Be Aware of Your Stress

Stress is destructive. Stress is ageing. Stress is a killer. Thirty-six chemicals pour into the blood—lethal chemicals like adrenaline and histamine. Blood rushes through the heart, blood pressure and pulse rates shoot up. The rate of breathing increases. The body gets ready to fight or flee. Digestion is switched off. All parts of the brain, except the primitive ‘lizard brain’, are switched off.

The force of blood-flow in an enraged person causes minute tears in the tender fabric of the arteries. Fatty deposits find a convenient place to park themselves to repair the tears, and cholesterol, the plaster of paris of the body, slowly builds up to occlude the artery. Soon the tender flexible artery becomes stiff and hard, preparing the stage for a heart attack.

The good news is that there is hope at the end of the tunnel as people are becoming aware of the stress epidemic and are making conscious choices to not become just another statistic. A fundamental shift in leisure time and spending priorities has taken place in recent years. This includes higher budgets for movies, personal fitness, meditation, holidays, adventure sports and fine arts. You have a much better chance of doing what you love as an artist, sportsman, musician or film maker today than ever before. Meditation and pranayama provide a way of reducing the automatic and violent reactions to stress. You can actually control autonomous systems like heartbeat and pulse rate, which were thought to be outside the individual’s control.