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.
Practicing self-care “me-time” today has completely evolved as a good thing. It used to have a negative connotation, associated with a rich heiress or actress who got pampered and shopped all day with no real-life problems.
We don’t live in that kind of soap opera-filled society anymore, as people share the good and the bad.
Healthy self-love, no matter who we are, is what we all need in order to be healthy for ourselves and others. The standard emergency plane instructions, “put your oxygen mask on first so you can save others”…is plain good wisdom for life.
Even subtle anxious-worry and potential problems that may never happen, run in every human. So whatever you can do to keep yourself hopeful and cheery helps to keep you at your highest potential self.
The opposite for most of us would be feeling unhappy in a job or the current situation in life. That just adds early aging and other signs of recurring stress that the body is expressing.
If there’s an inflammation or disease condition that shows up, a healthy move would be to work on restoring the balance as soon as it’s recognized. But prevention is still not the common American way of thinking. It’s still taking medicine for quick fixes, and the thinking, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Most Americans don’t think of life in these terms about reducing stress or gaining balance as preventative measures to potentially save your life. We work hard, have busy lives, and overachieving goals, and our bodies pay a price.
Changing Your Thoughts
If you think about your own past, you may recall bits and pieces of memory that automatically show up in your thoughts. You don’t decide what you remember, but you can decide what to forget.
You may also think those thoughts that show up taking residence in your current mind, are the important ones that matter.
That’s where the breakdown starts as you do have a choice with your thoughts.
In your busyness, overwhelm, or thinking there’s not another way, you may crowd out the opportunity to make a difference in your life through your thought life (where it all begins). Your thoughts can turn into actions and behaviors that you do if/until you decide to change them.
You may not want to think of your stressful life while you’re watching Netflix, reading, or trying to wind down in the few free hours you have, because you want to relax and enjoy yourself during that time.
For stress relief, if you were to consciously make yourself aware during the week, and list out all the known major stressors you’ve endured in your life from childhood to now (like I did above in my story), then you’d start to magnify and witness that you could be living a life out of balance.
Your mental, physical, and emotional health could be compromised, when you could be liver fuller and happier.
Here are a few transforming tips to change your situation.
1. Get aware and find out what trauma memories your brain is holding onto. These can lead your mind to create counterproductive outcomes and irrational assumptions that are based in fear and insecurity, showing up in your daily thought-life and decisions you make.
Question any negative thoughts so you have a chance to reprogram what’s not helping you.
2. Find quiet moments or time to get mindful about all the causes of stress in your life. List out all the stressors that are holding you back from fully living and rank them. Add ongoing worry to your list if you worry as a way to cope.
Getting rid of worry and fears not based on reality or where you can’t come up with solutions, is one of the living full goals you can have and achieve.
Part of restoring balance is thinking positive thoughts and working out areas that are causing you from your full happiness. Being grateful and reminding yourself of what you have to celebrate keeps you calm and not wanting what you don’t already have.
3. Find out what body symptoms are showing up now and make small lifestyle changes to fix them.
You could take the body balance quiz to find out what your body is trying to tell you now, that you can change. Your body keeps score.
If you have less than optimum health that’s showing up as negative thoughts, inflammation or an aching body, and/or anxious-irritated emotion– then make a goal to balance and get stress relief.
From there you can learn about the mind-body connection that can create an imbalanced or off-balance internal system that needs repair. This can exacerbate and get worse if you don’t have a good work-life balance.
But you can prevent and bypass misery and breakage in your choices because your mind-body subtly and sometimes outwardly shows you what they need in order to be healthy again.
You can use them as guides to figure out how to change your life now (e.g. maybe you don’t know what stressors or trauma you have or had like I didn’t in my 20’s).
You can prevent health issues and gain awareness to live fuller and more confident.
This is so interesting and transformative to your life and was for me in 2008 when I was seeking stress relief and knowledge. That’s when I started getting deeper awareness and learned how to maintain internal balance from the mind-body perspective, instead of just living life the same as usual and just accepting what was sent my way.
Being grateful to be on the other side of more enlightened knowledge, is how I run my life, collecting data, and implementing healthy, personal growth evolved ways. And you can also live this type of way, with confident stress relief and to run your best life yet.
You have a choice to make a difference in your own life. Make this a reason to make a change or live out your best life this season.