Tag: Robert Sapolsky

Dan’s Top Video Picks on Depression

Films can teach us a lot about depression.  Not only can they provide information.  They can also move us emotionally by drawing us into the subject with interviews, animations, and other techniques that aren’t amenable to books.  Here are my favorite videos that address the topic of depression.

Living with Depression

I came across this short video recently.  And was very moved.  It captures, with sublime music and moving images of a young woman, her struggles with clinical depression and the loneliness she endures. Powerful. Over four million people have viewed it. Running time is 3 minutes and 22 seconds

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Dan’s Top 10 Stress Books

Full Catastrophe Living

Based on Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this book shows you how to use natural, medically proven methods to soothe and heal your body, mind, and spirit. The title?  Oh, that’s from the classic book Zorba the Greek.  Zorba is a Greek full of a salty zest for life.  At one point, his intellectual benefactor asked him, “Zorba, are you married?”  Zorba snorts, “Married? Wife, kids, house . . . the full catastrophe!”  When all of our lives are pulled about by the catastrophe of daily living, we need mindfulness to ground us, we need the deep breathing and quiet to enrich the quiets place in all of us. 

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky has chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress.
As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear-and the ones that plague us now-are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal’s does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way-through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us literally sick.

Buddha Brain

Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and other great teachers were born with brains built essentially like anyone else’s, but used their minds to change their brains in ways that changed history. With the new breakthroughs in neuroscience, combined with the insights from thousands of years of contemplative practice, this book shows readers how to have greater emotional balance in turbulent times, as well as healthier relationships, more effective actions, and a deeper religious or spiritual practice. It’s full of practical tools and skills readers can use in daily life to tap the unused potential of the brain and rewire it over time for greater peace and well-being.

Spark

This book offers a fascinating investigation into the transformative effects of exercise on the brain, from the bestselling author and renowned psychiatrist John J. Ratey, MD. Did you know you can beat stress, lift your mood, fight memory loss, sharpen your intellect, and function better than ever simply by elevating your heart rate and breaking a sweat? The evidence is incontrovertible: Aerobic exercise physically remodels our brains for peak performance. This is one of the few books that got me off my ass and into the gym.

How to Train a Wild Elephant

This is a short book and easy to read.  Jan Chozen Bays, M.D., a physician and Zen teacher, has developed a series of simple practices to help us cultivate mindfulness as we go about our ordinary, daily lives. Exercises include: taking three deep breaths before answering the phone, noticing and adjusting your posture throughout the day, eating mindfully, and leaving no trace of yourself after using the kitchen or bathroom. Each exercise is presented with tips on how to remind yourself and a short life lesson connected with it.

The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook

This book details easy, step-by-step techniques for calming the body and mind in an increasingly overstimulated world. It’s based on the latest research, and draws from a variety of proven treatment methods, including progressive relaxation, autogenics, self-hypnosis, visualization, and mindfulness and acceptance therapy. In the first chapter, you’ll explore your own stress triggers and symptoms, and learn how to create a personal plan for stress reduction. Each chapter features a different method for relaxation and stress reduction, explains why the method works, and provides on-the-spot exercises you can do to apply that method when you feel stressed.

Stress-Proof Your Brain

Our brains have evolved powerful tools for coping with threats and danger-but in the face of modern stresses like information overload, money worries, and interpersonal conflicts, our survival reflexes can do more harm than good. To help you adapt your nervous system to the challenges of today’s world, neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson presents Stress-Proof Your Brain. Join him to learn research-based techniques and meditations that will literally re-shape your brain to make you more resilient, confident, and peaceful, including: – How to replace your brain’s unhealthy reactions to stress with protective and self-nurturing responses- Techniques for using memory to soothe and release painful feelings of sadness, guilt, anxiety, inadequacy, or anger – Guided meditations for calming chronic worries, developing gratitude, building inner strength, and more.

Stress Proof Your Life

Stress proof your life is for people who struggle to find time for a shower, much less a bath. The ones who worry that stress is affecting their health and relationships. Or they would worry if they weren’t so knackered. Some people are really good at avoiding some stresses without realizing that they are slaves to another kind. Elisabeth Wilson looks at the sources – occupational, genetic and environmental – and reveals 52 brilliant techniques for creating a stress-free zone. When your batteries are blown and burnout is imminent these top tips can help you regain control.

Getting Things Done

If you’re like me, my biggest source of stress comes from the pressure to get lots of things done everyday.

In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the methods for getting things done. Allen’s premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential* Apply the “do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it” rule to get your in-box to empty.

Upward Spiral

Lawyers help others but take very poor care of themselves. In their quest to max out their earning potential and afford the best material goods our economy has to offer, lawyers lead a narrow, grimly serious existence without emotional rewards. They work inhuman hours yet always feel pressured for time. Since they never stop, breathe, and relax, they are frequently tense, irritable and ready to bark. Author Harvey Hyman, himself a former trial lawyer, gives us the latest science, wit and wisdom in a book I highly recommend.

