Study – Harrison Hansford

Isometric exercise MAY reduce blood pressure and appears safe!

High blood pressure is the leading risk factor for death across the globe, affecting 1.13 billion people, resulting in over 10 million deaths in 2019. Clearly high blood pressure is a huge problem, and the issue of treating this condition is much researched. There are many drugs which are effective at reducing blood pressure, but this has still not reduced the overall burden of the condition, potentially due to unwanted side effects. Exercise (aerobic and strength-based) has been shown to reduce blood pressure, but often is quite tiresome and time-consuming. Isometric exercise is a type of resistance training which involves exercises such as wall sits, or hand grips. Isometric exercise however is quick (usually taking just twelve minutes!) to undertake and relatively easy to do!

My team and I recently conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis looking at the effects of isometric exercise on blood pressure (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-021-00720-3). Systematic reviews are the highest level of evidence and usually are used to inform clinical practice and health policy.

We found that isometric exercise appears to be safe, in all populations including those with hypertension and older adults. This is an important findings as this was previously unknown and many clinical guidelines have not recommended isometric exercise due to safety concerns.

Importantly, we also found that isometric exercise may significantly reduce blood pressure. We found that it may reduce systolic blood pressure (the top number on a blood pressure reading) by 8mmHg, and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 4mmHg, both of which are clinically important amounts, similar to many other drugs!

It is important to note that I say isometric exercise “may” reduce blood pressure, because the quality of the studies included in our review was very poor, which limits how much we can trust them and their results. However, it appears unlikely the isometric exercise is dangerous as was once believed and could be another great tool for people living with high blood pressure who don’t like exercising, struggle to make time for exercising or have physical limitations which makes exercising difficult.

Have a read of our study and feel free to contact me if you cannot access the paper!

Reference:

Hansford, H.J., Parmenter, B.J., McLeod, K.A. et al. The effectiveness and safety of isometric resistance training for adults with high blood pressure: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Hypertens Res (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41440-021-00720-3

New Grad Energy

I was discussing with a friend about my time at one of my placements in a mental health ward and I was talking about how much I cared about the patients and was passionate about helping them and how it was sad to be leaving them. He mentioned that I was like that because I’m still very new to the job and because of that I had what he called “new grad energy” and wasn’t jaded by the system yet. I don’t think that putting in effort to the patients and your job should be something out of the ordinary, it shouldn’t be something the diminishes over time, if it does you’re likely just in the wrong job.

Days off

I vowed to take my Saturday off studying, I had just submitted my final assignment and ostensibly had nothing to do. I was going to chill out and just take the day off. That was great until I couldn’t help but jump back on R to do some more coding for my manuscript which we’re planning on publishing soon.

It wasn’t because I was bored, I just couldn’t help myself. I realised I had nothing else to fill the void. I realised I didn’t have any hobbies. Being me, I sat down on Sunday and tried to brainstorm what hobbies I should have, which obviously is ridiculous.

I realised I haven’t put any time aside for myself to think and enjoy myself. I need to do more of that, or do less of everything else and have some blank time, not filling every minute with tasks. No conclusion other than my own realisation that there can be such a thing as too much ‘productivity’, which when your task ends, leaves you feeling pretty empty.

Stress and Anxiety: Don’t Suffer Twice

This week, I listened to a great podcast about mindfulness and anxiety from Sam Harris and Tim Ferris. Whilst writing my weekly review I realised I experienced some stressful situations in the short, medium and long term which the podcast helped me control, with varying degrees of success. If you just want to see the techniques I use, jump to here

Short Term Stress

I had a very difficult exam (my final one for university!) which seemed to be designed to push you for time. I had roughly 30mins to go, with 30 marks unfinished (out of a 100 mark, 2hr exam), all long responses and I noticed myself getting frazzled and spending time thinking about how I was not going to finish, and flipping between questions.

After about 30 seconds of fueling the fire of anxiety, I identified my stress and thought, “it doesn’t matter how many questions I’ve got to go, I just need to keep powering through them and finish them the best I can,” and that’s exactly what I did. I put this ability to identify and put aside my stress down to my meditation, which I poorly adhere to but have still seen the benefits, this being one.

Medium Term Stress

My medium term stress was having a busy week ahead with Friday, Saturday and Sunday being full of work, and a lot of research to do. The way I managed this stress was ensuring I had a to do list of the essential pieces I needed to have finished, and just worked hard to get them finished by thursday so on the days I was working I was able to switch off afterwards so it still felt like I had a weekend; worked a charm.

