Today's topic is: stress. Now, I think I'm an expert in being stressed out, but I'm certainly not an expert in stress and its effect on our minds and bodies. So this morning, I've got a stress expertson the line.

Dr. Mustafa al'Absi is a professor and the director of the Stress and Resilience Research Labs at the University of Minnesota Medical School Duluth campus. His research and teaching focuses on stress and its connection to addictive behavior, appetite regulation, and risk for heart issues. In fact, I know that he is calling in from Austria, where he's this year's keynote presenter at the World Conference on Stress and Related Diseases.

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Every Wednesday morning at 8:30 CST, Jill Riley connects with experts and local personalities for some real talk about keeping our minds and bodies healthy — from staying safe in the music scene, to exercising during a pandemic, to voting and civic engagement. Looking for more resources and support? Visit our friends at Call to Mind, MPR's initiative to foster new conversations about mental health. Subscribe to Wellness Wednesday as a podcast on Spotify, Apple, RSS, Radio Public, Stitcher, or Amazon Music.

Jill Riley: It was early last year that you and your colleagues and your team launched an international study on stress and resilience in the face of Covid-19. The findings were published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. Can we talk about the question that you posed as scientists, and some of your findings?

Mustafa al'Absi: Well, as you know, Covid presented a huge challenge globally to everybody around the world, and we wanted to kind of track how people were adjusting to this overwhelming challenge. One of the things we wanted to document was not just the immediate adjustment, but the long term effects. Related to that we assessed precautions and calls for changes in your life: social distancing, staying at home, engaging in behaviors that minimize or reduce your risk of exposure. These behavioral adjustments, in addition to the anxiety, fear, [and] worry, would bring major adjustment in how people live, how people cope with things in their life, how people eat, sleep, and feel physically feel in terms of their mental health.

Interestingly, and also, to some extent expectedly, we found lots of unfortunately negative changes that correlated with those early weeks of the scare and worry about the pandemic. We're expecting the impact to be long term, and long lasting. We also believe, however, that people are resilient and able to cope. When we launched our program was looking to these qualities, these characteristics, these attributes that help people cope, that help enhance their resilience in the face of uncertain and scary challenges.

At the beginning of this pandemic, of course, no one knew how long how long people were going to have to change these behaviors and live with these anxious and stressful feelings about the uncertainty of what the future looks like, when is this pandemic going to end? You know, people losing sleep. So what are some of the more long term effects or risks for disease?

Well, under conditions of stress, whether those conditions are internal — meaning based on worrying and being anxious, being depressed, being feeling sad — or because of the source of stress outward, people endure so many changes physiologically [and] chemically. Their behavior changes, their mood changes...and part of that, actually is not necessarily bad. In fact, I always tell people you don't want to empty your life from stress completely. After all, you know, having a little bit of stress can be good, can help you accomplish things, can help you wake up in the morning and get to work and and that's a good thing.

The problem with stress comes when you have long term chronic stress, and when you really don't have effective means to deal with that stress, or you feel like you lack the capability. So this combination then leads to harmful or damaging or deleterious effects of stress. There is no part or no system in your body that's not affected by stress in a negative way if the stressful events are chronic and threatening. Certainly we are concerned about this prolongation or [extended] period of stress that we are dealing with with Covid — and the amount of uncertainty that that comes with this lengthening of time of worry and uncertainty about it.

Now we when we do our research, we find that long term effects of stress affect many things: affect your risk for heart disease, affect your blood pressure, affect your risk for escalating your diabetes. If you're a diabetic, it also makes us behaviorally prone to engage in unhealthy behaviors. We may smoke more, we may use drugs, we may drink more, we may eat a lot of palatable comfort food and that part of it can also increase our risk for obesity. And that also can increase our risk for many other health consequences. It can affect the quality of our relationships with people around us, can affect our mental health in terms of increasing our risk for depression, for chronic anxiety. It can affect also our sexual health. Our interest in life in general may increase also our loneliness and tendency to isolate ourselves from others, and that can lead to further negative effects and exacerbate our feelings of stress and distress.

Dr. al'Absi, you said the word "resilience" earlier. Is there a way for people to learn to cope? Are some people more naturally resilient than others? Does it have to do with how we're raised? Can people be taught to be resilient?

Yeah, I think certainly the environment around us can help us be more resilient, but also we can learn to enhance our ability to cope and to withstand challenges. There are simple things that we can do: things like integrating into our daily routine activities that we like, activities that make us comfortable, activities that make us healthy — things like taking walks, physical activity, connecting with people that we feel comfortable with, having some periods of relaxation or mindfulness or reading things that you like to read, getting out to nature — that tend to be highly therapeutic, highly effective in calming us down, but also allowing us giving us time to reflect and maybe then be able to appreciate that what we thought of as being very stressful, very upsetting, may actually be put in a more objective perspective and therefore, they will be more manageable and they will be as upsetting.

You have to work with your mind to learn skills for appreciating the reality out there as it is because a lot of the time stress not does not just come from what happens outside. It actually comes, for the most part, from how we perceive this outside world, and how we think that we are able or not able to deal with it. If we think that these events are threatening, upsetting, they can harm us, they can cause us long term negative consequences. [If] we also think that we can't do anything about it, that combination of emotions and thoughts can be toxic — and that's what makes the mix stressful, problematic.

[In addition] to the physical activity, to the relaxation, to working with your cognitive processes and your perception of the events in your life, also [work] on some sort of routine to help you get some sleep. Sleep is the most important element of how we can really anchor ourselves in a more comfortable, resilient life. If I want to give people advice, it's to really work hard on having a good, healthy, sleep routine. And this can be done. It's just a matter of building into your daily repertoire, a routine that you stick with so that you have enough sleep. Things then become easier. All the other coping strategies can come easier if you've had a restful night.

Wellness Wednesday is hosted by Jill Riley, and produced by Christy Taylor and Jay Gabler. Our theme music is a portion of the song "F.B. One Number 2" by Christian Bjoerklund under the Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 International License. This week's photo is by Michael Clesle (CC BY-NC 2.0). The image was altered: it was cropped, filtered to greyscale, and supplemented with a logo.