j’s blog

As Stress Mounts, Self-Control Goes Out the Window - Yahoo! News

By Alison McCook Thu Apr 21, 2:34 PM ET

During times of stress, we’re less able to hold ourselves back from unhealthy temptations, new study findings indicate.

Australian researchers found that during exam periods, students smoked more cigarettes, drank more high-caffeine drinks, ate less healthy foods, kept up with fewer household chores, neglected commitments, and monitored spending less.

“The results tell us that during periods of high stress - such as examination periods for students - we may see a relapse in behaviors that we had successfully controlled in the past, such as smoking,” lead author Megan Oaten of Macquarie University in Sydney told Reuters Health.

“These findings have practical importance because they illustrate that at times of stress we are particularly vulnerable to breakdowns in self-control,” she added. “Therefore, we should not ask too much of ourselves during such a period.”

Oaten pointed out that handling stress itself takes self-control. “So, the work required to cope with stress consumes a lot of our self-control strength, and leaves us less able to control our behavior,” Oaten said.

During the study, Oaten and her co-author, Ken Cheng, asked 57 students about their typical self-control, then re-interviewed them 4 weeks later, when half were coping with a high-stress exam period.

The researchers found that, during exams, students were less likely to control their behaviors, reporting that they ate more junk food, exercised less, and left more dishes in the sink. They also neglected to shave, brush and floss their teeth, wash their hair, change their clothes and do laundry.

Stressed out students also smoked an average of 7 additional cigarettes each day, and drank 7 extra cups of caffeinated drinks each week.

In contrast, students not coping with exams had no increase in self-indulgent behaviors, suggesting their self-control was as strong as ever, the authors report in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

These findings suggest that people should be extra careful during times of stress, Oaten noted. “It appears that people can only control so many behaviors at any one time, and should therefore avoid taking on too much at once, particularly during periods of stress.”

Developing stress management skills may also ward off lapses, by leaving more self-control reserves available to fend off the urge to overeat and smoke, she said.

SOURCE: Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, March 2005.

Yahoo! News - On April 15, headaches and unpleasant surprises

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the last significant simplification of the tax code. Since then, succeeding presidents and Congresses have messed it up again with layers of complexity.

Anyone who saw this coming could have made killing. A $5,000 investment in the stock of tax-return preparer H&R Block in the fall of 1986 would (with dividends reinvested) be worth more than $170,000 today.

But for those not inclined to put their money where their cynicism is, the increasing complexity of the tax code has made for nothing but misery. The code has become so complicated that it is best seen as a tax in itself. Call it the complexity tax.

On top of the tax paid on income and capital gains, we pay a cost - in dollars or in hours - because lawmakers like to accommodate lobbyists seeking deductions, exemptions and credits. Some of the ways the public pays:

• Help! Help! Sixty-one percent of taxpayers have been driven into the clutches of tax-preparation services, according to the National Taxpayers Union. That’s up from 38% in 1980 and 46% in 1986.

•Are we done yet? Taxpayers and their accountants will spend an average of 13 hours on their Form 1040s this year, up from nine hours 15 years ago. They will spend almost four hours on 1040EZs, up from one hour in 1990.

• The cost of compliance. Individuals and companies spend about 6.5 billion hours filing their taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. Estimates of the cost to the economy run from $125 billion to $140 billion.

What makes all of this anguish and expense more remarkable is that it comes despite the arrival of user-friendly tax preparation software such as Turbo Tax. Even these tools are no match for a monster code.

Now comes a new reform plan. President Bush has appointed former senators Connie Mack, R-Fla., and John Breaux, D-La., to chair a commission on simplifying the tax code. It’s set to hold its seventh hearing on Monday.

Taxpayers would be well served if the commission could persuade Congress to fix the code. But given the track record of tax reform, they might want to hedge their enthusiasm. In fact, perhaps they should go out and buy shares of H&R Block.

Yahoo! News - Americans Spend 6.6 Billion Hours on Taxes
By MARY DALRYMPLE, AP Tax Writer

WASHINGTON - People scurrying to meet tonight’s tax deadline might consider this: It’s taking you and your fellow Americans 6.6 billion hours to do all that paperwork. The basic tax return — the Form 1040 filed by most people every year — accounts for 1.6 billion hours.

