16 Nov Caress Your Stress With Meditation

Stress seems to be such an important and universal part of everybody’s life. It’s what pushes workers to meet deadlines, it pushes us to complete daily chores, helps us to cram for a test,  it even wakes us up every day! Stress is a hard-wired response that can have many short term advantages (as mentioned above), but as soon as it becomes a frequent, everyday phenomenon, it becomes very negative towards the wellbeing of both your body and your mind.

How many of us forget to eat breakfast, thinking,’let me leave the house ASAP so that I don’t have to sit through traffic’? How many of us leave behind keys or make silly mistakes, all because we had to rush out of the house? How many of us ignore our family and friends so that we meet the deadlines during the grind?

It may seem as if all we do in life is, breath out stress and breathe in even more stress (even during weekends). On a typical day, you might find yourself rushing around, in and out of work and home. As you juggle responsibilities more than you’d like to, on a biological level, studies show that you’re rushing around just as if you were escaping from a predator.

Aside from the fact that all of us can relate to stress, we can also prevent the experience that brews into anger and frustration when our emotions are challenged. Instead of making stress a daily habit, we need to climb the ladders of meditation, so that while you explore relaxation with each step, you also remind yourself that you are human and it’s completely natural to take baby steps towards learning how to stay calm. To become calm, we have to approach meditation with the goal of it becoming a habit.

Let’s look at calmness as a stone. The more you polish it and nurture it, the shinier and smoother it gets. Now, look at the stone as a tool for conquering all the problems. Imagine it as the ultimate tool. Feed yourself with meditation and use that to conquer stress. Obviously, this is easier said than done, it’s easy to give into stress, it’s easy to just let a tornado of panic build inside you. And once you nurture stress, it will turn your regular pub brawler into Muhammed Ali!

Your life will always be filled with stressful situations. But what matters to the brain and the entire body is how you respond to it. View stressful situations as challenges you can view and master, rather than looking at it as threats to fight. Relieving stress through mindfulness changes your performance in the short run and keeps you feeling healthy in the long run.

 Nehita Abraham

Nehita is a mindfulness expert who writes extensively on lifestyle management, wellness and ways to lead a healthier and a happier life. She is a part of Aware’s expert team on meditation. She is also an avid artist who spends most her time dribbling amazing stories through art.