Category: The Problem

What keeps you up at night?

Is it money? Work? Family responsibilities? Relationships? Health?

Have you considered that what keeps us up at night is our thoughts about life situations?

Lying awake at night is simply one of our body’s reactions to the meaning we give to life situations.

But do we see things for what they truly are?

Join me in exploring how to be in charge of your power by choosing the way you look at what we have come to define as the major challenges of our existence.

Three Reasons Why Meditation is Good for Your Health

We are in the midst of an inexplicable paradox. – Our scientific discoveries and medical advances have increased our life expectancy to an all-time high. Yet, we have never been more obese, addicted, over-medicated, or stressed-out as we are today!

The “mind-body problem” seems to be right at the heart of this paradox as shown by ample, Western medical research. This research has bridged the gap between Descartes and Plato, who first described this problem, and modern science.

The mind-body problem refers to the problematic ways our mental activity, that is, our thoughts, affect our body.

Meditation offers us an incredible shield against the negative consequences of the mind-body problem. Here are three of the reasons why:

1.    “Our minds’ wish is our command!”

Much like training a puppy, our mind and attention can be trained through the practice of meditation to stop and stay in the present and not wander off so easily to worries about things that are not happening now. Worries about the past or the future are unsettling. They cause our heart rate and our blood pressure to go up and draw metabolic energy away from the fabulous, critical thinking part of our brain to the mammalian, primitive part of our brain. It is up to us to decide where we will place our attention and what wish will become our command. We can choose to stay away from mental activity related to fear, and instead fuel our creativity, will-power, and optimism—wonderful resources we can use to support the optimal functioning of our body.

2.    We are born to be free.

When we train our mind and attention, we essentially free our body systems (our hearts, cardiovascular, nervous, immune, and digestive systems) to work for us and not against us. We have the amazing “hardware” to operate at peak performance levels professionally and personally. But we need to be in charge of all this power we have to be able to use it for noble causes and not to waste it on non-existent threats, which are based on our perceptions of the past or future.  Using our power to fight “imagined threats” undermines our ability to connect to the ones we love, access creative solutions to our problems, bounce back from adversity, and feel happy, content, and optimistic. We are born free, but sometimes we end up allowing our past to keep us hostage and deprive us of the freedom to be our authentic self. Meditation puts us back on the path to freedom, by not allowing our attention to wander to anything that is not in the here and now.

3.    “No pain, no gain”

There is so much grace and dignity in human suffering and discomfort. None of us gets a free pass from pain and suffering. We can find incredible lessons in pain, and we miss out on a lot of mundane, yet profound, beauty by numbing our pain through all sorts of ineffective ways such as drinking too much, working too much, or shopping too much.

Meditation is a gateway to surrendering to the present moment, instead of resisting it, even when our present moment includes the discomfort of physical and/or emotional pain.

Once upon a time, meditation was a mystical practice that belonged to foreign cultures and religions.

Today, laboratory and imaging instruments have provided measurable, hard-core evidence that the simple act of quieting our mind changes our brain in a way that helps us manage our body systems better.

Sure, in our information-overloaded world, there is a pill for everything to keep away symptoms of disease, even for unfamiliar diseases with strange names.

But if you want to try something new that actually has the power to bring your body and mind into harmony and shield you from dis-ease, I invite you to MEDITATE.

You can find a collection of guided meditations here: http://bit.ly/myndzenguidedmeditations

Part two: Improving your relationship with stress-How to establish safety and trust

Last week, I introduced you to my simple, yet effective, approach that I used to become a BFF (Best Friend Forever) with stress so it would no longer be such a barrier to my health and well-being. Following the cumbersome health complications that I experienced when I chose to ignore the effects of stress on my body, befriending stress has become the most effective health improvement intervention for me so far.

Although the idea of “befriending stress” may sound like an abstract concept, it is not very different from the process we use to befriend someone we meet that we like:

  1. We get to know them better.
  2. We create safety and trust between us.

In this section, Stress: Part Two, I will share with you the most profound and unusual pearls of wisdom that I have gathered in regard to how we can create safety and trust in our relationship with stress so we can enjoy a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

