Roberta Lee - The SuperStress Solution: 4-week Diet and Lifestyle Program

INTRODUCTION
A NEW KIND OF STRESS, A NEW SOLUTION

PART 1

CHAPTER 1.

CHAPTER 2.

PART 2

CHAPTER 3.

CHAPTER 4.

CHAPTER 5.

CHAPTER 6.

CHAPTER 7.

CHAPTER 8.

PART 3

CHAPTER 9.

CHAPTER 10.

IM TAPPING THIS OUT on my laptop under the sole lightbulb in the dark jet bringing me home to New York from my monthlong stay on the islands of Micronesia. I first went to these coral reef islands in 1988 when, as a newly minted physician fresh out of residency, I joined the U.S. Public Health Service and was immediately dispatched there for five years. My task then was to provide Western medical care to those who needed it and, when necessary, to bring the islanders to the main island for more intensive treatment. For the past nine years, Ive returned there for a month every year to do research with traditional healers, studying their vision of health and illness, as well as learning about their use of herbal medicines. Much of what I learned and observed there has informed my medical practice today. I continue to be awed by the methods and philosophies of these indigenous healers.

Tonight, as the drone of the engines pulses steadily through the cabin, I feel that all of my fellow passengers are asleep. I wish that hum could lull me into oblivion so I could tune out at least some of the twenty grueling hours that remain of the flight. But I cant sleepand not just because Im cramped in my airline seat. I cant because a nagging ache that started at the base of my neck is now radiating down to the muscles between my shoulder blades. It used to appear a month or so after I returned home, but now it shows up sharply and acutely just a couple of hours into my return flight. I think I know why.

With each passing year, my New York life grows exponentially more hectic and demanding, and I know whats facing me almost as soon as I get off the plane. As a doctor, I must respond and react far more swiftly now than I did a decade agoand at all hours of the day and night. My patients expect this, as they, too, seem to be caught up in their own frenetic worlds. Also, I know all too well that the serenity that I have just enjoyed throughout my monthlong stay on the islandsa serenity I have grown to cherishwill be gone the moment I unbuckle my seat belt.

In Micronesia, no matter how hard I workand some days I go nonstop from dawn to duskat the end of the day I always feel a sense of peace and tranquility. And yet each time I return to the States, I see the tranquility gap between here and there widen. While the islanders seem suspended in a state of calm, I and my patients back home in New York City, where I have lived for many years, are getting more and more frenzied.

And here is something else: Not only do my patients appear more stressed; they have started describing symptoms of stress at increasingly younger ages. It used to be that most people in the waiting rooms of general practitioners were there for treatment of diseases associated with aging, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. They were in their fifties, sixties, and older. And yet my patient population has been heading in the other direction. It now includes a growing number of thirty- and forty-year-olds.

I also see a whole new battery of complaints creeping into patient histories, from young to old. Some people come to me knowing that they are terribly stressed, but not really sure why or what to do about it. Others come in describing what we now know are stress-induced illnesses. And yet, when I ask them whether they are feeling stressed, they tell me theyre not. Im not sure what it is, Doctor, said one patient who practically dragged himself into my office. But I know Ive got something because Im not sleeping. Im exhausted. Energys gone along with my sex drive. Another patient, a woman in her late thirties, a commodities trader whose office was very near where the World Trade Center had been, came in with a terrible case of hives on her chest and forehead caused, she told me, by nothing she could put her finger on. She only knew that she was anxious all the time. When I asked about what might be stressing herother than her high-stress jobshe stoically told me that nothing was any different from the usual. It hadnt even occurred to her that her proximity to a place that had known such catastrophe might be psychologically weighing on her.

These two people are hardly isolated cases. I regularly see any number of patients who are plagued with irritable anxiety, substance abuse, sleep disorders, and withdrawal from life. Many come in bewildered by what they are experiencingeverything from strange digestive, allergic, respiratory, sexual, and skin problems to autoimmune dysfunction and heart disease. And yes. Some patients do understand whats happening enough to complain, Im so stressed out! But the great majority has no idea that stress is playing a significant or catalyzing role in their afflictions. All they know is that theyve slipped over an edge; that theyve caught something that wont go away.

What theyve caught is a menacing form of stress that closely resembles post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Known as shell shock when it was first identified after World War I, PTSD usually stems from a catastrophic life eventcombat, rape, involvement with a deadly accident, or a major illnessthat leaves its victim in a persistent highly anxious state that leads to disengagement from life, sleep disorders, and substance abuse habits that are so elevated as to place them in a new category on the diagnostic scale. After the original distress and emotional fallout, many victims gradually return to life as usual. But not all. For some, the stressand the memoriespersist. Occasionally, PTSD sufferers re-experience the traumatic event or events through flashbacks or nightmares and, as a result, they tend to avoid places, people, or other things that remind them of the event. They remain off-balance, their bodies literally in an Im-at-war mode all the time. But most of my patients havent suffered through the experiences that are so often linked to PTSD, yet their symptoms are very much the same.

Whats going on?

About a decade ago, I decided to keep a closer eye on a group of patients who had been exhibiting a number of physical symptoms that more often than not came in multiples. They denied experiencing any unusual stress in their lives. After I talked with them for hours on end, it came to me one day, right out of the blue: These people had been living with extreme stress for so long that they didnt even realize they were stressed! They had crossed the line from a pale shade of gray to a very deep dark black state in their bodies, but they hadnt noticed the transformation. Stress had become an invisible part of the landscape of their lives.

And it wasnt just job stress. They had job stress and money stress and parenting stress and relationship stress and trying-to-find-a-taxi-in-the-rain stress. Layers upon layers of stress weighed on them in increments so small that they didnt feel them separately. Here, right under my nose, was an insidious new threat to everyones well-being, a menacing, twenty-first-century kind of stress that, because it was above and beyond anything I had ever seen before, I gave the name