I think many people need overall stress relief these days. I’ll share some of my insight on how you can become aware with mindfulness.
People walk around seemingly unaffected but underneath their skin, they are stressed out, anxious, annoyed, or irritated. You know that because of the stress statistics, and because you have shared and felt those same feelings at some point. That makes us human. And, if you live in a city or busy, suburban area around people, you probably know that all too well.
Living chronically stressed is one of the worst things you can do for your health (it’s a slow form of dying as I think settling into retirement is, but that’s another story for another day).
You may know stress is linked to 6 of the leading causes of death and probably more as our society is growing even more complex and filled with daily stressors. The saddest result from stress is if a person tragically considers ending their life or lives on anxiety medication. Inside of each of us, there are healthy alternative solutions, and that is the answer to life.
Jon Kabat -Zinn is known for his mindfulness and meditation work and writing. He worked on a study where employees practiced a mindfulness technique for 30 minutes a day for 8 weeks. Their brains were scanned before and after. Following the mindful 8 weeks, the participants had more activity in the left side of their front brain that showed enthusiasm and joy.
The study is an example of how we can affect our stress and daily lives by our thoughts. Most adults carry some out-of-control problems and walk around with varying levels of burden or worry in the mind-body construction we’re given.
Often, we don’t know what we can do to fix our immediate problems or we’ve already tried without a definitive solution, so we just accept that’s just how it is, at least for this season. And the season can be lifelong if never addressed again or if giving up or coping is the way of being.
That’s this life. It’s what you do with your thoughts and making them positive in some way, that makes all the difference in the world.
If you’re a natural Vata-Pitta type and live in a city environment, like I am and do, you’re highly susceptible to stress-related health issues. You can get warning signs initially showing up as acute or chronic anxiety, strong judgment, inflammation, aches, or pains that you can’t pinpoint the exact cause of. Over time these stress symptoms wear down your mental health and you can suddenly one day no longer get excited about your work, even though it was a gradual accrual.
So I starting making stress relief and work-life balance a priority in my late 20’s. I knew my health and appearance would suffer if I didn’t make changes.
We all want to live actively, and full of energy now and especially in our older years. Plus we have our individual desires like I want to look 20 years younger than my real age… and, I know I’m not alone in those wants.
Looking back in my young adult life, I had put my health on auto-pilot, prioritizing goals to climb the corporate ladder. And then I had small health situations, one after another, that made me question if my work lifestyle was contributing.
I took my job more seriously than my own health. Like, one time I had a panic attack and just went on with the day as though nothing had happened. I never forgot about it though.
Another time, I ignored the initial call to walking pneumonia. Not until the CEO of the company I worked for, urged me to go see the doctor, did I actually prioritize health over my job. I was lucky to get the encouragement and luckily I went to get medical help.
Those were warnings. They may have panned out okay for a healthy 20-something-year-old, but even a few years later makes a difference in the aging process as I started to notice my health more as I got more balance in my life.
I had accumulated stress in my body-mind for many years before I noticed or took any positive action. The body keeps score.
The stress I accumulated had started years before.
I grew up in a house with struggling immigrant parents. There was a lack of daily consistency. There was weekly household expressed anxiety-anger that got recorded in my young brain. And, I suppressed my emotions. As an adult, to become whole and healed, I needed to let out and process post-trauma still living actively in my old child’s brain and affecting my new adult decisions.
I didn’t know mindfulness could be an even better cure (than therapy). Back then in my 20’s, I didn’t know I had an issue, until I started learning more and getting aware (in our pre-vulnerable sharing society days we live in today).
As a young adult, I was just trying to put a roof over my head. That led to a panic attack incident from accumulated stress building up from a prior work victimization situation, then-current toxic management issues, and also working 55 plus grueling work hour weeks.
Different situations, but those are the types of multiple, complicated layers that many adults walk around with daily, that’s running in their mind-bodies. And they hold it all in instead of finding a healthy, sustainable solution that’s readily available (like I found).
In my case and so many others, my brain had recorded current stress-filled situations and mixed them with past emotional childhood trauma that was never healed. The body can then snap.
Our regular healthy bodies are naturally resilient but they can only take so much before there’s a breakdown, and that’s what happened in my case.
Most people live like that, unconscious and unaware about the damage carried around in the cell memories of the mind-bodies. Getting stress relief awareness is life and investment in your future health.
Continue reading “Stress Relief and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction”
