Stressed Leading Stressed
Stress is a significant cause of disease, yet doctors themselves cannot break the cycle of stress. The blind leading the blind. 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.
Breathing Away Stress
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 siblings.
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.
Stress As A Challenge
Stress has never been discussed in all my years of therapy and so it went on unabated. If I brought stress up with a psychiatrist, it would be dealt with as a symptom of my OCD with medication. So I did my own stress research and put it together in a blog post.
Since stress has been a major problem in my life, I want to know the physical side of this debilitating discomfort. Once I understand the root of the problem, I can do the research and come up with a plan for dealing with it.
I started my quest for relief of stress and anxiety back in 1954 with Freudian psychoanalysis, shock treatments, and eight years majoring in psychology. But the first help 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 from low in the abdomen. ( Of course, you can’t actually breathe in from your abdomen. It is more conceptual.) I Ki Breathe in bed in the morning and at bedtime.
Coherent Breathing
Much more recently I came across Coherent Breathing. The term does not even come up yet in Wikipedia though there are a couple of recent books that include a description. It is so simple it can be described simply as five ordinary breaths a minute. But this ultra simple technique packs a solid punch.
Stephen Elliot coined the phase Coherent Breathing. The breathing method, though, has been used for millennia. It is a part of yoga, qigong, and Zen. Elliot says it virtually guarantees a meditative state.
Coherent Breathing balances the sympathetic (fight/flight) versus parasympathetic (rest/digest) nervous systems. When you inhale five seconds, heart rate increases favoring the fight/flight system. When you exhale five seconds, heart rate slows favoring the rest/digest parasympathetic system.
All you need to know is inhale five or six seconds and exhale five or six seconds. With this ultra simple breathing exercise, you balance the fight/flight sympathetic system with rest/digest parasympathetic system.
Anxiety and panic result from the autonomic nervous system held in a sympathetic (fight/flight) state. Coherent Breathing releases the hold on the sympathetic state, creating a balanced autonomic nervous system.
Ki Breathing accomplishes the same, but it also richly supplies the body and brain with oxygen and rids the body of wastes like carbon dioxide. You need not choose between Coherent and Ki Breathing, though. Do whatever feels right at the time.
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
