Word: bensons
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...adrenaline got their muscles primed, their attention focused and their nerves ready for a sudden "fight or flight." But try doing either one in today's traffic jams or boardrooms. "The fight-or-flight emergency response is inappropriate to today's social stresses," says Harvard Cardiologist Herbert Benson, an expert on the subject. It is also dangerous. Says Psychiatrist Peter Knapp of Boston University: "When you get a Wall Street broker using the responses a cave man used to fight the elements, you've got a problem...
...comes down to the bottom line. By encouraging workers to reduce the strains on their hearts, backs and psyches, corporations can begin to lower the $125 billion or more annually spent on total health care for employees, a figure that has been rising by 15% a year. In addition, Benson points out, many firms are finally beginning to appreciate the long-established fact that too much stress makes workers inefficient. In 1908 Yale Psychologist Robert Yerkes, along with J.D. Dodson, demonstrated that pressure improves performance, but only up to a point; after that, efficiency drops off sharply. Relieving the strain...
...really knows if there is more stress now than in the past, but many experts believe it has become more pervasive. "We live in a world of uncertainties," says Harvard's Benson, "everything from the nuclear threat to job insecurity to the near assassination of the President to the lacing of medicines with poisons." Through television, these problems loom up under our very noses, and yet, says Psychologist Kenneth Dychtwald of Berkeley, Calif., the proximity only frustrates us: "We can't fight back with those people...
...would die if I had to sit in a space capsule," says Boston University Psychiatrist Sanford Cohen. But while working with the early astronauts some 20 years ago, Cohen observed that "John Glenn just saw it as a job and went about it in a businesslike manner." Notes Benson: "A snowstorm is not stressful to a skier, but it is to someone who has an appointment across town...
...guru of therapeutic relaxation is Cardiologist Benson. Back in 1968 he was persuaded by practitioners of Transcendental Meditation to study the effects of the technique on the body. To his surprise, Benson found that TM could elicit dramatic physiological changes, including decreased heart rate, lower blood pressure and reduced oxygen consumption. Meditation, says Benson, sets off "a built-in mechanism that is the opposite of the fight-or-flight response." Practiced ten to 20 minutes once or twice daily, it has been shown, by Benson and others, to produce a lasting reduction in blood pressure and other stress-related symptoms...