Stress is the bane of today’s society and plays havoc on our physical and mental makeup. Psychological stress activates the adrenal glands to discharge stress hormones called cortisol, which help us survive the stress but are harmful to our health. When a person is exposed to prolonged periods of stress, he can develop ailments like high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, cancer and various immune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, depression etc.
Food has a profound effect on both mind and body. Health is a reflection of our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well being. A person with a disturbed mind cannot have a healthy body because the mind is the monitor of our physical health. Research at the National Institutes of Health in the USA has been looking at how stress affects the mind and body. One of the scientists, Dr. Pamela Peeke, focussed her work on the relationship between stress and weight gain. It was found that people who are stressed out often turn to food for solace, and eat more than normal. Dr. Peeke found that the stress released fat accumulation can begin in people as young as 20.
Stress is one of the largest killers of mankind, today. It is the cause of most of our illnesses, whether physical or mental. Stress has a very negative impact on our digestive system. The body can assimilate the nutrients from food only when the mind is in a relaxed condition. No matter what you eat, if the mind is disturbed, your body will not gain any benefits from the nutritive components of your food.
There are, however, a few foods that help the body cope with the demands made by stress. When the body is under stress the demand for nutrients is more as key nutrients are burned up faster. In order to derive the maximum benefits from a nourishing diet, one needs to follow three essential steps-
• Eat under a stress-free and pleasant atmosphere.
• Eat just enough to repress hunger; overeating can be hazardous. Overload the digestive system by overeating and it will make you lethargic, sleepy and inactive.
• In case you suffer from excessive stress, eat foods that counteract stress.

Emotional equilibrium is a state of stable balance, such that any disturbance from outside tends to be corrected.
Let’s assume that everyone has an internal ‘regulating machine’ that requires ‘resetting’ after an upsetting event, but the great majority return to emotional equilibrium within days (that is, they have a ‘normal’ depressed mood state). Some people, however, are unable to reset their mechanism easily, thus losing their ‘emotional equilibrium’. They remain essentially ‘stuck’. Their personality styles and ways of dealing with events ‘sustain’ the depression, rather than enabling them to ‘get over it’.
So how can equilibrium be lost? There are two main ways:
1. The machinery can fail; for example, if the keel on a yacht breaks off, the yacht will capsize.
2. A ‘positive feedback loop’ can develop. This means that two or more factors can influence each other to such a degree that a small disturbance leads to a further disturbance. This loop is sometimes also called a ‘vicious circle’. An example of feedback occurs when a microphone is put too close to a speaker. A small noise from the speaker is amplified into the mike, and further amplified by the speaker. While the feedback loop can be of use to create musical effects, such reverberation (mulling over and rumination) is not useful for humans.

Meditation, which originated in India, had an almost twenty-five-hundred-year run as a physical and mental health booster and then was stopped dead by modern medicine. Until, that is about thirty years ago when DR. Herbert Benson coined the term “relaxation response.” Since then it has been gaining ground. In 1998 Congress gave the NIMH $10 million to expand a network of mind-body research centers and provide training for health workers in a variety of meditative approaches.
The purpose of meditation, one popular version of which is called “mindfulness,” is to open the mind to sensations and thoughts and temporarily tune out everyday life. Not only does this induce calm, it also can bring about specific, quantifiable changes in the body. Most who consistently practice meditation feel different and better afterward, but a least five people now have provided specific proof that something beneficial has in deed happened.
In a 1999 study conducted by a Harvard team of researchers, five accomplished meditators spent about forty minutes in an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine, started at a dot on a computer screen, thought up random list of animals, and mediated. The resulting pictures of their brains showed that the regions that process positive emotions and influence cardio-respiratory function were most active during the meditation.

Check out more about alternative therapy.

We have already told you in an earlier issue, that curcumin (a component of turmeric and cumin seeds) could break up plaques formed by beta-amyloid deposits in the brains of genetically altered lab mice. Such plaques are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. When the researchers added small amounts of curcumin to human beta-amyloid proteins in a test tube, the compound kept the proteins from accumulated to from the fibers that comprise the plaques. Reporting in the Journal of Boilogical Chemistry, the UCLA research team said curcumin was more effective in inhibited plaque formation than some drugs being tested as Alzheimer’s treatments. Curcumin’s low molecular weight and structure allows it to penetrate the blood-brain barrier and bind to beta-amyloid.
Curcumin has been used for thousands of years as an anti-inflammatory in traditional Indian medicine to treat a variety of ailments. It appears to counter the oxidative damage and inflammation that occurs in response to amyloid deposits, the UCLA researchers sat. Apart from Alzheimer’s disease, curcumin is under study in cancer and heart disease and animal studies suggest it may also help treat multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. According to the researchers no spice has ever looked more promising.

What if you hated yourself
What if you were scared of yourself
What if you create barriers around yourself
What if you sleep but still feel tired
What if you always feel sick and weak
What if you had no friends
What if you had to pretend
What if your bad memories always play inside your head
What if you have to keep everything inside
What if you feel guilty for something thats not your fault
What if you’re filled with all-emcompassing sadness
What if you wished you were dead
What if you told your self that you’re worthless
What if you thought no one would care if you were gone
What if you feel like you don’t belong
What if you can’t stop crying when you’re by yourself
What if every song or story or poem brings up bad memories and thoughts
What if nothing ever goes your way
What if you never get to choose
What if you were isolated from everyone
What if you never get noticed
What if you had your childhood taken from you and had to grow up so fast
What if no one cares or loves you
What if no one sees your pain
What if you were silent all the time and never talked to anyone or got talked to
What if no one understands you
What if you saw the whole world as grey and meaningless
What if you felt like apart of you dies everyday
What if you know your life is meaningless
What if you never smiled or held your head high
What if you had to go through, feel, and be all of these things
What if………….then you would know how it feels to be ME
—-(brittney)

Before giving a patient a first prescription for a drug, the doctor should explain several points. He should make clear what effects are likely to be experienced on first taking the drug, e.g. drowsiness or dry mouth. He should also explain how long it will be before therapeutic effects appear and what the first signs are likely to be, e.g. improved sleep after starting a tricyclic antidepressant. He should name any serious effects that must be reported by the patient, such as, coarse tremor after taking lithium.
Finally, he should indicate how long the patient need to take the drug. For some drug such as anxiolytics, the latter information is goven to discourage the patient from taking them for too long; for others, such as antidepressants, it is given to deter the patient from stopping too soon.