The Internal Revenue Service furnished those statistics to the White House budget office, which keeps tabs on the government’s bureaucratic demands. The budget office notes that tax work “towers over the entire paperwork burden for the rest of the federal government” and accounts for some 80 percent.

“If anything, those numbers are probably understated,” said David Keating, president of the National Taxpayers Union, which reports annually on the increasing complexity and demands of tax returns.

“A lot more of the cost is just planning to do the tax-smart thing. That can actually take a lot more time than reporting what you’ve done,” he said.

Tax returns must be postmarked by midnight tonight.

Sensitive to the demands that tax laws put on weary taxpayers, the IRS has seven people working full time to reduce the anguish for filers. The IRS Office of Taxpayer Burden Reduction looks for requirements that can be streamlined, reduced or eliminated under the law.

“We’re trying to reduce unnecessary burden,” said Michael Chesman, the office director.

Some of the burden cannot be avoided because it is a requirement of the tax laws. By attacking unnecessary burden, the office has shaved more than 200 million hours from tax paperwork since the office was created in 2001.

Chesman said the office plans next year to simplify the process for requesting an extension. The idea is to replace the current four-month, and subsequent two-month, deadline extensions with one simpler and automatic six-month extension.

Small changes can make a big difference. Letting more people use the simpler 1040 forms trimmed 5 million hours off the paperwork, for example. But the improvements are often swamped by the burdens associated with new tax laws. President Bush has enacted tax changes every year he has been in office.

For individuals wondering how long they will spend on tax forms, the taxpayers’ group said it takes an estimated 26 hours and 48 minutes to prepare the Form 1040 and its most common supporting schedules. That includes keeping records, learning the law, preparing forms, copying and mailing.

That actually is less than last year, when taxpayers could have expected to spend 28 hours and 30 minutes on the same forms.

Tax preparation software has made the task more manageable for many. Where the IRS estimates it takes 13 hours to fill out the Form 1040 by hand, Julie Miller, spokeswoman for Intuit, said its TurboTax software can do the same work in two hours to four hours.

Kathy Burlison, director of tax implementation at H&R Block, said software makes individuals and paid preparers more confident they have not missed something. It also makes mistakes much easier to fix.

Nevertheless, the forms are not just a drain on people’s free time, but on the productivity of the country, Keating said.

“That’s a huge, dead weight burden, trying to discern the tax code, what it rewards most,” he said. “If we turn the nation into a paper-shuffling, law-figuring-out country, no one actually gets anything done.”
___

On the Net:

Internal Revenue Service: http://www.irs.gov/

National Taxpayers Union: http://www.ntu.org/main/

VOA News - Stress Management as Effective as Exercise In Reducing Heart Problems

By Brian Purchiav

We all feel stressed out now and then, but for people with heart problems, stress can be deadly. Researchers found that providing training in stress management was just as effective as exercise in reducing the risk of more heart problems.

Joseph Mazzetta, participated in the study
Eighty-year-old Joseph Mazzetta is having his heart function checked, because seven years ago he had angina — oxygen wasn’t getting to his heart. “I started getting shortness of breath and a little tightness in my chest,” he said.

Today he feels much better. He was one of 134 heart patients who took part in a Duke University Medical Center study. Researchers divided the patients into three groups. One got exercise training, which was Joseph’s group. Another received stress management training, and the third group got usual medical care. The training programs lasted four months, to see if exercise or training reduced stress.

Research findings are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
The findings appear in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. The author of the study is Dr. James Blumenthal. “Those patients who underwent the stress management or the exercise training experienced significant improvements in levels of depression and overall psychological distress, and not only did they experience those psychological benefits, but they experienced physical benefits as well.”

When patients experienced mental stress, exercise and stress management training were equally effective at reducing ischemia, which is when narrowed blood vessels prevent blood from flowing to the heart. But people who got stress management training saw added benefits improved blood vessel health and the way the body handles surges in blood pressure.

