The Trend of Working Out for Stress Reduction

We hear it a lot that exercise is good for stress.  Which undoubtedly it feels good once you have sweated, worked hard, and pushed yourself past these limits that you thought you had.  I will not argue with that and this article is not designed to say that exercise is not good.  I just want to bring a new perspective to the table.  

Let's start with the word stress.  It has far more definitions that I thought it would, so I will list the ones that pertain to emotional and physical stress rather than from language and sound.

1. the physical pressure, pull, or other force exerted on one thing by another; strain.

2. to subject to stress or strain.

3. to experience stress or worry

These are things we experience on a daily basis whether it is instigated by family, friends, negative self talk, work, diet, driving, etc.  It comes in so many forms and many of us have been taught that we need to be working hard to be productive.  So that is what we do, we work long hours, we come home tired from those long hours and time spent in traffic and think about what we should eat and then choose something that is easy; and then over think our choice, feel guilty, and often watch tv to try to drown out all the noise; and then crawl into bed with out any real intention to rest because our mind has not had the space to process our days, and depending on how long we have been doing this routine, our lives.  

This is why yoga and meditation are important. 

Even though there are different types of stress, it is all still stress.  It is all something that shortens the breath and kicks the sympathetic nervous system into action, which is the flight or fight response.  And if it is true what they think, that the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) counteracts the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest), then we are mostly operating on fight or flight.  Which is true to some extent.  Our fight or flight has to be running all of the time to keep us alive, however over using it will lead to a deficiency in many other areas of the body.  

This is why yoga and meditation are important. 

I am repeating myself, I know, but I really want to drive this point home.  There has to be a balance.  We have to rest, I mean really rest. We have to breathe slow and deep, walk slower, act instead of react, savor our foods (chew and taste it), enjoy and be at peace within ourselves and know our boundaries for an improved quality of life.  So to work hard and sit in traffic and stew about it all then go do a work out that is more stress to your already stressful day may be counter productive.  So maybe 3 days a week you give your workouts a break and instead you go to yoga class, or you go home and you put on music that is calm and light, or you use silence, and you lay flat on your back legs a little wider than you are naturally inclined to place them, then you take your arms about 8 inches away from your body so that your rib cage can have space to move, and make sure that your palms face up to the ceiling so that your chest can open and relax, close your eyes and start to focus on the weight of your body against the floor.  Keeps your lips together, breathe through your nose and keep feeling the heaviness of your body, the body that you are in every minute of every day of every year until the day you leave this world behind.  And when your mind starts to wander, bring it back to how heavy you feel.  It is basic and simple. But it works wonders.  At the end of this post you will find a short audio to walk you through ths relaxation.  

More than relaxation, restoration is important.  It is supposed to be what we get when we sleep, but unfortunately our sleeping patterns can be interrupted when we are too stressed in our daily lives.  Placing ourselves before our jobs is important.  Having a regular exercise routine with a good understanding of what and why you are doing it, as well as a regular yoga, meditation, or simple relaxation routine is important to the quality of our lives.  For the record, yoga is more than just the religion it is based on and you can call it stretching if you feel more comfortable with that, but stretching helps to release the muscular tension that we hold from our posture, it helps to break up the acidity from over activity or not enough activity, and acidity creates disease... and more stress. 

Bottom line, move your body regularly, and put your body first because no one else, besides a trainer, will do that for you.  If you are waiting for your boss to say.. "Hey, why don't you take off early and go hit an exercise class" then you may be waiting forever, because the majority doesn't care about that, they care about the business.  No one can argue that the healthier and better you feel the more productive you will be in everything that you do, but you have to make that declaration first.

Love!  

My head is a fucking construction zone.  Not the 1^st world American type either, more like 3^rd world type, you know?  Rusty nails everywhere, no safety helmets or guard rails around giant pits of wet concrete and rock, rebar sticking out of the roof and people lazily asleep on the “beams”.  It’s a nightmare.  But the only thing is, I am the only one working on this building, I am alone.  And this state, well, it makes me not care so much about the “problems” of the world.  You know the ones that we dwell and simmer on for months and days and hours, wasting our time trying to protect our hearts and selves from pain. 

My mom died 7.5 months ago.  She was healthy, strong, ate “well” (organic, not a lot of meat, no gluten, etc), and then she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer.  And then 7 weeks later she was no longer here on this planet with us.  I had four weeks while I was in Thailand of listening to her say she was doing okay; and then I had 3 weeks of seeing her and subconsciously knowing she was not going to live, but racing around this disaster of a reality trying to keep her alive.  3 weeks to figure out what the fuck was happening.  And it still does not make sense what has occurred.   I am still tripping over the minutes from September 2013, still falling face first into conversations her and I had, things she said, and the rippling events that followed her death. 

