Yoga - Reducing Stress

Excerpted from
Yoga Zone Yoga for Life: An Intermediate Guide to Health, Fitness, and Relaxation
By Alan Finger, Al Bingham

Everyone experiences stress-it is a phenomenon as old as the human race. The fast pace of twenty-first-century life provokes the stress response-and exacerbates its negative side effects - probably more than any other rime in history. Never before have people experienced so many pressures in the course of a single Jay. pressures to earn money, be successful in a career or job, meet deadlines and goals, pay bills, drive the right car, wear the right clothes, live in a nice home, and even more important, raise healthy, well-adjusted children and be a generous and considerate friend, colleague, spouse, and family member. If chose pressures and responsibilities haw not affected you physically and emotionally, you are lucky.

Most people, however, are physically and emotionally overwrought by daily stress. You may feel that there is not enough rime in the day to fulfill all your countless responsibilities. You may feel that you have let down your family or friends in some way. You may have gotten yourself into some sticky situation and are having some trouble extricating yourself. You feel as if you are the only one who has ever suffered from these problems. In fact, all of these emotions are common, but knowing that others feel the same way does not make them any more bearable to someone suffering from stress.

In today's society it is common, unfortunately, to get trapped in a cycle of stress. The original biological reason for developing the stress response was survival. The fight-or-flight response provided early human beings with the physical means to escape danger: the sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear: the heart rate speeds up, increasing blood flow to the arms and legs by 300 percent: energy diverts away from digestion, adrenaline pumps through the blood: the pupils dilate, decreasing peripheral vision: and the breath becomes shallower and more rapid.

When the stressful situation disappears, nature intends for the body to return to a balanced state. Unfortunately, in this fast-paced culture nature backfires, and we often get stuck in the fight-or-flight mode. Before we have recovered and rebalanced from the last stressful event, the next challenge is already upon us. Stress becomes chronic and overrides the relaxation response; the body loses its chance to recover. As subsequent stressors appear, we are less and less capable of dealing with them. Often people resort to alcohol, cigarettes, binge eating, and other coping mechanisms to deal with the stress, causing even more harm to themselves.

Exploring and Releasing Stress with You

If left unchecked and unexamined, stress can take physical root in your body, the large muscles in your legs, the quadriceps and hamstrings, may become tense and inflexible. Can you relax them completely; Probably not. You may also carry tension in the muscles of your neck, back, pelvis, jaw, or some other area. The tension may be so normal that you do not even notice it anymore, but that does not mean it is not harmful. Similarly, emotional stress can become such a natural state that you no longer notice that you are sleeping poorly, overreacting to small problems, or cultivating an outlook of doom and gloom. Worse, over a long period of time, physical and emotional stress can cause many physical ailments: high blood pressure, heart disease, migraine headaches, back trouble... the list, unfortunately, continues.

Clearly, it would do you good to find a way to release yourself from this vicious circle! It you are like most people, however, you are accustomed to feeling uncomfortable, and you cannot begin to remember what true relaxation, stillness, and peace feel like. To recover that peace, you must change your outlook. Certainly this is easier said than done, but unlearning stress, like unlearning any bad habit, is a process that begins with the intention to change. When we are confronted with stress, we can choose either to accept the damage it wreaks on our bodies and emotions or to examine and confront that damage. Removing yourself from the grip of stress is difficult because stressed behavior is so practiced and habitual. But bit by bit, using yoga, you can certainly reverse the pattern. Practice a new vision: learn to greet the onset of stress positively because it signals a situation that is causing you discomfort, giving you an opportunity to break old, harmful patterns of thought and behavior and consciously create healthier new ones. The key is self-examination.