Living in a Constant State of Stress Creates Disease

Medical research estimates stress plays a significant role in 90 percent of illness and disease. Stress can interfere with your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.

– Centers for Disease Control

The state of relaxation is a healthy, vital glowing state of body and mind. Unfortunately, few people experience this joyful, glowing, relaxed state.

Many people think that to experience relaxation, all they need to do is stop working and take some time off. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Time out does not guarantee relaxation, usually because we carry deep-seated worries and anxieties about life.

Most people only experience moments of relative peace. They rarely get to enjoy the peace fully because of underlying tensions held in the subconscious mind.

Deep and enduring inner peace depends on your ability to relax your body, mind, and emotions, and your deeper psyche.

You can achieve this by:

  1. Understanding the mechanics, the basic theory of how stress accumulates in the nervous system.
  2. Practicing relaxation-meditation techniques, for example, to remove long-term existing stresses, patterns of bracing.
  3. Learning to detect and disarm new stresses the moment they occur in daily life.

With these skills and knowledge, you will be far less vulnerable to tiredness and fatigue, and common sicknesses such as cold and flu. Your overall level of inflammation—a major cause of modern diseases—will reduce. This will enable you to keep youthful vigor as you age.

Worry and anxiety lead to chronic disease

Human beings oscillate between a state of physical and mental relaxation, governed by the parasympathetic nervous system[1], called the rest and digest system, and a state of physical and mental stress, governed by the sympathetic nervous system[2], called the fight-or-flight system.

The modern dilemma is that many people are in a constant state of stress, worry, and acute anxiety. They remain stuck in a high tension state, prepared for fight or flight even in situations of relative calm and tranquility.

This has become the predominant mode of being on a global scale, creating a self-perpetuating sense of emergency, anxiety, hyper-aroused, and hyper-vigilance. Left unchecked, this can spiral out of control, draining psychological and physical reserves. Ultimately, this state leads to exhaustion and collapse, the predisposition to chronic mental and physical illness.

Relaxation and meditation as a remedy for stress

The aim of yoga and meditation is to provide you with knowledge and techniques that cultivate your inner resources of self-awareness, vitality, inner-calm, harmony, and connection to higher intelligence and intuition.

Relaxation meditations enable you to better face the difficulties of life with minimal effort and maximum skill.

Make relaxation the base from which you operate

The key to healthy living and longevity is to make relaxation the baseline from which you operate rather than stress. If you operate from a position of habitual stress and a constant sense of hypervigilance, you will exhaust your inner resources, and put yourself into a weak and vulnerable position. You will react to the normal challenges of everyday life from a hyper-aroused state, seeing problems where there are none, and wasting energy on overreactions and self-created crises.

By consciously engaging from a self-aware, mindful, relaxed, and grounded state, you can find more positive and creative ways to better manage the constant flow of life’s challenges.

Big Shakti’s Relaxation Meditation Course will teach you how to make relaxation your baseline. The result is a wakeful, aware, and balanced state in which you feel calm and grounded, emotionally resilient, and with a clear, relaxed mind.

Living in a Constant State of Stress Creates Disease

[1] Parasympathetic nervous system activation leads to feelings of expansion, pleasure, and joy, the stay and play response.

[2] Sympathetic nervous system activation engages the fight-or-flight response to marshal whatever resources you have available to deal with real or imagined threats.

 

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