DISS this: The wondrous powers of chewing gum
In a today’s Fitness blog section of the The Dallas Morning News, there was a report on recent studies by Australian behavioral and brain science professor Andrew Scholey about whether chewing gum affected one’s scores on the Defined Intensity Stressor Simulation (or DISS). It did, happily, and helped support the theory that chewing gum relieves anxiety, increases alertness and reduces stress.
Here’s what Leslie Garcia reports in her blog today:
The findings were quite positive. A couple of more specific tidbits:
Levels of salivary cortisol ( a physiological stress marker) were lower in gum-chewers than in non — 16 percent during mild stress; 12 percent in moderate.
Multi-tasking gum chewers improved their baseline DISS scores by 67 percent during moderate stress and by 109 percent during mild stress.