About a month ago I was doing a presentation, and I brought up the idea that every time we are stressed we activate the “fight or flight" response, which is done through something called the HPA axis (hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis), and that causes a release of cortisol. Cortisol is then responsible for mobilizing blood sugar from your muscles and liver. This blood sugar is designed to help you with your ordeal (to fight or flee) but if you are not fighting or fleeing, then the extra blood sugar just gets stored as fat. So I made the comment that every time you get frustrated, whether it is in traffic or looking at your body in the mirror, since your body doesn´t know the difference between real stress and imagined stress (both create the same chemical reactions), your body will have created the equivalent of a doughnut that you didn´t get to enjoy. I didn´t know if that would be a whole doughnut or a doughnut hole, but the idea stuck either way with the audience.
Having really piqued my own curiosity I decided to check to see what happens with my own blood sugar when I am stressed. I have a device that measures blood sugar (the same one diabetics use), and I thought this would be perfect for before–stress reading and during/after–stress reading. I bought this device years ago to see the effects of physiological overload stress on the production of blood sugar (assuming that blood sugar would be the beginning indication that the body is sensing a problem and needing to take action to help with the impending problem) so it had been a long time since I pricked my finger to draw a drop of blood. Interestingly, I was really nervous the first time I went to prick my finger. Since I forgot how little the pain was I was hesitant to create pain to myself. It took me about a minute to get myself psyched up to shove the pin in my finger. Needless to say I was already nervous and stressed from the anticipation of pain. My blood sugar reading was 137, which is way above what my normal reading was (I got that a bit later since I couldn´t recall where my normal blood sugar was from my readings years ago).
I then sat in my office and deliberately worked myself up into a frustrated state. One of my pet peeves was getting behind slow drivers or people who don´t use their turn signals, so I focused on that for a few minutes, really getting myself annoyed. Once I felt I was sufficiently annoyed I measured my blood sugar once again, and it read 157 this time. Even higher than when I was stressed from pricking my finger the first time just moments ago.
Later, after figuring out that my normal blood sugar levels are in the 90s, this was a significant rise in blood sugar in a short amount of time: about 65 points from just being stressed (nervous and frustrated). I then decided to see how this related to eating an actual doughnut. Once my blood sugar was at a normal level, I ate a doughnut. Within less than a minute my blood sugar immediately dropped from 92 to 80. I assume this is my body preparing for the sugar that was coming by immediately reducing the natural blood sugar production from my body. Within fifteen minutes (I gave a little time for the food to start to digest) it went up to 130. Within another fifteen minutes it went up to 145. I checked fifteen minutes later, and my blood sugar had started to go back down–it was at 95 by then.
I found it interesting that being frustrated (in combination with being nervous about pricking my finger) got my blood sugar up further than eating a doughnut did. Now, I don´t know how many calories this increase in blood sugar from being frustrated equates to, but in any event it showed that there is a spike in blood sugar when frustrated. I could only imagine how much would be there if I was feeling worse than frustrated–like angry or resentful or disempowered. And then I think about how often we get frustrated in a day (most people don´t even recognize they are frustrated anymore as they are used to feeling negative) and I thought: Even if this little spike was more like a doughnut hole than it was like a whole doughnut, this extra blood sugar that doesn´t get used would add up as fat pretty quickly. You then throw in the fact that the body thinks it needs to replenish the blood sugar stores (not knowing the body didn´t use it to deal with impending stress) thus creating cravings and hunger so you will eat, and you can see how easy it is to get into a huge calorie swing in the wrong way.
After doing the blood sugar experiment I had a concept of how negative thinking affected my body, but I was also curious as to how positive thinking would affect my body. The best way I know how to check this is to measure my resting metabolic rate (RMR). I do this using a calorimeter device (made by BodyGem), which measures your rate of breathing, the amount of oxygen uptake, the amount of carbon dioxide output, and the amount of moisture in the breath, among other things I am sure.
