Presents!!!

I just love getting presents! I sure wasn't expecting it, but presents at work have been coming in steadily this week. It's sure nice that people show their appreciation for each other.


My Green Tea Sampler and a Storybook

My Beautiful Green Tea Sampler



A Bottle of Wine



Snowman Doorknob Hanger & Homemade Plum Jam

And here is a photo of a gift I gave to a co-worker who has been especially helpful and supportive as I began a new job this fall. I decorated two cans of my homemade rhubarb jelly. I also gave her a jar of freezer jam but I didn't decorate that one because it was still cold. I love receiving homemade gifts as much as I enjoy giving them (the plum jelly above is one of my favorites).

My Homemade Rhubarb Jelly

Stress is Bad at the Bottom of the Hierarchy...Luckily Your Attitude Counts for Something

I just read this amazing article in Wired about the connection between stress, your physical health, and your emotional state. This article describes how anthropologist Robert Sapolsky proved that baboons at the bottom of the social hierarchy were more stressed out and had more health problems than baboons at the top of the hierarchy. This article cites studies of stress in baboons, Oscar nominees/winners, and British civil servants, showing that there is a direct connection between stress and your health:

Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more.

The shocking part of the article for me was the finding that it’s not necessarily a stressful, demanding job that is so “deadly,” but rather the feeling like you have no control or that your work is meaningless…sound familiar to anyone?!

While doctors speculated for years that increasing rates of cardiovascular disease in women might be linked to the increasing number of females employed outside the home, that correlation turned out to be nonexistent. Working women didn’t have more heart attacks. There were, however, two glaring statistical exceptions to the rule: Women developed significantly more heart disease if they performed menial clerical work or when they had an unsupportive boss. The work, in other words, wasn’t the problem. It was the subordination.

This passage also points to the fact that some groups are more vulnerable than others. In this case, women. That got me thinking about our campus hierarchy and our limited term employees, roughly 75 percent of which are women. It is even more troubling to think that many of these women, probably the most vulnerable in our campus community to stress-related health problems, have no health insurance, paid time off, and don’t make a living wage.

I was floored by the description of the following study by Michael Marmot about British Civil Servants. For the past 25 years the study has tracked 28,000 British men and women working in Civil Servant positions who all have access to the same health care system, who “don’t have to worry about getting laid off,” and “spend most of their workdays shuffling papers.” Here is a description of the findings:

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

This study is haunting to me because our campus has the same type of hierarchical Civil Servant system. If the people at the bottom of the hierarchy have “double the mortality rate” in a situation where they have the same benefits as people at the top of the hierarchy, what about the people at the bottom of the hierarchy who DON’T have benefits? What would a study of stress reveal about this population?

In light of these thoughts, the following quote really stuck with me, and I’ll be thinking about how I can be more aware of my own emotional state and my attitude and how these affect my health.

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

The Real Cost of Living

Would you be scared if you read this about a medication you were taking???

As with any medication, Armour Thyroid can also cause allergic reactions. In fact, it may have a higher risk for allergic reactions, since it contains ground-up pig thyroid glands. Seek medical attention immediately if you develop signs of an allergic reaction, including:

•An unexplained rash
•Hives
•Itching
•Wheezing or difficulty breathing
•Unexplained swelling (especially of the lips, mouth, or throat).

It is the comment about the pig thyroids that REALLY freaks me out. Poor pigs. Wtf? I have been taking this medication for about two months and the last few days I have been feeling so itchy and my skin feels abnormally dry and tight. I looked up "Armour Thyroid" side effects on the web and saw the above statement. (Side note: I tried taking synthetic thyroid, Synthroid, last summer and had a bad reaction to it...)

I have an appointment with a nurse practitioner next week, who was recommended to me as being open to holistic medicine, among other things, by an ayurvedic practitioner I recently saw. So I’m going to get someone else’s opinion on this whole hypothyroidism thing. In the meantime, I will try and keep taking the medication since pigs were slaughtered and their thyroids were ground up for it. I’d hate to have had them die in vain. How horrifying.

It just reminds me that we always need to ask questions about where our every day products come from and what is the social and environmental cost of producing them? Who and what had to suffer and what are the alternatives? That’s why I really enjoyed EcoTrip, produced by the Sundance Channel and available via DVD or streaming on Netflix. It is truly shocking to discover the true environmental impact of every day products like cell phones, bottled water, salmon, gold, light bulbs, and more…