Facing Your Stress The Conscious Lifestyle:(1)
I don't want to open the vast
discussion of stress that now exists, except to make two limited points. 1.
Stress isn't good for you. 2. The vast majority of people do not deal with
their stress effectively. Coming to grips with these two things is important
for anyone who wants to create a conscious lifestyle. To be aware is to be
open, alert, ready to meet unknown challenges, and capable of fresh responses.
When you are under stress, these qualities are compromised. Raise the stress
high enough and they are reversed. The mind closes down as an act of
self-defense. In that state it is very difficult to be alert and open.
But stress is bad for you in far
more basic ways. The hormones that are released in the body's stress response,
such as cortisol and adrenaline, are meant to be temporary. Their effect is to
galvanize the fight-or-flight response, which is triggered in a primitive area
of the brain, because fight-or-flight is an inheritance from our pre-human
past. In the stress response, a privileged pathway is opened for dealing with
emergencies, while at the same time the brain's higher responses are
temporarily suppressed.
No one can healthily sustain the
heightened alertness, quick burst of energy, rapid heart rate, elevated blood
pressure, and other marks of the fight-or-flight response. Physically,
the hormone rush must come to an end, leading to the opposite state - you
become drowsy, lose energy, and have a hard time remaining alert and focused.
So-called adrenaline junkies deliberately induce an aroused state because they
enjoy being highly aroused, and they presumably value the courage, euphoria,
and killer instinct that the stress response brings.
What they overlook is the down side.
They may also be unaware of the physical damage done to various parts of the
body, since various processes (e.g., growth, digestion, oxygenation of muscles)
are temporarily shut down during fight-or-flight, which must be considered an
abnormal, unbalanced state - no one would deliberately stay there. As stress
experts have asserted for decades, the low-level stress of modern life fools
the body into triggering a borderline condition of fight-or-flight that isn't
good for us. "Normal" stresses like being stuck in traffic contribute
to hypertension and coronary artery disease, along with susceptibility to
infections, insomnia, and much else.
So those highly competitive types
who boast that they thrive on stress are living in a fantasy world when you
consider the potential for damage to their bodies. The most recent studies on
the genetic effects of exercise, diet, meditation, and stress reduction
conducted Dr. Dean Ornish,
a national expert on reversing heart disease, suggests that a positive lifestyle
produces beneficial output form as many as 400-500 genes. This implies that the
same genes are adversely affected by a negative lifestyle that ignores stress
management.
We are only now beginning to
understand that subjective states like pain and happiness are not standardized.
In fact, as we constantly reshape the brain and nervous system through everyday
experience, each of us is structuring a unique response to the world, including
our response to stress. This implies that there are people with high tolerances
for stress and people with low tolerance, just as there is for pain. But
if you put soldiers under the high stress of battle, eventually all of them
will become shell-shocked unless they are given time away from the front lines.
The firefighters and police who responded on 9/11, a group self-selected to go
into stressful situations, suffered very high rates of post-traumatic symptoms.
Therefore, don't try to make stress
your ally, either by toughing it out or turning your back on the problem. The
conscious choice is to recognize that modern life is a battleground of
low-level stress, sometimes peaking into high stress, that will have a damaging
effect over time unless you deal with everyday stressors in a consistent,
effective way.
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of
more than 65 books with numerous New York Times bestsellers and co-author with
Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing
the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual
Well-being. (Harmony)
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