I took a measurement with the calorimeter first thing in the morning on an empty stomach after sitting for about ten minutes relaxing. My first reading was 1500, which was fairly consistent to other times I have read it in the past. After that first reading I took about fifteen minutes to coach myself on some minor things in my life that had me frustrated or irritated. The result of that coaching was a change in perspective that allowed me to see what it was that I did want (rather than focusing on what I didn´t want) along with knowing why I wanted it (for the sense of love, joy, freedom, etc.–high emotional reasons). Once I had my positive points of focus, I started my RMR reading again. While breathing into the calorimeter I focused on the new desires and looked for evidence of already having had the same successes, not only with the subject matter at hand but also having had the same feelings in my life (those feelings being the reason why I wanted what I now realize I wanted–knowing what having what I wanted would provide for me that I don´t already have in my life). I also wore a heart rate monitor to make sure my heart rate wasn´t going up (and potentially increasing my body temperature, that is, increasing the thermodynamics). In fact, it was lower then when I checked it earlier (down to around 57 from 60). After the ten minutes it takes to do the reading was up, my new RMR was 1830 (330 points higher than normal–an 18% increase). This is significant to me. I was taught that your RMR could not change that much from day to day. The only thing I was told that would affect that would be food, movement, or increase in heart rate and temperature, as well as adding muscle (I´ve read that each pound of additional muscle adds about ten calories to your RMR total and have heard up to fifty calories but feel ten is more realistic) but never just positive points of focus.
I then started to wonder if the device had some natural variances (a natural level of inaccuracy) so I decided to check my RMR back–to–back without changing my point of focus to see how big that natural variance would be with no other distractions. A few days later I did the same thing in my office (same scenario–no food, same time, sat for ten minutes, etc.) and my first reading was 1590, which is to me is an acceptable variance from 1500 (a 6% difference). I then took it again ten minutes later and it was 1630. Again, to me this felt like an acceptable variance from the previous reading (about 2.5% increase).
Curious as to whether negative thinking would make my RMR go down, I decided to do it one more time. Another morning I set up the same scenario and measured for the regular RMR with no distractions. My baseline was 1560, which felt consistent with my previous neutral readings. I then got myself all worked up with little pet peeves and used that as my focus during the reading ten minutes later. My reading was 1620, which is not a huge jump and might be just normal variance in the machine (about 4% change). I then decided to do it one more time to see if I could get it to rise again. I used the next ten minutes to come to new conclusions about my pet peeves by coaching myself. I then started my next RMR reading by just focusing on breathing and feeling certain parts of my body for about five minutes (heart rate about 53). I used the last five minutes to focus on things I enjoyed and now wanted as a result of my self–coaching. My final reading was 1850 (about a 16% increase from my first reading). This final reading was similar to the same reading when I did the positive focus the first time.
I should also note that I checked to see if positive thinking had an effect on my blood sugar as well as checking to see if negative thinking had an effect on the calorimeter reading (my metabolism). The two times I checked my blood sugar after focusing on something positive it went from 91 to 87 and 92 to 89. This did not feel like a significant change, which is one reason why I moved on to the calorimeter experiments as I felt that might be a better way to show significant changes from positive thinking since blood sugar only changed when there was a “problem." With that, I did a calorimeter reading after I got myself into a frustrated place (and continued to remain there while doing the reading) but it was about the same variance as when I focused on nothing (going from 1590 to 1640–a 3% change).
Both these experiments signify that my focus changes the functionality of my body. I have to imagine that negative thinking causes my body to create and crave extra calories (by virtue of the fact that my blood sugar when up when I was stressed) whereas positive thinking causes me to expend extra calories (by virtue of the fact that my metabolism increased when I was thinking positive thoughts). I could then see how going from focusing on something negative to focusing on something positive could create a pretty big calorie swing (from storing and begging for more calories to burning extra calories).
