STRESS
Humans have dealt with stress while becoming highly adaptive to it their entire existence. The circumstances causing most stress have changed over the eons becoming quite different for humans today than in the past.
In the earliest days stress for homo sapiens was intermittent and relatively short lived. If a dangerous wild animal came into the encampment, for instance, humans would go into stress mode and either fight the animal off or run away. Either reaction was relatively short lived both in terms of time and in what happened to their physiology. When the event was over, people would return to normal living habits.
The hormones cortisol and norepinephrine are released at times of stress to cause metabolic changes in our bodies that enable us to deal with stress in real time by causing rapid changes in blood circulation, breathing and heart rate while at the same time allowing our bodies to withstand things they would not be able to otherwise.
Today we often have stress in our lives for far, far longer periods of time than our ancestors. Working at jobs is probably the number one cause of stress for most. Even things like driving through Bay Area rush hour traffic or having your cell phone ring often throughout the day cause the stress response to take place. Certainly if you make the mistake of watching too much cable TV news, you'll create for yourself a type of continuous stress...especially if you linger at one channel for too long.
For some stress has become a chronic and sometimes almost continuous condition which leads to the development of serious cumulative physiological issues. Cortisol and norepinephrine are released, but not just in a burst intended to deal with an immediate stress. They are released for hours thus becoming problematic for our health.
In the long run, stress is without doubt the number one condition underlying most chronic and debilitating health problems.
SCIENCE: HOW IT DEALS WITH STRESS
Western medicine quantifies everything entirely from testable evidence. In that way, it understands there to be two systems...the nervous and endocrine systems...controlling all body reactions, including responses to stress. Due to this understanding, the majority of western drugs change how our autonomic nervous system behaves.
Emotions obviously influence our experience of stress and our physiology. Love and connection are thought to be the most important emotional states in mitigating the effects of stress. Depression and anger are deemed most damaging in the long run.
In recent years pharmacology has spent a lot of effort making drugs that control neurotransmitters in the brain so as to affect the root of the entire nervous system instead of just the autonomic nervous system.
Just recently I was made aware of research, by way of watching a TED video, which shows taking SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) for long periods of time actually changes people's capacity for "long term love", at least in the way science views love in terms of it being a physiological adaptation for survival.
In ancient Greece they defined many different types of love, each being known by a different word. In our western scientifically based way of understanding phenomena, there are three types of love controlled by our physiology...each type needed for the continuation of our species to survive. At least that's the way science sees it.
The first type of love is "lust" which is thought to be triggered by pheromones released into air and by the hormone testosterone in both sexes. This is understood to be what makes sure humans procreate. It's the sex drive. And you get a nice reward for the effort...both in attaining orgasm and the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. Humans have physically adapted over millions of years, according to science, specifically to have sex...a lot of sex...a lot of the time.
The second type of love is "connection" and understood as being chemically induced primarily by the hormone oxytocin which causes global changes in the neurotransmitter soup in the brain. Oxytocin causes us to feel closeness and connection. This is understood to be the reason parents fall in love with their offspring, which is necessary for the survival of infants. It is also believed to be the driving force that keeps parents together during pregnancies.
The third type of love is "committed" which is seen as being primarily controlled in the long term by the neurotransmitter serotonin. This is believed to be necessary, in terms of survival, so that parents stay together long enough to see the child through to adulthood before they get totally sick to death of each other. Serotonin causes us to feel encouraged and accepting.
The first two types of "love" are scientifically viewed as temporary phenomena that have a relatively short half-life, while the third type is for the long term...even for life.
It turns out that taking an antidepressant that plays around with serotonin levels for too long, changes this third type of love...it doesn't persist. And that was the bottom line point of the presenter in that TED video I saw. She believes, due to her own scientific research, that taking SSRIs for longer than short term (a few months at most) is harmful to the ability to maintain committed, loving relationships.
All very interesting to be sure, but all so very scientific! To scientists all love can be explained through chemicals being produced by us.
THINGS OLDER THAN SCIENCE THAT DEAL WITH STRESS (thank goodness)
Then there are non-drug methods of dealing with stress. And these ways of dealing with stress aren't all explained by release of hormones and neurotransmitters or the need to survive.
Qi Gong and meditation are two of the very best practices you can cultivate to counter the effects of stress, in my opinion, based on personal experience.
Qi Gong combines breath with very slow, specific and purposeful movement to gather and collect Qi from the fog of Qi that surrounds us always...then bring it into us through the three Dantian Centers:
Lower Dantian (下丹田, Xia Dantian): below the navel (about three finger widths below and two finger widths behind the navel), also called "the golden chamber" is associated with cultivating life energy (qi) with vital essence or sexual energy (jing).
Middle Dantian (中丹田, Zhong Dantian): at the level of the heart, associated with storing life energy (qi) and with respiration and health of the internal organs, in particular the thymus gland.
Upper Dantian (上丹田, Shang Dantian): at the forehead between the eyebrows or third eye, associated with the energy of consciousness and spirit (shen) and with the pineal gland and the lower Dantian.
Meditation stops the internal voice so that, instead of broadcasting outward, you quiet yourself completely and receive inward from consciousness that surrounds us and infuses and animates everything.
I'd like to know from you: What things cause stress in your life and what do you do to deal with or diffuse stress for yourself? I really want to know about all the things you all do for yourselves to deal with stress.
What stresses you out and what do you do to release it?
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I'm listening.
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