  1. Question your perceptions! We are built for fight or flight in response to demands from the environment. It’s nothing personal, just a matter of survival. One of our most primal needs is to connect with others, yet our brain and nervous system are built for war and not for love. This presents us with a great paradox that we have to somehow reconcile to reinstate a sense of safety within and without. Our brain has evolved to give us the greatest survival advantage and that translates into us looking at things from a threatened perspective. We can intercept this scientific truth by literally questioning our assumptions and that which challenges us. For example, if you did not get an “Exceeds” in your performance evaluation, does it really mean that you should have concerns about your job security?
  2. Make a regular practice of choosing the words to your own life story. We are what our experiences have shaped us to be. Most of our memories are stored in our brain without conscious intervention on our part. A memory of a negative experience will get triggered and elicit a response when a situation occurs that mimics sensations of that negative experience. As brilliant as we may be intellectually, most of our actions happen without our permission. For example, if we had a negative parent figure in our childhood, the moment we get close to someone as an adult, implicit memories will resurface of what it was like to depend on someone who was not dependable. Then the relational part of our brain will shut down to disrupt the perceived negative consequences of depending on someone again. We can start re-writing this story by assessing how much of our assumption that the present moment resembles our past is a truth or a story. We can also become a regular participant in deciding if bringing the past into our present is leading us to our desired outcomes.
  3. Embrace the power of your emotions—one emotion at a time. We have been conditioned to be afraid of our own emotions, because well, they have a life of their own! We need to embrace that it is biologically impossible to not make an emotional decision. Prominent neuroscientist, Joseph Le Doux, has shown us that when a threat is perceived by our thalamus, which relays motor and sensory signals, it only takes eight milliseconds for the message to reach our amygdala, which is responsible for detecting fear, but forty milliseconds to reach our prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our brain. Instead of running away from our feelings, what if we fully embrace and trust them by giving them a name and choosing how we allow them to shape our behavior? Making intelligent use of our emotions (otherwise known as emotional intelligence) has been found to be more important than IQ in how well we do in life. You can access a free resource to help you with this endeavor by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen
  4. Reconcile differences between expectations and actuality. Our brain perceives difference, or change, as “errors.” When we are promised a sweet-tasting treat and we get something sour instead, two structures in our brain get activated that emit very strong error signals. The two structures are the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala. The activation of these structures draws our metabolic energy away from the part of our brain that supports higher intellectual functioning and results in us acting impulsively and often putting our foot in our mouth. To change this, make it a high priority to identify any parts of your life that present your brain with the taxing job of reconciling differences and, one by one, eliminate them. Do you support healthy living, but find that your health improvement initiatives end the moment you sit in front of the TV at the end of a stressful day with a bag of unhealthy snacks? Do you have a significant person in your life who says they love you but often minimizes you? Recognize all situations that aggravate your brain by showing up as errors, call them by name, and let them go. Your brain will love you for it!
  5. Treat your brain as the best part of yourself. Our brain is our best friend and the CEO of the amazing operation of our incredible body. Improving our relationship with stress involves improving our relationship with ourselves. Although we haven’t been taught how to do that, there are several practices we can learn that are simple, backed up by science, and take only a smidgen of our time. Mindfulness meditation is one of the most effective and well-documented methods to quiet down the alarming narrative of any story and allow us to infuse our present moment with safety and trust. We can chose any focal point that makes us feel safe and protected as an effective way to build an internal sense of safety and trust. We can simply focus on our breath and recollect all the amazing things the power of our breath accomplishes, like oxygenating our one hundred trillion cells, or activating the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system, which governs rest and digestion. If you are one of the many of us that needs some guidance meditating, I invite you to use some of my favorite guided meditations that you can find here: http://bit.ly/myndzenguidedmeditations.

We modern humans are having such a hard time keeping our nervous system calm and available to serve our higher purpose and objectives in life. Part of the problem is that we have had to turn our brain into a warrior in order to survive throughout the ages.

Ultimately, we all strive to accomplish one, and only one, universal state—to be happy! However, there is not just one type of happiness.

We feel a primal type of happiness when we are in love and we make love to the object of our affection. But there is a different type of happiness that has been a secret until neuroscience uncovered it for us. This other type of happiness does not leave us, like the afterglow of being with the one we love. Instead, we carry this other type of happiness with us, and it shapes our perceptions of the world and how we expect the world to show up for us.

The foundation of this amazing, effervescent happiness hinges upon a baseline feeling of safety.

No matter how well we do in life, happiness will continue to be a fleeting target for us until we are ready to improve our internal sense of safety and trust. Changing the perceptual lens through which we view the world is a powerful way to improve our relationship with stress and increase our health and happiness.

Do You Have a Good Relationship With Stress?

In the midst of this crazy world we live in, fueled with uncomfortable phenomena, one thing that will never discriminate against us, regardless of our race, sex, or socio-economic status is—stress!

Stress has been described as the epidemic of the century. Prominent scientists around the world have provided us with over five decades of evidence that links stress to more than 90% of today’s disease, regardless of the color of our skin or any other of our unique characteristics.

I have had a tumultuous relationship with stress because I did not make friends with it. I am now living with some significant consequences. I have developed a musculoskeletal condition that graces me with chronic pain and restricts my activities to a great degree. Furthermore, my brain has been sculpted to be over-sensitive to stressors. This means that my amygdala (our nervous system’s alarm system responsible for identifying threats) is probably enlarged and my hippocampus (mainly associated with memory, among other critical functions) has probably experienced some shrinkage. So, you can say that finding a solution to the problematic consequences of not having a good relationship with stress has been a big deal for me.