Writing the tasks down and blocking out time in my calendar has been a great way to show me how much I really do need to get done because the worry about having a lot of work to do is always worse than the actual work.

Long Term Stress

My long term stress is more about the career I want to pursue, I am coming to the end of my degree and have several options but unsure which one to take. I’m still figuring out how best to approach this, but I currently have two heuristics:

Which path will be more fun to do
Which path has the most options afterwards

So far this led me to choose my degree (Exercise Physiology is more fun than Engineering) my jobs and the research projects I’ve been involved in as well. It is working out pretty well so far.

You can never know whether the decisions you make are the right ones, so by choosing a path which has the most options and will be fun in the short term removes a lot of the stress around making significant live decisions. Tim Ferriss’ fear setting exercise is also really useful for life-altering decisions as well.

Strategies to Stress Less

It’s not that I don’t stress, I do, but I’ve really learned over the past few years how to better manage my stress so that it doesn’t distract me from what is important.

For short term, in the moment stress, like in an exam, you have to understand your stress, allowing it to be put away and ignored so you can deal with the problem at hand. Mindfulness Meditation (with Sam Harris’ ‘Waking Up’ app) has helped in identifying this stress, allowing you to not be consumed by it.

For medium term, stress about the coming days or weeks, writing a list and scheduling your time in a calendar helps to make you realise that the stressor is probably not as time consuming as it seems, and by blocking out time for it, Steve Jobs’ ‘Imaginary time’ comes in and with a pressing enough deadline, clearly set out in a calendar and a list, you can achieve almost anything. What happens when your tasks aren’t time bound is called Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” so block off the time you need and have no more, trust me, you’ll finish it.

Finally long term stress. Making life decisions suck, you can never be sure of what result your decision will have, but there are ways to ensure you enjoy it. Choose something that you’ll enjoy doing, the worst thing that happens is you enjoy yourself, then do something else. Choose something which doesn’t close doors, or even opens them, nobody knows what they want to be doing in 5 or 10 years, so don’t limit yourself with your choices.

Finally, the main takeaway from this post should be that the object of your stress will never be as bad as what you think it will be, so don’t suffer twice by stressing about it. Just saying ‘don’t stress’ doesn’t help so I’ve given some thoughts on how I manage my stress so I’m not wasting my energy on my ruminations.

I’d love to know what you do to manage your stress and any techniques which have worked for you, leave a comment down below and get in touch if you’d like to chat through your stresses with me!

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Organising your study

It’s currently the night before my pharmacology final exam, I only studied 3 hours today as I felt I had sufficiently studied up until now and felt no need to increase my stress levels by trying to cram in extra information. If you read my first post you’ll know that I work four jobs, have a girlfriend and study full time at uni and I often get asked by my friends, “how do you fit all that in” or “how do you have time to do that”. Hopefully, I’ll be able to shed some light on the techniques I use to make the most out of my days and study as little and as effectively as possible.

*This is how a typical to do list looks for me*

The first thing I do either the night before or in the morning is, write down the 3-5 things I need to get done that day. This can be on paper, but I like to use sticky notes on my desktop and have 3 sections, Today, Tomorrow and Later, making each point discrete and as specific as possible, ie. ‘study renal pharmacology lectures’ rather than ‘study’. Not only does it save the time you spend figuring out what you need to study, but it also makes you more likely to actually do the task, whether it be studying or cleaning your room.

Furthermore, when doing this I find if I start with a smaller more specific task which is easy to achieve, I complete that quickly and after getting this achievement I feel empowered to complete more, maybe study another topic or clean another part of your room. The small dopamine release you get from completing a task is extremely beneficial and makes you enjoy whatever it is you’re doing. What most people do though is set vague, large tasks for themselves each day, for example, study. This is unhelpful because not only is it vague, causing you to waste time organising yourself on the day, you also do not get any satisfaction out of it because there is no discrete ‘finish’ to studying, leaving yourself unsatisfied and unfulfilled at the end of the day.

The final thing I do when designing this list is make it achievable each day. I have found that if you set yourself 3-4 tasks each day and are able to complete them all, it’s more likely that you will do the same the next day. This consistency is a key part to being successful, there is no point being sporadic in your studying, you’ll gain the most benefit out of studying consistently each day, rather than cramming it all into one where you fry your brain and feel unmotivated to work the next day. Overall, the most important steps towards reclaiming your days are to make a list, make it specific, discrete and achievable.