Dr. James Blumenthal, Duke University Medical Center
Dr. Blumenthal says, “We taught them what stress was, how to recognize it, and then we taught them strategies as to how to reduce their stress levels.” He adds that more physicians should recommend exercise or stress management training for their heart patients. “I think they feel that medication may be sufficient. I think data from this study would indicate that exercise and stress management really add to the benefits of medical management of patients.”

Joseph Mazzetta takes three heart medications a day, and continues the exercise he started during the study. “I do it also because I want to live another day (laughs), it’s as simple as that.”

Mr. Mazzetta didn’t receive stress management training, but he says regular workouts have helped reduce his stress.

|| DukeMedNews || Exercise, Stress Management Show Physiological Benefits for Heart Patients

DURHAM, N.C. — Behavior modification techniques such as exercise and stress management can not only reduce the levels of depression and distress in heart patients, but can also improve physiological markers of cardiovascular health, according to the results of a randomized controlled trial conducted by Duke University Medical Center researchers.

According to the research team, this may be the first randomized trial to demonstrate that a non-pharmaceutical approach can have positive effects on such physiological determinants of cardiovascular health as blood flow to heart, the responsiveness of the lining of blood vessels and the ability of the cardiovascular system to regulate surges in blood pressure.

“While studies have shown that psychosocial factors such as depression, stress and anxiety place heart patients at a much greater risk of suffering future cardiac events or dying, few have looked at the effects of modifying psychosocial factors,” said Duke medical psychologist James Blumenthal, Ph.D., lead author of a study appearing in the April 6, 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The trial was supported by a $4.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“Our results suggest that exercise and stress management training offer considerable promise for patients with heart disease by not only improving psychosocial functioning and reactions to mental and physical stressors, but also by modifying important bio-markers of risk that may translate into improved clinical outcomes,” he said.

The Duke trial enrolled 134 patients with stable heart disease and randomized them to one of three groups – exercise, stress management or standard medical therapy. Patients randomized to the exercise group participated in 35 minutes of supervised aerobic exercise training three times a week for 16 weeks. Those in the stress management arm received 16 weekly 1.5-hour classes designed to help patients recognize the sources of stress in their everyday lives and to teach them strategies to respond more adaptively to those stresses.

Patients enrolled had stable heart disease, meaning they did not experience chest pain while at rest, and exhibited evidence of myocardial ischemia, or reduced blood flow to the heart, during exercise. All participants underwent a battery of psychological and physiological testing before randomization, which was repeated four months later.

One of the physiological markers studied was the endothelium, which forms the inner lining of the blood vessels and controls how the vessels reacted to changes in blood flow and pressure. The researchers took ultrasound images of the brachial artery of the arm before and after a tourniquet was applied and released to determine how the vessels responded. Healthy arteries will dilate to accommodate the increased blood flow, while diseased arteries are less responsive, the researchers said.

In these tests of flow-mediated dilation, patients who received the behavioral treatments displayed nearly a 25 percent improvement when compared to those patients who only received usual medical care.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that stress management might reduce cardiovascular risk in part through beneficial effects on vascular endothelial function,” Blumenthal said. “This is a level of improvement is comparable to that achieved in drug trials. For that reason, these findings add additional support for the use of non-pharmaceutical approaches to treating patients with heart disease.”

The researchers also found that patients who received exercise training or stress management had improved baroreflex sensitivity, a phenomenon by which receptors located along the walls of blood vessels respond to changes in blood pressure. These receptors are connected to the heart by nerves, which carry the message to pump faster or slower in response to pressure changes.

“This finding is important because past studies have demonstrated that abnormally low baroreflex sensitivity has been shown to be associated with worse outcomes for patients with heart disease–improvement may produce clinical benefits,” Blumenthal said.

Additionally, the researchers measured changes in the left ventricle — the pumping chamber of the heart — during periods of both mental and physical stress. The research team used radionuclide imaging tests to identify wall motion abnormalities (WMAs). These WMAs, or areas of abnormal contractions of the left ventricle, are known indicators of ischemia.

