I read an interesting article in the March Science of Mind: Healing our Lives, Overcoming our Fears: An Interview with Dr. Marc Schoen, by Diane Dreher. It talks about an “epidemic of fear” in our lives.
Your sympathetic nervous system’s fight-flight response used to require danger along the lines of “a tiger attacking you in the forest” to set it off. Nowadays the level of when you consider something “uncomfortable” has been lowered significantly. Now all that’s required to set off your flight-fight / stress response is your latte taking a little too long to get done, traffic delaying you by a few minutes, or perhaps your computer stalling (let alone crashing). Fear used to set off your stress response—now fear has been downgraded to discomfort. You sense discomfort as danger. Nowadays you’re less tolerant of discomfort.
While you may not consider stress necessarily equivalent to fear, Dr. Shoen reminds that “the stress response really emanates from a fear response.” He also touches upon something I think we all instinctually know—as a society we are addicted to sensory stimulation. The more you increase the sensory stimulation, the more agitated you become. It only makes you crave more stimulation. Dr. Schoen refers to this as “agitance”. You’re so used to constant sensory stimulation from your devices, you’ve forgotten how to relax.
So when you’re asked if you’re under stress, you may be like my husband who likes to tell me he’s fine when I know better; or you may feel stressed but are unable to pin down exactly why. There are too many variables, too many things that bring you “discomfort”.
The solution? Generating positive change by combining positive thoughts with positive feelings of gratitude and love. I know, I know, you’ve heard this before…but perhaps this time you’ll listen?
So here’s where the magic of meditation comes in:
Do a gratitude meditation whenever you start to feel agitated, uncomfortable, or downright antsy. Focus with feeling on what you are grateful for, on what you love in your life. Connect to that for even a minute with eyes closed and perhaps a half-smile on your face and then continue on with your life. Do this as often as you remember to do it. It will become your natural state of being after awhile, and you’ll feel fantastic. Just try it! I know when I dwell on the absolute joy of being in this life with the greatest husband/ friend a gal could ever have, every moment becomes filled with joy.
What and or who do you love? How about those of us in the Northern Hemisphere about to recover from the worst winter in a looooong time and experience spring? Can you put a little emotion into that? Can you get excited about some green grass and walks in the forest OUTSIDE? When it’s spring, the world is your oyster! Go out and enjoy this great big beautiful world!
The list of things you can meditate on for a mere minute is endless—your hot cup of joe, your favorite song on the radio (or in your head as you sing along), your best friend meeting you for dinner, your team winning the game. You get the idea. Heck, you can meditate on being grateful for your ability to remember to take a moment for your mental health and the freedom to smile to yourself for a minute. The half-smile technique is a meditation in gratitude in and of itself. So when you’re fresh out of what to be grateful for, try it:
Thich Nhat Hanh suggests using a half-smile technique in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness. Half-smiling when you first awake along with three deep breaths, when you find yourself sitting or standing anywhere, while listening to music, and when irritated—all with three deep breaths. Trying it when I’m irritated works for me, calming my mind. It also surprises the person you’re irritated with!
“Our goal is to better manage discomfort and remember that too much discomfort leads to the fear reaction.” ~ Dr. Schoen.
When we “bring more of these positive emotions into our lives, we develop new neural connections, new synaptic pathways in our brains that counterbalance the old fear patterns. In this way, we can then use positive or corrective belief patterns in a much more powerful way.” He calls it “building up the discomfort muscle”. Building new synaptic pathways by bringing in the positive parts of our brain “makes it so much more possible to create substantive change to overcome these overreactive primitive fears.”
“When we learn to manage discomfort better, not to shut down, not to fear it, not to run away, we can realize our full potential.” ~ Dr. Marc Shoen
The Fight or Flight Response jpg from Wikipedia
