Heal Thyself
What’s up doc?
Stress is a significant cause of disease, yet doctors themselves cannot break the cycle of stress. They jump from patient to patient, writing prescriptions, dealing with patients who come late, miss appointments, smoke, cough in their face, don’t listen, are Google docs, demand medications, and refuse to take medications. Most doctors treat diseases rather than the stress underlying diseases that might prevent them from occurring in the first place.
How Do We Break the Cycle of Stress?
We need more exercise, sleep, avoid processed foods, and prepare healthy foods from scratch. How do we do all that when it feels like we are working 7/24? Not just feels like –texts, emails, even telephone calls keep coming and to ignore them means the next day you start out buried alive.
Telomeres Tell It All
Telomere caps
Stress chips away telomeres, the protective covering at the tips of the double helix strands of DNA. As this protective casing shrinks, cells lose their ability to divide. When they lose this ability to divide, we age, tissues and organs begin to fail, we die. The telome
res are a sand clock emptying from life to death.
Burning Out
Stress affects sleep, eating, and every aspect of our lives. I have been through virtually every specialist department in the modern Japanese hospital in Japan near the school where I taught. Prescription medication filled a dresser drawer. If my wife walked into the kitchen while I was preparing something, I would scream in fright. She is 4 feet 9 inches and 80 pounds. Even my cat made me jump.
If a student tapped the desk or crinkled paper, it competed with my voice as I spoke to the class. I could not get through a class period if I were not medicated with Valium or one of its molecular forms.
Stress As A Challenge versus Stress As A Threat
I started my lifetime quest for relief back in 1954 with Freudian psychoanalysis, shock treatments, and eight years majoring in psychology. But the first help was came in my early fifties when I began practicing Aikido with Ki. Now Ki Breathing Meditation is a part of my daily regimen. It does not take time out of my schedule. I am practicing Ki Breathing Meditation now as I tap on my keypad. I remind myself to sit up straight, relax completely, and breathe in low in the abdomen.
More recently I began practicing Open Focus Training and Attention Training Therapy. Both are forms of Metacognitive Therapy where you step back from thoughts and work on improving the patterns of thinking. With Attention Training Therapy you focus on sounds, shifting from one to another, then combining two, three, and more sounds at once. With Open Focus, you include physical or emotional pain as part of a much wider focus. You dissolve into physical and emotional pain instead of trying to shut it out.
Rather than fearing sounds as a distraction, I use distracting sounds as a part of Attention Training Therapy, shifting among the sounds and directions. If I were teaching, I would focus on my voice, tapping, crinkling, the sounds of whatever else is happening, and move my focus front, sides behind, all around.
Sound Waves
When stress is a threat, it tears down the body. When threat is a challenge, it does not. You turn negative fearful stress into challenging stress with Open Focus, Attention Training Therapy, and Ki Breathing Meditation, as a basic go-to three.
None of these are a one-time see if it works. It takes practice, like learning to work out or practicing a musical instrument. You get better at it little by little, often imperceptibly, though on a day-to-day basis.
It helps not to focus on the future and on how far you have to go.
And not to have amnesia and forget the past and how far you have come.
Perspective
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
