ASG presents Move Well workshop

For students, the combination of school and work alone can cause stress, which ironically is a good thing (Pixabay) 

Saddleback College’s Associated Student Government collaborated with Dr. Shervin Tabrizi, a volunteer wellness expert and one of Costa Mesa’s top chiropractors, to supply students with a better understanding of how to manage stress for the final week of Mental Health Awareness Month.

“A lot of the emotional stressors actually manifest because of how we’re physically and chemically stressed out,” Dr. Shervin Tabrizi said. “The way that we eat and move matters in how we think.”

According to Tabrizi, stress is ironically a good thing. Stress is essentially our bodies’ reaction to an environment it recognizes as unsuitable for survival. So stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but a chronic state of stress is where it can become unhealthy. This goes hand in hand with four out of the top five causes of death in the United States being stress related, two major ones being heart disease and cancer.   

Realizing that stress is a beneficial reaction makes it a little more acceptable. But the best way to approach stress is to be aware of one’s own stress responses. Stress responses can be anything from muscle aches and pain to difficulty sleeping. Difficulty sleeping is the number one  negative stress response because once one is lacking sleep, or has ‘sleep debt,’ the body is constantly in need of recovery or rest.

“When I see a line coming out of Starbucks at 8:00 a.m in the morning it confuses me, we just slept for 8 hours?” Dr. Tabriz saidi. “We’re supposed to wake up with the highest peak level of energy but we need a kickstart first thing in the morning, it kind of doesn’t make sense.”  

When the human body wakes up, it doesn’t need caffeine, humans were not born needing Advil. These are examples of chemical stressors, which can also be found in fast food, processed foods, and alcohol. This routine of a caffeine kick start in the morning leads to feeling worn out by the early afternoon, feening for another pick-me-up energy drink.

“We don’t have an Advil deficiency, we’re not born with headaches, poor posture, difficulty sleeping, we earn that,” Tabrizi said. “When we add another chemical stressor like Advil to just numb the ‘check engine light,’ it adds another stressor you have to deal with on top of that.”  

Dr. Shervin Tabrizi went in depth on stress as a whole, clarifying that stress is completely controlled by the nervous system. He went on, displaying powerpoint slides, giving commonly experienced examples such as forgetting what the teacher said 30 minutes after class. This is due to our nervous system not being engaged.When a traumatic event occurs in someone’s life, that experience gets the nervous system going,  that’s when lifestyles begin to change.

“A lot of modern work doesn’t require us to move at all,” Saddleback student Cody Huntting said. “So we’re always sitting down, but our bodies are prepared to move, and it needs to move.”

Factors of stress can be found not just students, but everyone’s day-to-day lives. With advances in medicine and technology, our generation of humans have a life expectancy of 100 to 110 years. This length of life can’t be achieved with lack of sleep, lack of nutrition or lack of exercise. There’s no time like the present to start preparing,  if not, the results will speak for themselves.

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