“While there was no difference in WMA scores between the three groups during mental stress testing, among the subgroup of patients who had mental stress-induced WMAs before treatment, those in the exercise and stress management groups had lower WMA scores after treatment compared to patients in usual care.”

Other findings, which were expected, showed that patients in the exercise group had the largest improvements in such measures as exercise duration and aerobic capacity. For the psychosocial tests, the researchers found that exercise and stress management had reduced general distress and depression compared to usual care controls.

Future studies are planned to determine if stress management and exercise together have an even greater positive effect on these markers of cardiovascular health. The researchers also said further investigation is needed to reveal the biological mechanisms behind the improvements seen.

Yahoo! News - Overworked — and angry about it

TECHNOLOGY KEEPS EMPLOYEES TETHERED, REPORT FINDS

By Nicole C. Wong, Mercury News

As the boundaries between office hours and off hours continue to blur, one in three American employees report being chronically overworked, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Slightly more workers forfeit some of their paid vacation time — and two in five work while on vacation — in part because they can’t escape their demanding jobs.

Overwork in America, a 54-page report issued by the non-profit Families and Work Institute, underscores the irony that the very factors giving companies a competitive edge and healthy bottom line — technology, multitasking and globalization — may be undermining their workers’ physical and emotional well-being.

“Technology has made staying in touch instantly much more available. That creates the expectation of an instant response,'’ said Ellen Galinsky, president of the New York research institute. “How many times have you seen people at parties with their BlackBerry? Or sitting in church with their BlackBerry?'’

And you can bet they’re often answering work e-mails.

The study, based on phone interviews with 1,003 U.S. wage and salaried employees in October and November, shows that one in three workers is in contact with co-workers, supervisors, customers or clients at least once a week outside normal business hours.

A year and a half ago, when Albert So was principal engineer at a Mountain View-based game developer that had at most 15 employees, he routinely skipped dinner and didn’t get home in time to tuck his newborn son into bed.

His boss called him at home on nights and weekends, urging him to drop what he was doing — including his father’s birthday celebration — and fix a glitch. He didn’t have to leave the house but said “that hid the problem.'’

Skipping vacation

And So never took advantage of his 15 annual vacation days “because nobody else did.'’

The 33-year-old is happier now that he works elsewhere. But others remain miserable. Employees who toil without enough down time to rest and recover make more mistakes, exhibit poorer health and show more symptoms of clinical depression, the study stated.

Also, 39 percent of intensely overworked employees say they are angry at their employers for expecting so much of them, vs. only 1 percent of employees who have low levels of overwork. And 34 percent of extremely overworked employees often resent their co-workers who don’t work as hard, compared with 12 percent of employees at low levels of overwork.

While the percentage of people who feel overworked hasn’t changed since the institute conducted its initial study in 2001, Galinsky said, the reasons people give for why work environments feel stressful have shifted. While workers have more flexibility with their schedules, their bosses also demand more of them, particularly to compensate for recent layoffs.

Santa Clara County employers have slashed about 200,000 jobs since the height of the dot-com boom five years ago.

Galinsky said: “People who have experienced job insecurity and people who’ve seen a lot of downsizing are more likely to be highly overworked'’ — 42 percent of employees at companies where payrolls have been pinched vs. 27 percent of those where head count hasn’t slipped.

While rank-and-file employees may not have much choice, executives may also succumb to work overload — although they may deny it.

100 hours a week

Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, spends more than 100 hours a week bolstering the image of his Oakland-based Internet security company, which has 65 employees. Even though he receives 30 vacation days a year, he uses only five of them — for Christmas and a few other special occasions.

“The tough part about vacation is I work twice as many hours before I leave on vacation to prepare to go,'’ he said. “And then when I get back, I work twice as many hours to catch up.'’

Despite Morimoto’s non-stop schedule, he doesn’t consider himself “overworked.'’

“I work for myself, and I choose to work as hard as I do,'’ he said. “In this economy, you’ve got to work hard to keep your job.

“I choose to work my butt off.'’

Contact Nicole C. Wong at nwong@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5730