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Control stress and keep a balanced mind

by Jessica Tomaz

A woman went to the doctor’s office with her husband. After the checkup, the wife was called in to speak with the doctor alone.

The doctor told her, “Your husband is afflicted with a serious stress disorder and unless you do the following, he will certainly die.” He continued, “Every morning, make your husband a big healthy breakfast. Smile and be pleasant at all times. Prepare another nutritious meal for him at lunchtime and something very special for dinner each night. Don’t talk about your problems with him. Don’t burden him with chores. It will only make his stress worse. Don’t nag or complain. And be sure to make love with your husband several times each week. If you do all this for the next six months to a year, I am confident your husband will overcome his stress and have a full recovery.”

On the way home, the husband asked his wife, “What did the doctor tell you?” The wife replied, “He said you’re going to die.”   

This joke isn’t so funny when you think about the truth it contains. No matter how much you hope, you can’t expect others to relieve your stress. Stress management is an individual responsibility. No magic pill and no quick fixes will take away your stress.  Finding inner peace is a personal journey - and not always an easy one.

The other truth in this joke is scary. That is, when not managed efficiently, stress can have dire, even deadly, consequences.

So, what exactly is stress? And, more importantly, how can you successfully manage stress?

Stress is your body’s instinctual way of preparing you to meet a challenge. It’s an involuntary response to ensure basic survival. When met with a challenge, the sympathetic nervous system is activated to prepare your body for conflict or escape, more commonly known as the “fight or flight” response.  When fight or flight is activated there’s an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, breath rate, hormones, cellular metabolism, and blood flow to the muscles. These changes help you respond with more speed and strength. In the face of a challenging situation, this response keeps you safe; it may even save your life.

However, if the stress response is activated repeatedly without any actual fight or flight, the response places tremendous pressure on the physical body and on the mind. Fight or flight requires a great deal of energy, and, when elicited, steals energy used for other bodily processes such as digestion and kidney function. The results are fatigue, chronic high blood pressure, body pain, headaches, insomnia, and countless other physical and mental symptoms. The stress response can even lead to heart attack and stroke. When the stress response is continuously activated the energy you need to stay well gets consumed. The result: You become sick.

When stress is not managed, it affects every major bodily system. Pulitzer Prize winning microbiologist Rene Dubos warns us, “What happens in the mind of man is always reflected in the diseases of his body.” Of all visits to primary care physicians in the U.S., 75-90 percent are for complaints and conditions related to stress. More than 100 million Americans take some form of medication for stress-related symptoms. Here are just a few of the physical and psychological symptoms of stress:

Many techniques can reduce stress, such as exercising, taking a bath, avoiding known stressors, getting a massage, and taking breaks. But these techniques only temporarily reduce stress levels. It’s like cutting the weeds without pulling out the roots. Yoga and meditation get to the root of our stress because these practices work deep within the central nervous system.

Harvard professor and esteemed medical doctor, William James said, “Our greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” James confirmed what the yogis have been telling us for millennia. More than 2,000 years ago, Indian sage Patanjali, wrote in his yoga sutras, “Yoga is a stopping of the mind’s modifications, bringing it to a one pointed focus.” This is exactly what is practiced in meditation and yoga. As you sit for meditation, you direct your thoughts to one focus point, be it an object, sound, or mantra. As you flow though your practice on the mat, the one thought you choose above all others is the breath.

Medical doctor and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Herbert Benson, is a pioneer in the field of mind/body medicine. His groundbreaking studies with meditation have given scientific validation of age-old wisdom providing proof of meditation’s power to calm sympathetic nervous system activity and provide physical and mental well-being. He found that meditation decreases heart rate, cellular respiration, oxygen consumption, and blood lactate (a substance linked to anxiety), as well as produces feel good alpha waves. This means meditation produces an opposite response to fight or flight. Benson calls meditation’s effects the “relaxation response”.
In Benson’s studies, subjects with high blood pressure were able to lower their blood pressure through daily meditation. Blood pressure stayed low not only during meditation practices, but throughout all their daily activities. When the subjects stopped their meditation practices, blood pressure returned to higher levels within four weeks. Interestingly, Benson found no marked difference between subjects just commencing their meditation practices and Zen and yoga masters with 15 or more years of experience.

Though meditation can be helpful if used in times of coming anxiety or stress, it should also be adopted into your daily routine to experience its maximum benefits. So, don’t just DO something … SIT THERE!

You can’t always control what happens, but you can always control the way you think about what happens. If the thoughts you choose are those of stress, problems, and obstacles, certainly you can expect to see more problematic and stressful situations in life. What you resist persists. On the other hand, if you choose to be a witness to the ebb and flow of life by keeping a balanced mind, you can expect to see divinity in all life’s surprises. If the mind is controlled, calm, and with one-pointed focus, it doesn’t matter what happens externally, you will not be affected by situational stressors. You will watch what others see as problematic or stressful and view it as what it really is: The gunas, or forces of nature, dancing and playing together.

Coming back to the mat day after day is one of the best ways to control stress and keep a balanced mind. Ultimately, it becomes easier to practice yoga and meditation daily than to not. As you care for and honor yourself, you become better able to care for and honor those you love and the world as a whole.