Suffering from stress? Try meditation as a way out

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

JAKARTA (JP): Stress is a double-edged sword. It keeps you in motion and was once important to our survival, but in excessive amounts it can kill you, first making you fat in the process. Initially, it will eat away at you mentally and then this will manifest itself physically. Stress is a normal part of life and can indeed be useful and good for us. Reaction to stress serves an evolutionary purpose. It is essentially a response to danger. However, too much stress turns normally useful bodily reactions into damaging overreactions.

In his bestselling book Real Age: Are You as Young as You Can Be? Michael F. Rozen, M.D., explains that one's "real age", i.e. one's biological age as opposed to chronological age, is determined by over 100 factors. These range from one's cholesterol level, educational level, diet, number of orgasms per year, marital status, pet ownership, sexual orientation to the habit of having breakfast.

The book offers a systematic program that calculates the aging effect of the above factors. For example, it states that stress, mental disorders or deprivation from social connections could make one three years older than one actually is.

Sense of humor makes one 0.5 years younger and its lack thereof 0.5 year older. Happily married men are weighted 1.5 years younger, while single men three years older. Divorced women are weighted two years older. Slight depression leads to one becoming 0.5 years older, serious two years older and severe three years older.

Be careful also with disruptive events in your life. One major disruptive event in the last 12 months adds one year, two events two years and three events three years. The number of friends and relatives seen more than once a month also makes a difference -- it could take 1.5 years off one's real age.

This makes a compelling case for the argument that stress affects health. Or to put it another way, there is a strong connection between emotions and one's physical well being which makes mind and body inseparable.

What is stress? Stress is a very complex set of physiological and psychological reactions. Dr. Hans Selye, one of the earliest researchers to study stress, defined it as "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made on it". Simply put, stress is the body's reaction when it anticipates the need for extra energy. Almost anything can provoke this reaction: an injury, working under a deadline for a strict boss, not sleeping enough or not eating regular meals. Even laughter stresses the body.

When we are stressed, our bodies release a flood of adrenaline, cortisone and other stress hormones that induce physiological changes. The heart pounds and blood pressure rises. Our rate of breathing increases and we feel more alert. Blood races to the brain and the heart, and moves away from the kidneys, liver, stomach and skin.

The classic study linking stress to immune dysfunction was performed by psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues. They showed that people who ranked high on a psychological test of perceived stress were more likely to develop colds when intentionally infected with a respiratory virus. Last year he showed that although a single large stressful event in the preceding year did not affect the subject's chances of getting sick, chronic stress -- ongoing conflicts with coworkers or family members, for example -- increased the odds by as much as three to five times.

In 1974, Robert Ader, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, discovered that the immune system, like the brain, could learn. This finding demolished the then prevailing wisdom in medicine that only the brain and central nervous system could respond to experience by changing how they behaved. Ader's finding led to the investigation of what are turning out to be the myriad ways the central nervous system and the immune system communicate through biological pathways that, as mentioned above, make the mind, the emotions and the body not separate, but intimately entwined.

The immune system is the "body's brain". Until the day Ader made his serendipitous discovery, every anatomist, physician and biologist believed that the brain (along with its extensions throughout the body via the central nervous system) and the immune system were separate entities, with neither being able to influence the operation of the other. There was no pathway that could connect the brain centers monitoring what the rat tasted with the areas of bone marrow that manufactured its T cells. Or so it had been thought for a century.

The implication of this finding is both good and bad since the mind can very well keep one sick or healthy. What is healthy for the mind, emotions and spirit consistently appears to promote physical health. Conversely, what is unhealthy for the mind, emotions and spirit tends to make one more vulnerable to disease and less able to recover from it successfully. Stress lowers blood sugar level and low blood sugar level leads to anxiety. Due to low blood sugar level, many find temporary solace in food when stressed, only to find themselves sinking lower than before they started. This vicious cycle is responsible for those who are fat and have underlying emotional problems.

The research into the mind-body connection suggests that the fewer the barriers we erect -- between conscious and unconscious, between ourselves and others and between personal and universal concerns -- the healthier we are likely to be. Conversely, the more narrowly we define ourselves, the more separate we feel from others and the more disconnected we get from our own deepest needs, the more vulnerable we become to disease. At this point, researchers have found a strong correlation between personality and one's predisposition to lethal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease.

The other good news is that there is growing evidence that the mind can be enlisted to instruct the body to heal itself through imagery: the language of the subconscious.

In this framework, meditation is instructive. In 1968 Herbert Benson, a Harvard physician and scientist, and Keith Wallace, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, undertook two separate, but similar, experiments on the effect of meditation on physiology. They characterized meditation as a uniquely relaxing physiological state; distinct both from everyday wakefulness and from sleep. They reported that meditation had just the opposite effect from stress. During meditation, oxygen consumption decreases, heart rate comes down, hormonal balance returns and alpha brain waves associated with relaxation increase.

On a broad scale, meditation has proved most effective with stress-related symptoms such as headaches, back pain, gastrointestinal disorders and irritable bowel-syndrome.

The writer is the director of the Satori Foundation, a center for study and development of human excellence through mind programming and meditation techniques.