few days I was breathing like a Zen monk, at least while my finger was on the meter. You cannot fool the StressEraser—believe me, I've tried. If you worry about your mortgage, job, or weight, the machine will display a claustrophobic series of triangles packed tightly on top of one another. Now relax. Breathe. Concentrate on nothing. As soon as you ditch the bad vibes the triangles begin to space out—and so do you. Once you are breathing properly, the machine awards you a point. I try to rack up 100 points a day, which takes about 15 minutes, although one needn't do it all at once. At night, the StressEraser works better as a sleep aid than Ambien.

Perhaps the simple act of watching your own breath forces you to ease up—and even lower your blood pressure. Or maybe the machine simply plays the role of an elaborate (and, at $299, costly) placebo. Anything's possible. But placebos often work, and who cares so long as it makes you mellow?

It's not as if I've suddenly attained a state of infinite peace and enlightenment. Far from it. But I have been to a lot of airports lately. And so far I haven't made a single ticket agent weep."

I have to laugh. This is a cheap price for the same thing we used on the ambulance - an pulse oxicimeter. It measures two things: oxygen molecules in the blood stream and (less accurately, depending on the patient) the pulse. Your heart rate can easily be found in many parts of the body. We don't rely on the pulse-ox for the heart rate, though; we always corroborate that finding with taking the physical pulse, usually in the wrist. (And you never take a pulse with your thumb - it, too, is a pulse point.)

I'm amused because this is a commonly found device in the medical community. And while the price of $299 is a little expensive to do deep, mindless breathing (otherwise known as meditation) just think of what we pay - around $4,000! So at that price you are getting a placebo, but look at it this way: if it works, run with it!

Stress is not just a little bad for people; it contributes just as smoking, overeating and everything else to killing people a whole lot faster. Run with the placebo. Although, going to the gym is cheaper and far more satisfying to me. So is yoga, but that clearly did not work for the writer.

There are other links: how to reduce stress and the dangers of overthinking. I think I will check those out!