Why is it important to get rid of mental stress? What is mental stress? Does stress affect your cognitive abilities? Why causes stress and how to get rid of mental stress?
Why is it important to get rid of mental stress?
Do you know almost 82% of India’s population are suffering from stress?
Suppose you are one of them who is experiencing stressful situations in your life and wondering how to get rid of mental stress. This article is for you.
Stress is the mother of all illnesses. We have a misconception that stress is a mental health issue. Well, its time to change that view. Stress affects your physical body in various ways you’ve never heard of. For many years, medical science has separated minds and bodies in their understanding of health and well-being. That’s a significant flaw because a hepatologist or a neurologist cannot treat stress like a Psychiatrist would. Therefore, it is essential to understand how your mind affects your body, in any efforts to keep yourself healthy.
Through this article, I aim to explain the cause of Mental Stress and tell you an ancient yoga practice that can help you overcome mental stress.
What is mental stress?
Stress is a response to your body and mind undergo when you come to face with an emergency.
Is this definition any useful without knowing what those responses are?
Some of the changes your body undergoes during stress are raising heartbeat; slow down of digestion. Acid production in the stomach stops for some time; blood is pumped along with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Breathing becomes faster breathing, less blood circulation in the internal organs than your hands and legs, the liver breaks down glucose and throws it into the bloodstream.
But why has our body invented such response to stress? Is stress even useful?
There are two kinds of stress. Eustress and destress. While Eustress is good for us, destress is not.
Stress is useful in situations that involve your life and death. When you have yourself from real danger like from a street fight or when a dog chases you or is a snake right in front of you hissing at you. In such cases, your body goes into a fight or flight response to save itself from the danger. So the body sends maximum oxygen, glucose and blood into your legs and hands to enable you to escape the threat. This kind of response is usual in every being on this earth.
I am talking about the stress you undergo when your boss calls you to his office or when your husband/wife/Gf/Bf comments something about you. When you go through a break-up or when your parents restrict you from going to your friend’s place or the trip you dreamt of going. When you cannot find a job that pays you well or when someone you love passes away.
These are some of the situations, you do not need a stress response, but you end up going through it. Such stress manifests into various other physical symptoms like bad posture, heavy breathing, lack of sleep, memory loss so and so forth.
Does stress affect your cognitive abilities?
Stress distorts your ability to perceive reality. When you are stressed, your mind combines the truth with your imagination of perceived danger and presents a picture to you which seems dangerous. So your body reacts to such a dangerous situation in all the ways mentioned above. As you get more and more stressed, you move further away from how things are.
Stress can affect your mind and feel like you are not getting what you want. It makes you think people and the world around you are hostile. To save your body from such a harmful environment, your body adapts to certain physical forms which determine your body languages. This is why it is very easy to identify someone who is stressed and someone who is not.
Why causes stress and how to get rid of mental stress?
We experience lots of stress because our expectation about the world and the reality is very distorted. Most people hold a romantic idea of the world in their minds and expect great things to always happen to them. It is essential to understand that the world is a mixture of good and the bad. You need to re-model your expectation of the world based on reality. To accept the truth, you need one essential skill called ‘Relaxation’. Only when you understand how to relax can you get rid of mental stress once and for all.
My teacher would say “relaxation is the only good”. He taught me a cool mantra which I would like to quote here. It goes like “Om Malam Gataha Akalikam Prachalati”. Which exactly translates into ‘When shit happens immediately move On’.
Suppose we learn to move on from any harmful incidents and learn to relax through all of them. Then we would be able to avoid and control stress to a greater extent.
What causes stress and how to overcome stress?
Unhappiness causes stress.
Karma causes unhappiness.
According to Yoga, the root cause of Stress is KARMA.
To get rid of mental stress and depression and live a stress-free life, understanding karma is necessary.
What software programming is to the computer, Karma is to the body.
There are good karmas and bad karmas. Good karmas are something you are born to do on earth. But if it is good, there is also evil. Bad karmas are the repelling forces which pull you away from your life’s purpose. You are happy when you follow your heart’s calling and are stressed when you aren’t following your heart’s path.
In our general understanding of Karma, we think of it as a cosmic tit for tat. Nobody is keeping track of all our good and evil deeds.
Let me give you an example of Karma. As I am typing this article on my laptop, I intend to convey my message to you through my words. But if the bad Karma were to act upon this, my computer may get crashed, or a guest could visit me suddenly and take away my time. Now that is bad Karma.
Another example could be, say you are excited to attend a job interview. You prepared all the necessary documents the previous night, pre-booked a cab to reach the venue on time. But the next morning, as you leave the house, you find out the cab has been cancelled, it is raining heavily and you cannot book another taxi on time. This is your Karma too.
It is common for people to react in such situations and get immensely stressed. But not to those who know to remove Karma.
Yoga has devised the best cure to cope-up with stress. It is a technique called Karma Visarajana which enables you to remove your own Karma. The method is easy to learn and implement. It is a highly effective practice, that can help you stop worrying in a few minutes. This is the ultimate answer to live a stress-free life.
The knowledge of karma removal can help you smoothly clear off the karmas that come in your way and help you achieve the things you want to achieve. Karma removal comes handy in solving any relationship troubles that is causing you to stress in life. It can help remove the financial obstacles that obstruct your wealth and prosperity. The technique is beneficial to resolve legal disputes as well. It can help you get out of any addictions that you may have indulged in to escape stress. The karma removal technique has been proven effective to improve the quality of terminally-ill patients.
