Stress & Anxiety Have a Huge Impact on Parkinson’s – we need to learn ‘Why Worry’ as the Guru states it although I like most of us do.
Stress & Anxiety have a massive impact on Parkinson’s and, in my view, are among the most important environmental factors that you can address to reduce the severity of symptoms and potentially slow their progression. As the Guru says below – ‘Why Worry’
I can say from personal experience, especially over the last year, that acute stress has directly translated to significant impacts on my Parkinson’s disease (PD). As I write this, the stress of watching the news on TV has triggered my balance issues, and I temporarily need a stick again.
Surveys also show this clearly. For example, a 2021 survey titled “Stress and Mindfulness in Parkinson’s Disease” involving 5,000 patients demonstrated a huge impact on all symptoms of Parkinson’s. It showed a significantly worse situation for people with PD compared to those without PD in all categories related to anxiety, stress, and depression.
In some ways, it creates a vicious cycle, as worsening symptoms can drive more stress. It’s not surprising, as we all know that stress and anxiety cause negative health effects. With Parkinson’s, it seems to have an additional effect on key symptoms like tremor, balance, sleep, rigidity, and freezing.
I know this firsthand. When something particularly stressful happened with one of my kids last year (all is ok!), I froze and collapsed minutes later, leading to several bad weeks. When stress goes up, PD gets worse.
The study above lists the following types of stress as having the strongest negative impact, in order:
- Conflict
- Time pressure
- Social stress
- Worrying
The two that affect me the most are worrying about my kids and the future, and conflict, but we all have our specific stresses.
What Can We Do About It?
Stress is, unfortunately, a feature of our lives. I can only talk about what I have tried to do. How successful I have been is debatable, but I have made huge changes that have reduced my stress significantly. Tonight, I write this feeling the full effect of stress from reasons completely out of my control. I am trying my best to deal with it through the things I have been taught.
- Work-Life Balance: As a partner in a big firm, a certain level of natural stress comes with the job. My neurologist has told me many times that work is crucial in the fight against PD as it keeps the brain active, but it must be managed against stress, which is a ‘killer’. Finding this balance has been hard—not because of my firm, which has been amazing, but because of my natural tendencies and years of high stress, attention to detail, and sensitivity to lack of quality. To resolve this, I had to step back from managerial roles and narrow my focus and team size considerably. It was really hard and a huge step for me, but it has made a difference. Each of us needs to find our way, and I am slow to react, but it is something that must happen.
- Mindfulness and Relaxation: Learning to breathe, be mindful, take a moment, and find ways to de-stress is crucial. I tried many things, including meditation, which didn’t work for me, but yoga, calming music, and deep breathing exercises (four deep breaths in, hold for four, and four deep breaths out) all help. These need to become ingrained, and it takes months for them to set in, but they help me. The ultimate state – which I am a long way from is the Guru below whose amazing video clip says it all ‘Why Worry’.
- Acceptance: It is very hard to see yourself decline physically and cognitively (luckily, I have restored the latter, and the pump has made a huge improvement) and to know it is degenerative. While still fighting the disease head-on, you have to be sensible and learn to accept that you simply can’t do what you used to do and that the stress is not worth it.
- Exercise and Therapy: Exercise, physical therapy, acupuncture, massage, and physiotherapy are great ways to de-stress. I find long walks and running really relax me, but it took a long time to get there.
- Medication: There are options that can help, but these need to be discussed with your doctor.
The key for me is routine. These activities need to be part of the routine week in and week out. They need to be second nature, well-practiced, preventative, and scalable when stress gets too much. The survey also shows that when these activities are performed regularly, they have a much better chance of working and having an effect. It is easy to say but if I can crack it, truly anyone can.
I am the worst to advise on stress—I am a magnet to it—but even I have made huge changes and continue to do so. I am happy to discuss this with any skeptics. It is a huge factor, and although PD is inherently stressful, reducing stress even a little goes a long way. The survey concludes:
“In conclusion, our findings show that stress is an important topic for PD patients, that it has a considerable and detrimental influence on quality of life and on symptom severity, but that it is also potentially amendable to interventions aimed at reducing stress. Specifically, the significant beneficial effects that patients experienced from self-management strategies such as mindfulness and physical exercise encourage future trials into the clinical effects and underlying mechanisms of these therapies. Based on our findings, we expect that mindfulness interventions will have particularly large effects on depression and anxiety in PD.”
Probably the best advice about worrying is the famous YouTube guru clip which is just brilliant and worth watching again and again – ‘Why Worry’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YRjX3A_8cM
