Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

Checkup: Month 9

     Weight: 158

     Total steps this month: 230,000

     Push-ups till collapse: 58

     Days in which ate cayenne pepper powder in morning because a study showed spicy food lowers hunger: 12

Overall health: I’m finding the project exhausting—but oddly, mentally as much as physically. Dozens of times a day, I try to figure out what’s the healthiest course of action. But often, I feel lost in the fog of conflicting advice.

Take the treadmill. After about three hours, my treadmill starts to stink like burned rubber. My son Jasper holds his nose when he’s nearby. So are the positive benefits outweighed by these noxious fumes?

If I have an extra hour in my day, should I go to the gym or visit my family? All the health books emphasize the importance of family and friends.

Should I get a carpet because it blocks noise, or will that send allergens into the air?

When I have water at a restaurant, should I ask for a twist of lemon, because lemon juice lowers the glycemic index? Or demand that no lemon get within a yard of the glass, because microbe experts say restaurant lemon wedges teem with germs?

I bought a steamer, because you can’t get much healthier than steamed vegetables. But my steamer is made of plastic. Am I making myself some hormone-disrupting broccoli?

I need to relax.

Chapter 10

The Adrenal Gland

The Quest to Lower My Stress Level

IT OCCURS TO ME THAT writing a book about health is not healthy. In fact, writing any book is bad for you.

There’s the sedentary lifestyle (which I’ve curbed somewhat with my treadmill desk). There’s the isolation—being alone breeds depression, which helps explain the absurd number of authors who’ve come to unhappy endings (Hemingway, Woolf, Plath—I could fill up the rest of the page).

And then there’s the pressure. I’m way behind schedule. My publisher keeps reminding me of my deadline, and I keep replying that deadlines are incompatible with health. As are book releases. If and when my book comes out, what if I get the flu or an eye infection or something? I worry about that a lot. “You see the world’s healthiest man?” they’ll say. “He’s the one in the corner with a hacking cough.”

To combat this conundrum, I’m wrestling with stress this month.

Before this year, I was a bit of a skeptic. I was still too much of a Cartesian dualist to believe that stress was all that bad for your body. No more. Stress is not like vibes or auras. There’s an Everest of data showing that stress wreaks all sorts of physiological havoc.

The term “stress,” as psychologist Dr. Esther Sternberg writes in her book Healing Spaces, was coined by a Hungarian endocrinologist named Hans Selye. So obsessed was he with the concept, he had the chemical structure of the stress hormone cortisol carved into the stone above his front door.

Like so much else in the body, stress started out as a helpful ally back in Paleo times. Stress increases the heart rate, which is useful in the short term for running and fighting. It even helps ward off some disease in the short term. A study in the Journal of Clinical Immunology measured immune cell levels in skydivers just as they were about to jump. They had 34 percent higher disease-fighting natural killer cells.

But over the long haul, the high heart rate and constricted blood vessels suppress the immune system. The more worry, the more sickness. In one of many such studies, a researcher found that mouth wounds took 40 percent longer to heal when students were in the middle of exam week.

There’s a big problem with acknowledging that the mind plays a part in physical disease. We’re tempted to blame the patient. Stop being so grumpy and you’ll get better. You can will (or pray or think) yourself out of sickness! Buck up!

This danger fed my skepticism about the bodily effects of stress and moods. It smacks of The Secret, that bestselling but bunkum-filled book that says you can wish those cancer cells right out of your body. The last thing a melanoma patient needs to hear is that they should “turn that frown upside down” if they want to get better.

Robert Sapolsky—author of the great book on stress Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers—calls it a “lapsarian” view, “characterizing illness as the punishment meted out by God for sin.”

And indeed, so far, science shows no link between cancer and stress. That’s important to state, because much of America believes otherwise. Sapolsky cites a 2001 study where the majority of patients believed their breast cancer was caused not by genetics, diet, or environment, but by stress.

But when it comes to other health problems, stress gets trickier. Studies show a huge link between stress and heart disease. And studies also show that we can, to some extent, control our stress level.

At least for me, this leads to a horrible positive feedback loop of worry. If I worry too much, I’ll increase my likelihood of heart disease. So I worry about worrying too much. And that increases my worry. Which makes me worry I’m even more at risk for heart disease. I need help.

Ho, Ho, Ho, Ha, Ha, Ha

It’s Monday night, and I’ve chosen to go to a laughter club. I read about laughter clubs—also called laughter yoga—in Time magazine, and they seem like a relatively painless, if dorky, way to cut down on stress.

The club I chose is led by a chiropractor named Alex Eingorn in his midtown office. Eingorn writes on the website: “It’s free, but I’ll accept $2 million donations with no questions asked.”

Eingorn, it turns out, looks a bit like Mikhail Baryshnikov. He speaks with a slight Russian accent and is happy and welcoming, as you’d hope a laughter club leader would be. He wears casual blue Nike shorts and a sweatshirt.

There are fifteen of us tonight, ranging in age from early twenties to eighties, and we stand in a circle.

“Are you ready?” asks Alex. “Okay, drop