Six ways to beat chronic stress
By Nathan Seppa
For more on stress and its effects on the body, see SN‘s feature “Chronic stress can wreak havoc on the body.”
Counseling, mindfulness training and purposeful social contact may counteract the effects of nagging stress.
Parenting classes
In a trial of 272 low-income black women in rural Georgia, each with an 11-year-old child, scientists randomly assigned 173 to receive parenting training. “This was a set of coping strategies that may be particularly adaptive in these difficult settings,” says psychologist Edith Chen of Northwestern University. At age 19, the children whose families received the seven-week intervention had lower levels of six blood markers of inflammation, Chen and colleagues reported in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Inflammation markers were lowest among kids who got the least harsh and most consistent parenting.