Stress Management for Lawyers

When you practice law, stress comes with the territory. Such stressors as time pressures, work overload, conflict, and difficult people can rob you of a satisfying career and personal life. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. You can take effective action and this book, written specifically for lawyers, shows you how.

 

How Stress and Anxiety Become Depression

Lawyers suffer from depression at an alarming rate.  I am one of them.

I have been a litigator for more than 22 years, and I didn’t suffer depression in the beginning of my career. But I did have trouble managing the stress of my practice. 

Over time, this constant stress developed into anxiety.  I started feeling like I couldn’t control everything.  I would go to bed fearing the problems and disasters to confront me the next morning.  After years of this, the pendulum swung from states of anxiety to states of depression.  Why did this happen?  It took me a long time to understand.

Recently, scientists have been focusing on the connection between stress and anxiety and the role they play in triggering and maintaining depression.  This is something that should be of concern to all lawyers, who carry high stress loads in their law practices.

Too Much Stress Can Lead to Anxiety

“Stress” is anything in our environment that knocks our bodies out of their homeostatic balance.  Stress responses are the physiological adaptations that ultimately reestablish balance.  Most of the time, our bodies do adapt, and a state of balance is restored.  However, “if stress is chronic, repeated challenges may demand repeated bursts of vigilance,” warns Dr. Robert Sapolsky, an expert on stress-related illnesses and author of the best-selling book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress Related Diseases and Coping. “At some point, vigilance becomes over-generalized, leading us to conclude that we must always be on guard – even in the absence of stress.  And thus the realm of anxiety is entered,” writes Sapolsky.

About 20% of the population will experience some form of anxiety disorder at least once in their lifetime.  Studies show that law students and lawyers struggle with anxiety at twice that rate.

Anxiety and Depression

Stress went on too long in my life as a litigator.  I had, indeed, entered the realm of anxiety.  I felt like I had a coffee pot brewing 24/7 in my stomach.  I became hypervigilant; each file on my desk was like a ticking time bomb about to go off.  At some point, the anxiety made me dysfunctional, and I was unable to do as much as I had before.  I felt ashamed of this.  I denied it to myself and hid it from others, but the litigation mountain became harder and harder to climb as the anxiety persisted over a period of years.

Sapolsky writes, “If the chronic stress is insurmountable, it gives rise to helplessness. This response, like anxiety, can become generalized: A person can feel . . . at a loss, even in circumstances that [he or] she can actually master.”  Helplessness is one pillar of a depressive disorder that becomes a major issue for lawyers because we think of ourselves as invulnerable superheroes who are the helpers, not the ones in need of help.  Lawyers often don’t get help for their depression and feel ashamed if they do.     

Many lawyers do not appreciate the connection between their stress and anxiety and their risk for developing clinical depression.  But the occurrence of anxiety disorder with major depression is frequent; in fact, 60 percent of people with depression are also suffering from an anxiety disorder.

Maybe this connection helps explain studies that find such high rates of both anxiety and depression in the legal profession.

Depression “is stress that has gone on too long,” according to Dr. Richard O’Connor author of the book Undoing Perpetual Stress: The Missing Connection between Depression, Anxiety, and 21st Century Illness.  Many people with depression have problems dealing with stress because they aren’t “stress resilient,” writes O’Connor.  It’s not some central character flaw or weakness, but a complex interplay bewteen genetics and one’s experiences over a lifetime.

How our bodies and brains deal with stress and anxiety hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years.  This wonderful defense mechanism, which is wired into our nervous system, is called the fight-or-flight response.  When confronted with a threat – – whether real or perceived – – this response kicks in and initiates a sequence of nerve cell firing and chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol that flood into our bloodstream and propel us into action to meet a threat.  This was an essential survival device for our ancestors who lived in the jungle and would have to flee beasts or fight foes trying to kill them.

Lawyers don’t fact these types of real life-or-death threats.  But they perceive life-or-death threats in their battles with opposing counsel while sitting in a deposition or sparring in the courtroom.  Our bodies respond as if we were being chased by a hungry lion.  Accordingly, the stress response can be set in motion by mere anticipation, and when humans chronically believe that a homeostatic challenge is imminent, they develop anxiety.

Over time, this chronic anxiety causes the release of too much fight-or-flight hormones.  Research has shown that prolonged release of too much cortisol damages areas of the brain that have been implicated in depression: the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory) and the amygdala (a fear processing hub deep in the brain).  Another area of the brain, the cingulate (an emotion-dampening center located near the front of the brain), in tandem with the amygdala, helps set the stage for depression.

Lawyers need to learn better ways to deal with stress and anxiety to avoid the multiple triggers that can cause or exacerbate clinical depression.  Turning and facing those things that make us stressed and anxious, and doing something about it, gives us the best protection against depression.

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