My boss just came in and told me to go home, so I must look pretty sick still. I hope to run tonight.
I signed up for a military study at ASU. They said the military has a lot of personel who have to be placed in a desk job because of stress or physical limitations, so the military is funding a study to determine if they should target recruits who have lower responses to stress stimuli or meet certain physical characteristics. He basically already invited me into phase two which would involve them giving me a free personal trainer and access to ASU's workout facilities. Today was the first day of 3 different days. My next day will be a Vo2 max test. but today they tested cortisol production and stress. After filling out forms and signing disclosures they inserted an IV. Then they took me in a room and put heart monitors on my chest and a heart monitor on my finger. They said that by having the heart monitors in both places they can tell how long it takes blood to reach my finger from my heart. Not quite sure how that works, but it sounds interesting, even if it was an overly dumbed down laymans explanation of what they were doing. They had an ekg maching running that showed both pulses. Also on two of my fingers they put some pads that they said measure how much I am sweating. They said that is what they use for lie detector tests.
Then they put me through a bunch of stessors. First they put different colored words of color words on the screen. For example the word would be green but the text color would be red. I would have to say red. These blinked by quickly and there was a beep and I had to say the color of the text before the beep. This is all while some guy is drawing my blood in one arm, the blood pressure cuff is going off on the other arm and a guy is tapping his pencil on his clip board saying things like concentrate, you can do it faster than that, and what not. Then I had to do multipication and division problems. 77 x 8, 3/246 things like that in my head. They showed 6 on the screen at one time and when time is running out, a beeping sound gets closer together and the images fades away. Once again the guy was there with the clip board trying to get you to encourage you to do it faster and trying to stress you out. Then the same routine where I had to do anagrams. Then they put my hand in a bucket of ice water for two minutes. It was freezing cold. Throughout the study they kept asking if I was ok and they kept telling me I could take my hand out of the water if I wanted. I asked how many people took that option and she said about half. After about a minute my hand was numb and I could have left it in forever. Then for the final test they had me talk about a stressful event in my life and tried to get me to feel those same feelings again. In between each test I put this cotton thing in my mouth to soak up saliva and whatever cortisol my mouth produced. | 