During my diligent study and experimentation to improve my relationship with stress I came across a bewildering realization:

The dire ramifications of stress are not because stress is such a great villain, but because we don’t fully realize just how much power we have to choose how we relate to stressors and to the critical players involved with our stress response! Could it be that our “untamed” power leads us to the troublesome stress symptoms we experience?

What if we use our power to “befriend” stress?

On first thought, you may think the idea of “befriending stress” is a conundrum. The truth is, we all know how to do it. We go through the process of making friends pretty much every day in life.

In fact, making friends involves a simple two-step process:

  1. We get to know someone better.
  2. We establish safety and trust.

What if we followed the same process to improve our relationship with stress?

This week I want to talk about Step One: Getting to know stress better.

  1. What is stress?

Stress is the pressure we feel when our body goes off-balance (homeostasis) to respond to an environmental demand. In small quantities, stress is not necessarily bad as it motivates us to stretch ourselves to meet life’s demands. Imagine if you were an Olympian training to run for a gold medal. Some stress might be helpful to motivate you. Every day, we are all Olympians having to deal with situations that take us off homeostasis, which is our optimal, internal balance of essential bodily functions like temperature and heart rate. Next time you feel the subtle signs that your stress response is activated (for example, if you notice your heart rate has increased) give yourself sixty seconds to assess if the situation at hand is worthy of the activation of your stress response or not.

2. Is the reason for your stress a truth or a story?

What we don’t realize is that most of the time what triggers our stress response is the subtle, momentary interpretation we give to life situations and not the life situations themselves. For example, public speaking in and of itself does not actually pose any significant threat or danger to an organism. However, the thought of possibly forgetting our words and feeling embarrassed has the power to trigger our stress response, which we can immediately feel by the increase in our heart ratem just the same as if we had encountered a shark while swimming in the ocean. What if we shift our attention to simply recognizing how amazing it is that we are just as powerful as a shark or a bear in activating our fight or flight response, instead of allowing the power of our mind to take us off-balance?

 3. Too much of a good thing can be bad.

There are situations that warrant the appropriate elicitation of our stress response. Maybe we are in a car accident and we have to rush to provide aid for ourselves and our loved ones. A temporary, and infrequent, activation of our stress response with ample time to rest and digest what has happened in-between does not lead to health issues. However, we are now estimated to elicit our stress response over ten times a day. We are over-estimating threats and placing our bodies under a tremendous amount of unnecessary strain that does have significant short and long-term health consequences. What if we acknowledge how efficient we are at identifying threats, but shoot for eliminating one unnecessary stress response activation per week?

 4. Balance and optimal performance go hand in hand.

When we identify a situation as a threat, our thoughts and words trigger our brain to engage multiple systems in our body to address the threat. This diminishes the effectiveness of critical structures in our brain, for example, those that govern thinking; and shuts down other essential functions of our body, for example, our immune and digestive systems. In other words, when we operate under our stress response, our power is momentarily diminished and we enter a state of temporary impairment. Additionally, when we are in this defensive mode we cannot learn as well. What if we use the old advice to “pause and take ten breaths,” and then reconsider if we want to label a situation a threat, considering how powerful our thoughts and words are?

5. There are significant consequences to chronic stress.

When we allow our body systems to be used too often to address imaginary fears, like public humiliation, we are essentially exhausting our body systems by asking them to work overtime. Allostasis is the process that our body uses to regain homeostasis after it has been taken off-balance by a stressor. The total sum of all the things our body has to do to get back to its balanced state is called allostatic load. When our allostatic load is greater than our ability to recover, we enter the overload-level of allostatic load, and significant damage to organs and functions can occur. What if we consciously infuse breaks of calm in between jumping through hoops of stress as a means of boosting our resilience to life’s demands? Even sneaking out to the garden to water the plans, or creating a five minute space at work to listen to a guided meditation could be enough to restore balance in our nervous system.

We seem to frequently judge ourselves for our shortcomings, but we do not acknowledge how powerful we can be in creating not just our reality, but also our health and well-being. Although life’s demands are endless and many of them are outside of our control, what is actually within our control is working on building the resources that help us bounce back when something pushes us off-balance.

We are all drawn to rewarding experiences, and we strive to be happy. Reinstating an internal sense of safety and security is one of the most sustainable forms of happiness.

We know how to install a security system in our home to help us feel safe, but do we know how to reinstate a sense of safety in our neurobiology to improve our relationship with stress?

Join me next week for the second part of ways to improve our relationship with stress—how to establish safety and trust with stress and our nervous systems.

We cannot eliminate the sheer volume of stressors, but we can improve our relationship with our body systems and our stress response as a powerful way to live happier, healthier, and more productive lives.