Tag: Stress Reduction

Six Simple Strategies for a Stress-Free Summer, 1.

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Maintain a Quiet Time Routine

Finding quiet time isn’t a luxury; it’s essential for protecting your health.  So, take time for yourself each day. The key is –  when will you practice meditation and where? It’s always easy to postpone our practice when we don’t have a designated time  for it.  A routine will strengthen your perseverence. Decide how long you will meditate. The best way to develop your meditation practice is to be consistent. Short sessions regularly are better than longer sporadic sessions . Start to enjoy the idea of regularity and routine.

Meditation reduces the perception of pain.

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A recent study, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford,  has found that our physical experience of pain is influenced by the mood we are in at that moment. In other words,  our brain influences how we perceive and deal with the pain we are going through, as a low or anxious mood  disrupts a portion of our neurocircuitry related to regulating emotion, causing an enhanced perception of pain. The low mood may go as far as to drive the pain and make it feel worse. Mind and body are intimately linked when it comes to health and wellness.

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to affect the way we attend to what is happening in our lives at any moment,  and can impact upon mood in a positive manner. Therefore it is probably not surprising to read that a 2010 University of Manchester study, to be published in the Journal Pain,  noted that experienced meditators found pain  less unpleasant than did non-meditators. It seems that regular meditation can train the brain to anticipate pain less and reduce its emotional impact.

Dr Christopher Brown, who led the research,  stated “Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a way to treat chronic illness such as the pain caused by arthritis. Recently, a mental health charity called for meditation to be routinely available on the NHS (the National Health Service)  to treat depression, which occurs in up to 50% of people with chronic pain.”

The finding is a potential boon to the estimated 40% of people who are unable to adequately manage their chronic pain. Dr Brown suggests that the reason meditation works  is due to the fact that it is a training in remaining focused on the present moment and not anticipating future problems: “The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain. Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse.”

You can read more on the University’s website: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=5801

A simple practice for reducing stress today

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If at times today you find yourself getting anxious or stressed,  you may like to try this simple practice of dropping into your breathing. We use the breath as an anchor to steady us at moments of confusion or distress. The breath is always with us. We do not need any special skills or practices to simply notice it. We do not need to go anywhere, other than where we are at that moment:

Our breathing is a stable solid ground that we can take refuge in. Regardless of our internal weather- our thoughts, emotions and perceptions- our breathing is always with us like a faithful friend. Whenever we feel carried away, or sunken in a deep emotion, or scattered in worries and projects, we return to our breathing to collect and anchor our mind.

We feel the flow of air coming in and going out of our nose. We feel how light and natural, how calm and peaceful our breathing functions. At any time, we can return to this peaceful source of life.

We may like to recite: “Breathing in I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out I know that I am breathing out.”

We do not need to control our breath. Feel the breath as it actually is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. Conscious breathing is the key to uniting body and mind and bringing the energy of mindfulness into everyday life.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Exercise combats low mood

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Mindfulness Stress Reduction encourages a mind-body approach to health. It is part of a growing field of integrative medical care that combines the best scientific medicine with evidence-based  therapies from complementary traditions. Recent research – which we have written about on this blog – has found that it has beneficial effects on stress as well  as changing the function and maybe even the structure of the brain,.

It would seem that physical exercise and aerobic workouts have a similar effect. Indeed, molecular scientists and neurologists have suggested that physical exercise may alter brain chemistry by working on the key neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine. In fact, exercise seems to work in much the same way that antidepressant drugs do. One researcher working in this area is Professor Philip Holmes at the University of Georgia, who has focused on the neurobiological effects of exercise. He has found that, over the course of several weeks, exercise affects certain genes that increase the brain’s level of galanin, a neurotransmitter that appears to tone down the body’s stress response by regulating another brain chemical, norepinephrine. His current work focuses on the link between stress and different addictions, and how exercise can reduce stress which leads to addictive behaviours: “Stress turns on norepinephrine,” says Holmes, “which turns on dopamine, which induces craving. Galanin decreases norepinephrine, so someone with high levels of galanin should experience reduced cravings.”

Researchers at Duke University support these findings. In a randomized controlled trial they found that depressed adults who participated in an aerobic-exercise plan improved as much as those treated with sertraline, the drug which,  marketed as Zoloft,  is one of the most prescribed anti-depressants.

You can find more on this subject in TIME Magazine: : http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1998021,00.html#ixzz0rgWOWgm0

The body and the mind

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Increasingly research is showing how the mind plays a significant part in how our body feels. This is of interest to us who are working with stress. It also helps us understand how mediatation, simply sitting and observing the mind, can be an effective way of working with difficult emotions and events.

For example, research has shown that the body responds to abstract thoughts as if they were real. Work done at the University of Aberdeen found that when participants were asked to recall the past or imagine the future, their bodies acted out the metaphors contained in the words. So when asked to remember, they leaned slightly backward; when imagining the future, their bodies moved forwards. Though these shifts amounted to just a few millimeters, the results were consistent enough for researchers to conclude that they could ‘take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.’

Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam observes: “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” This is consistent with the way stress manifests itself in the body as headaches or heart conditions. It can also be seen when we have had a difficult encounter and we go around with a knot in the stomach. It supports the approach of Mindfulness meditation in its focus on the mind as a part of a whole body response to life’s stresses.

See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html/