How to deal with Stress?

Life can get tricky and toss situations in front of us that make us feel helpless and lost. Every day we fight a battle, both internally and externally of performing at work, home, school, while also handling stress, frustration, anger, and heartache. It gets exhausting and overwhelming to deal with all these emotions alone. With all the modern education in place, why did we miss out on teaching how to deal with these emotions and situations.

Isn't it true that we are the only ones who live with ourselves all our life? Everyone and everything changes, be it family, friends, money, and even the weather, but we always have ourselves. So doesn't it make sense to take care of our emotional needs in order to function better in this physical world?

Fortunately, the western world has now started talking about our emotional and psychological needs and has started advocating self-love techniques and ways to take care of the mind. It's actually a budding concept in the west, but in India we have been talking about it for ages!

When anything goes wrong in our life, we don't generally go out to change things on the outside but we are always asked to look within. Our parents, grand parents, teachers, advisers they all tell us to 'change our thoughts', 'distract our-self' or try to 'not think about it'. These are all modern shorter ways of saying something deeply important.

These are all perfectly good suggestions, except, we have forgotten what they actually mean. Usually when we are given these suggestions we think, "well I did have that bad experience so how can I forget about it?" "How can I not think about it when it hurt me so much." "Or how can I not think about it when I have to face that situation everyday?" Again, these are also all valid questions but we seem to be missing a link. When we are given these modern suggestions, it does not mean that we have to deny a particular experience, all it means is, not to re-live that experience in the present moment.

We need to understand that every thought that we have leads to a neuro-connection in our brain which then tends to have an effect on our body. So if we are constantly thinking thoughts, reliving past traumas and worrying about the future, we are strengthening these neuro-connections in our brain which then lead to emotional, chemical and physical imbalances in our body.

So doesn't this make the cliche 'Forget about it' very important?

But how do we practically do this? How can we deal with our life problems in such a way that

they don't have an impact on our mental and emotional well-being? Is there a way that we can face a particular situation without reminding ourselves about the hurt or pain that it has caused us in the past?

Well, one of the most effective ways to do this is, to associate ourselves with our breath. Whenever we observe ourselves going back to the past or worrying about the future, the best thing to do is, to get aligned with our breath. Being conscious of 'being', or being aware of what it is, that is keeping us alive. We need to remember it is not another person, it is not another job, it is not our friends nor is it our family that is breathing life into us. It is 'I' who is keeping 'me' alive. Yes, we have chosen to share our life experience with our friends and family but the source of our own life is 'I'.

When we talk about 'I' we are not referring to our identity of being a woman or a man or child or a nationality. As opposed to the most common belief of being the self-centered 'I', we are talking about being the breath. Becoming the very life force that keeps us afloat.

The more we connect with our breath, the better we feel. When we send more oxygen to our mind and body, we help the body perform better bodily functions. Being more conscious of our breath helps us in breaking old neuro-connections in our brain and supports the development of new neuro-connections. This is turn helps us to look at things differently and experience a shift in our perspective.

Connecting to the breath is often taught in yoga and different forms of meditations, but hearing the word meditation sounds like hard work to a lot of us. Meditation 'dhyaana' is nothing but the art of focus. We can choose to focus on any thing, and we are said to be meditating. If we focus on a particular task at work we are meditating, if we focus on listening to a song, we are said to be meditating. So choosing to focus on our breath is just another way of meditating. Contrary to popular belief, we don't need to find a perfect spot, perfect light or perfect time to meditate. We can meditate even in the most chaotic life set-ups and situations; all we need to do is just place our attention on our breath and watch the mind and body respond. Focusing on breath doesn't have to be watching the air going-in and out through the nose. Be aware of the continuous flow of inhalations and exhalations and watch how your belly rises as you take a breath in and falls as you exhale. We can simply choose to watch our belly swell up and down, as we inhale and exhale or we can do loud breaths so as to engage our sensory organs in the breathing process. Which ever way we chose to focus on our breath, we are choosing to focus on our life.

So whenever a past life event or future uncertainty begins to bother us, focusing on our breath takes our attention away from the problem and connects us to the very life source. Once we have re-connected with this life force and re-energized our mind and body we become better equipped to deal with the psychological and emotional stress that the world throws at us. We then find that our responses are more in alignment with our greater well-being.

This simple attitude shift can save us from any panic attacks, anxiety attacks or stress break downs and we find ourselves more balanced and calm to function in our day to day situations.

Sometimes you don’t need a plan, you just need to breathe, trust, and let go.