Learn Meditation to Live Stress-Free Life
Description:-
We all know that stress is bad for us and this is something we get told very often. However, it’s all too easy to write this off as being a minor nuisance or frustration rather than anything to really worry about. We all get stressed from time to time, right?
In reality though, this is the wrong way to think about stress. While it is fairly common place, that is not to say that it isn’t serious. In fact, stress is incredibly serious and can cause severe problems both in the short term and long term.
Stress can shorten your lifespan. Ruin your enjoyment. Cause serious illness. Shrink your brain. Hurt your performance. Ruin your relationships. Cause impotence.
Stress is what we feel when we’re overworked, when we’re dreading something that’s about to happen or when we’re generally unable to relax and stay calm due to outside or inside factors influencing our thoughts.
Essentially, stress is what causes the ‘fight or flight response’. This is a physiological response to perceived danger, designed to improve our chances of survival. If you were to see a lion, for example, this would trigger a cascade of effects collectively resulting in the stress response.
These regions of the brain correspond with emotional control, decision-making, reasoning and self-control. In other words, the eventual result of stress is to leave you more reactionary, more depressive, more impulsive and less disciplined. From here, every aspect of your life will start to see negative effects.
The key is to make sure that those stress levels stay at this optimal level, as well as to try and get your natural cycles to line up with the times when you need to be most productive during the day.
Nevertheless, though, this constant fluctuation does have an impact on things like your productivity and your mood. And it is also closely tied to the sleep-wake cycle. When you wake up for instance, you are in a fasted state having slept all night: thus you have high cortisol.
One very simple way to keep your stress at bay, is to avoid letting your blood sugar drop too low. We’ve already seen that low blood sugar triggers the release of cortisol and other stress hormones and so it follows that by avoiding low blood sugar, we can avoid this fate.
Meditation is something a lot of people don’t fully understand. There is the assumption among some that meditation is somehow ‘mystical’ or that it is necessarily linked with religion. Neither of these things is true.
Fortunately, meditation is actually pretty simple and this is what ends up making it hard even in some cases. A lot of people who first try meditation feel that it is too simple and thus assume they must be doing something wrong!
You can then try the ‘body scan’. This is something that some people use as the main basis for their meditation and it involves focussing on each part of your own body, starting right from the head and then moving down the body slowly from the face, to the chest, to the legs, to the feet. Each time you get to a point on your body, make a conscious effort to release any tension you might be holding there and to relax.
Don’t worry about it. It’s fine to move. It’s fine to open your eyes for a moment. All that’s important is that you then bring your attention back. In time, you’ll find you are less distracted. But to begin with, you won’t be ready for that yet and you mustn’t get frustrated when you find that distractions do arise.
This is a big deal if you’re trying to reduce stress, seeing as your stress levels are closely related to the way you breathe. We’ve already seen that there is a strong connection between physiology, feelings, emotions and psychology. When we are stressed, we breathe more quickly and not as deeply. But likewise, when we breathe more quickly and not as deeply, we become more stressed.
For most people, the answer is the chest. But to be optimally healthy, it should be the stomach. When we’re infants this is how we breathe and it’s also how animals breathe. Years of sitting in an office desk though, or on a sofa, mean that we’ve spent too long with our stomachs compressed and learned to breathe differently.
Happy Reading.
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