Have you ever heard of a whale with high blood pressure? A dog with a burnout? A zebra with an ulcer?
Likely not. And why is it you know quite a few people who are heavily stressed out or close to a burnout? They are also mammals, no?
The key difference is just that we have a mind with thoughts. That is creating the problem.
Let us first understand what is stress and what the purpose of stress is.
Imagine you are a zebra and you come under attack. Your body immediately gets into action without any thinking and activates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which controls the body’s responses to a perceived threat and is responsible for the “fight or flight” response.
It’s this chemical reaction that prepares your body for a physical reaction because it thinks it’s under attack. This type of stress helped our human ancestors survive in nature.
So the body gets prepared for either fight, flight or freeze. Fully automatic. You do not control this.
Your autonomic nervous system is:
- increasing your respiration, you need oxygen to fight
- your heart beat goes up, you need power to run
- your digestive system gets on hold (no need for during a fight)
- you pupils get smaller (for a better focus)
- you start to sweat (to cool down better)
- you get pale (your blood is sent to the more vital organs)
- your blood pressure goes up (more, faster oxygen to the muscles)
- a dry mouth (no digestion needed, no saliva needed)
- muscle tension goes up (ready to accelerate)
- sugar level goes up (we need fuel for the system)
- you are mentally sharp as a needle..
Your endocrine system is making extra hormones like Adrenaline, Cortisol and Testerone.
The whole body is in an alarm stage. Ready to fight or flight.
When the zebra believes it is no longer under attack it goes back to the normal state. It shakes of the tension in his muscles and the body goes back to find a balance: the so called homeostasis: internal stability in the body. Everything back to normal.
The two major differences with us and zebra’s :
- We go into the fight or flight modus without being physically attacked: our mind believes we are under attack as we think we do need meet our own standards of some else’s standards or expectations. It is us who put ourselves in that fight or flight mode. Not the events. Its is us.
- We do not know how to get out of that Fight or Flight state. We think we are continuously under attack and our body is continuously in the alarm mode, always out of balance.
Structural stress is causing serious health issues.
At the BASTA Academy we will share with you tools on how to get your body back to a more relaxed state and how to reduce the level of stress you are putting yourself into. An understanding why it is you have stress and others not.
BASTA,
Fons