To those of you who have both of your parents you do not know what I am talking about, your mind cannot fathom it and even to those of us who have lost a mom or a dad we feel it so individually that we know we cannot “know” how the other is truly feeling.  It is an initiation into the secrets of the world when you lose someone you love so much.  You belong to a secret society where a large part of your heart has just been destroyed… and what comes from that destruction is beauty and that is where the mind fuck begins.  Because all of the sudden you see this passing as a  blessing, but it shouldn’t feel like that because it cost someone else their life, not just ”someone”, a person you loved beyond imagining.  It took their loss for you to gain knowledge and awareness about the world.  That is where the construction zone enters the picture.  How do we cope, how do we clean up the shattered and scattered pieces of our psyche now that someone who rooted us to the earth is gone?  Drugs?  Alcohol?  Meditation?  Boundaries? Emotion?  Unless you are in it you cannot possibly know about it, and you can never been in another’s mind about such a loss.

It is not that we do not want help or support rebuilding our lives; we do, but it is a very lonely process to define your own personal boundaries, no one else can tell you what you want or need.  There is so much desperation in this loss, so much desire to have someone we can connect with the way we connected to the one we lost.  And it moves back and forth from teenage angst to terrible two tantrums to ecstatic belief in the human kind, over and over again.

So back to my head being a construction zone.  It began with the wrecking ball (cancer) realization that there is nothing secure in this world; from the diluted belief that humans are somewhat invincible, and  sugar plum fairy thoughts that if we eat right and exercise we evade disease.  It is a lie.  Because there is this sneaky little population controller waiting just around any corner it wants to.  When we watch disease destroy a body so ruthlessly we are humbled, we have to then change our lives.  But how do we integrate what we see into the life we want to live?  I don’t have any answer beside, we just do it.  But it takes time and it is a slow going process that we have to be patient with. 

It’s the patience with the rebuilding that I am struggling with.  As a yoga teacher I work with people’s bodies every day, and I love it.  However, every time I watch someone breath I remember the way my moms’ lungs slowly stopped working and what that looked like.  Or I see you use your left hand to spread the fingers in your downdog and I remember how her left hand stopped working a few days before she died, she couldn’t hold anything, it would just fall from the air to her chest and she would patiently and sometimes not so patiently try again.  I watch people walk as they practice a balanced posture and I am reminded that her left leg stopped working after the biopsy, or the way her ankles swelled, or how she quickly lost a lot of weight and thought it was because of the exercises she was doing, (this was before the cancer got to bad).  I stare at bodies in wonderment at how they operate and how they shut down, because now I have a better idea as to what the end process looks like.  I am reminded in everything that I do about my mom.  It drives me mad especially on days when I just want to forget that it happened and laugh like a normal person. 

The flip side to this sadness is the beautiful joy I feel knowing my mom is exactly where she wanted to be for so long.  Not in a morbid way of course, but my mom belonged to the world of the spirits and unfortunately being among people was difficult for her.  So she is where she wants to be and she is thrilled.  I feel her laugh and “yippeeeeeee” and “yahoo” and sing “happy happy joy joy” in my ear often.  When that happens I become so elated for her, I become so happy because now she can do everything she ever wanted with-out the limitations of being a human.  I know when she is helping me move forward and when she is telling me to chill the hell out, or when she is sitting back patiently waiting for me to get over myself.  It is bizarre to get to know her in this way, to know what a blessing it is that she left this world, to have the realizations that death brings. 

I have worked hard in my life to overcome being anxious and sleepless, and as soon as my mom was diagnosed, all of that uncertainty came back.  Because that is the way the world works, you progress to regress so that you can progress again.  It cannot be that we do not re-visit our old habits, we need to know where we stand with them and if our tools really work.  This process is necessary.

So here I am in the middle of a construction zone that I ignorantly thought I had overcome.  I am replacing brick by brick and trying to build it so that the next time something that feels like a disaster strikes, my walls do not come all the way down, so that my foundation is sturdier still.    I do not have time for the petty things, I do not have time to take the world so seriously because I am too busy trying to play.  Because the world will forever take us out, there is no way around the truth that the earth will outlive us, disease is our reminder that we are not in control of anything but our reactions.  We better start living by the beat of our own drum, enjoying the people and things around us, knowing we built the lives we wanted.