2010
We come upon this idea quite often in life, don’t we? I don’t think it is really understood fully why stress is so detrimental. We are told, anecdotally, by our parents, psychologists, doctors and friends that we need to avoid stress. But, do we have a grasp as to why stress hurts us? Is it really only psychological? Or are there other things at work here?
Well, today I wanted to try to clear up the topic a little bit for you. Perhaps I can even give you a few ways that will help you learn to deal with stress in a more productive way.
Alright, so, what is stress? It is something we feel most in our mind. And, yes it can have disasterous effects on this area of our body. Stress completely clouds our thinking and our ability to react positively to life.
Yet, sadly, for the majority of us, life is pretty much a journey from one stressful situation to another.
Daily, we are bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of advertisements hitting us up for our money. We turn on the television only to be forced to witness violence, anger, aggression, jealousy, hate in the scenarios unfolding in the shows we watch.
And, do not even get me started on the trash given to us as news.
We go to work, only to encounter one stressful situation after another, and then to have our boss tell us how we are not living up to the companies’ expectations. And we do it all for a paycheck that typically provides us with just enough to get by until the next one shows up.
Now, is this not an accurate depiction of the way the majority of the world population lives? Perhaps, things are changing, but these types of changes take a while to take hold. And, yes, all this stress does nothing but age us faster and bring us a life of physical pain and disease.
Well, why is that?
There is something called, “fight or flight” that we were all probably taught about in school. Don’t you remember? In biology class? It was something that happened in our bodies that gave us the ability to either fight like the dickens or run like we have never run before, when we came upon a bear or a lion as we were evolving in the days of our primitive ancestors.
It is a response mechanism that actually made us stronger. We could literally run faster or fight harder.
That is the stress response. It is an inherited survival mechanism. It is how our bodies react to a feeling of fear regardless of whether that fear is real or imagined.
Fear is generated in the mind or brain from an outside stimulus, a T-Rex perhaps. And, then our bodies begin to generate a cascade of hormones, cortisol and adrenalin just to name a few. These hormones trigger our blood vessels to constrict or tighten so that our hearts have to pump faster and we have to breath harder in order to get blood through the body.
Do you not normally begin to breath heavier during a run or sprint or some other type of physical exersion? Well, that is because oxygen buffers the lactic acid that is generated as a result of that physical stimulation.
Lactic acid is the substance that creates the intense burn that forces you to stop working out when you overexert yourself. And, the oxygen we take in as a result of breathing heavier helps to keep that burn at bay for just a little bit longer.
But, this is what made the “fight or flight” response so useful. We were almost automatically able to exert ourselves much longer and harder than is normally possible.
But there is something else to consider.
Every healing mechanism in your body is shut down in response to this survival stimulus. Digestion is inhibited. Proper brain function is deactivated. Cells cannot be repaired and regenerated when we are in this state. Waste cannot be removed from the body.
Any mechanism of repair and growth is turned off.
Why? Well, because all of the body’s energy is directed toward helping us survive in that moment! And, if we were still living on the planes of the Serengeti, hunting lions for food and fighting bears for our own survival, this really would be a GREAT thing!
Fast forward to now. Our boss yells at us for an hour about why he is thinking about firing us or we fight with our spouse on the phone about why we are at the office too much or we sit and stare at an ever increasing stack of bills wondering how we are ever going to get them paid.
This is how we live. Every time we turn on the television we are subject to a stress response. Every time we are made to think of situations like 9-11 or some murder that just happened or we watch in suspense as some hurricane or other natural disaster washes over a city and wait as the results of the destructive force are laid out for us.
This is how we live. We LIVE everyday…every moment…in a state of fight or flight!
Until we change this, nothing about our current world will change. But, we first have to change it in ourselves by, in as many ways as we can, deactivating stress’ hold on our lives.
Now, what are some practical ways that we can use to change and improve the way we deal with stress?
Well, exercise is one great thing. Exercise is a stress in itself in fact. But, it is a CONTROLLED stress. And it is temporary. The kind of exercise that I do, Crossfit, is an amazing way to generate a controlled stress response in the body.
But, as our bodies build up these stress hormones during exercise, we USE them and then our bodies discard them. They do not just sit there in our bodies wasting away our tissues. In typical daily life, we sit in a stressful situation creating these hormones, but we are not preparing to fight our bosses! We are not literally running away from our spouses!
These hormones are destructive for every part of your body.
So, an exercise program, helps us to learn to cope with the stress response by creating a controlled response in the body. Beyond the idea of increasing your level of fitness, this is really one reason to love it and to do it on a regular basis.
Another way of deeply enhancing our way of responding to and coping with stress is to meditate using a program like The Holosync Solution.
I have used it to deal with some of the most stressful periods of my life. And, I am now on the third level of the program. What it has done for me is immense and it can be for you.
Holosync, using binaural beat technology, creates a stress response in the brain that is similar to that of exercise. And, over time, it aids your brain in being able to generate better hemisphere coherence. Your waves become deeper and less confused. Your brain learns to develop higher amounts of healing hormones also.
And, as the carrier frequency of the soundtracks deepen as you progress through the program, you become able to deal with higher and higher levels of stress.
The program is amazing and the support material is outstanding.
I hope that you all try it and let me know what you think of it.
So, give it a shot. You have nothing to lose.
Peace, Love, Light!
