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Deepak Chopra on the Effects of Stress

The Conscious Lifestyle: Facing Your Stress

I don’t want to open the vast discussion of stress that now exists, except to make two limited points. 1. Stress isn’t good for you. 2. The vast majority of people do not deal with their stress effectively. Coming to grips with these two things is important for anyone who wants to create a conscious lifestyle. To be aware is to be open, alert, ready to meet unknown challenges, and capable of fresh responses. When you are under stress, these qualities are compromised. Raise the stress high enough and they are reversed. The mind closes down as an act of self-defense. In that state it is very difficult to be alert and open.

But stress is bad for you in far more basic ways. The hormones that are released in the body’s stress response, such as cortisol and adrenaline, are meant to be temporary. Their effect is to galvanize the fight-or-flight response, which is triggered in a primitive area of the brain, because fight-or-flight is an inheritance from our pre-human past. In the stress response, a privileged pathway is opened for dealing with emergencies, while at the same time the brain’s higher responses are temporarily suppressed.

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Self-Care Tip #9: Deal With Your Stress NOW

 

 

What is stress? What is YOUR stress? People identify all kinds of reasons for why they feel stressed. They attribute their stress to financial instability to family related issues to unhappy work environments. In my practice, I see many clients who are stressed because of interpersonal disharmony. This can be caused from  their primary relationship, their co-workers at their job or general dissatisfaction with their job that they may characterize as unstimulating or even overstimulating with a workload that is too big. The reasons go on and on but current social research reflects that 3/4s of Americans seeking medical care experience stress-related symptoms that are the cause of their complaints. The breakdown of stress symptoms is the following:

  • Physical complaints= 77%
  • Psychological complaints= 73%

Common complaints include fatigue, insomnia, headaches, anxiety and chronic physical aches and pains. Stress keeps doctors and the large pharmaceutical corporations thriving because it is the doctor who usually first sees the patient complaining of these stress-related symptoms. Most doctors prescribe medication and some might even suggest lifestyle changes, knowing fully well that only some patients will change the way they live their lives.

Read More »Self-Care Tip #9: Deal With Your Stress NOW