Stress in Your Life
What kind of day do you lead? Each day when you awaken, all of your responsibilities come right in and say “hi.” Maybe you are married with kids, maybe you have a house and a mortgage. Most definitely, you have bills and expenses. In other words, daily stress is as part of your lives as much as the Internet, CNN and Starbucks.
Stress does not stop here. It continues as you fight your way to work or to wherever your day is leading you. Your day is spent dealing with your job, your boss, your employees, the economy, clients and whatever else you want in your life. Stress, stress and more stress.
Then, after work because you are concerned about your health and maintaining what you know to be a healthy lifestyle, you go to your local gym.
Is your gym a place where you can decompress from your day, calmly re-connect back to your body (getting out of your head, which is where you are all day), and release some built up tension? If it is please let me know where this place is.
Most gyms are not set up this way. Instead, you find loud club music, packed full of scantily clad men and women (after all, it’s prime time). Some people are there to work out (hopefully) and some are there to meet that special someone. The distractions do not stop there. You enter the cardio area, find your treadmill or bike, climb on and stare up into a bank of televisions all tuned to different stations.
Television: The Price of Watching
I cannot stress (no pun intended) enough how damaging televisions are to working out. The effect of so many televisions completely changes the environment.
Research has shown television causes the brain to switch back and forth between hemispheres. This switching causes the release of endorphins, which are structurally identical to opioids. Opioids are a family of drugs, which include: Heroin, morphine and opium. While endorphins create a positive feeling in the body and mind, the point here is that endorphins are released by watching television. As opioids are highly addictive, watching television becomes habitual.
Watching television causes the higher brain (Neo-cortex and mid-brain) to shut down while stimulating the lower regions specifically the Limbic and Reptilian brain. Without the distinguishing ability of the Neo-Cortex, the limbic and reptilian brains do not have the ability to differentiate between reality and what it sees on television.
As a result, the events you see on the screen has a physiological affect causing the release of appropriate hormones based on what you are watching.
Watching television causes the left-brain, which organizes information into “rational” thought, to shut down while stimulating the right brain, which is our creative emotional side. The right brain is being forced to interpret data from which it’s being shown in a manner inappropriate for its function. In other words, we cannot rationally consider the information we are receiving from what we are watching because that part of our brain has been shut down.
What Does This Have To Do With Exercise?
What you watch is deeply impactful to your physiology. If you must watch television while exercising be sure to choose information/content that leads your system to health rather than fear, worry, anxiety or negativity on any level. Avoid the news, information about the stock market and anything else, which causes your body to feel negative emotions. If it disturbs you, don’t watch it!
What Is Your Purpose of Exercising?
If your purpose of exercising is to distract yourself from what you are doing, then go ahead and watch all the TV you want. But if your purpose of exercising is to deepen your connection to your body, improve its abilities, clear your mind and change your body, tune the TV out and focus on what your body is doing. A deeper connection helps to prevent injuries, clears your thinking and keeps you energized. You also become more sensitive to your body’s needs and, therefore, you can recognize and address health problems before they take root and require medical attention.
Watching TV does not improve this connection. It serves to distract. Now some of you might say, “Yes, of course it does. Cardio is boring and I need something to distract me or else I would never do it.”
I understand your need to distract yourself. But I caution you: The body is a learning machine. Your muscle memory banks are of the highest level and record everything you do, especially if it is repetitive. If you are doing something physical, like running but your focus is not on what you are doing, this will eventually become a habit and a behavior. The result of this practice is you will get better at ignoring what is happening to your body while it’s happening. As you continue this practice - and this is exactly what it is - you are practicing an association between being physical in your body and needing to distract yourself because of an emotional reason (boredom). Therefore, you will increase this ability and ultimately, your need to distract your attention from your body. This will result in an escalating desire to be distracted, which will continue to grow and evolve, diminishing your connection to your body.
Yes, cardio can be boring and it may not feel good (more on this later), but what you are doing is practicing and reinforcing a muscle memory habit and mental focus that will always cause you to want to leave your body during physicality. This practice or association will eventually become a habit. What is happening subconsciously is you are saying to yourself, “I don’t like how it feels when I exercise so I will not pay attention to what is happening to my body even though I know its good for me and I would rather focus upon anything except what is actually happening.”
Tell me, during sex do you watch TV? Do you find your mind wandering as you are having sex? I am willing to bet, if you are in the habit of watching TV while exercising, then most likely during sex, you are not really there either.
Is this the kind of behavior you want to reinforce? Do you want your sex life to improve? To have great sex requires conscious practice. This practice can be performed in the gym as you pay attention to every detail your body is experiencing as it is experiencing it.
This elevated consciousness can be applied to your workout as you pay attention to every detail, sensation and feeling your body is experiencing as it is experiencing it.
This will deepen your sense of your body and then when it really counts, you are so in tune with yourself that every part of your experience becomes magnified. Additionally, the greater awareness and connection you have to your body promotes your sensitivity and awareness of your partner’s body. Sex is a great deal more pleasurable when your mind is in your body.
Everything you do, everywhere you go, every thought you ever had, every feeling you felt, and every experience you have ever experienced all have a common factor. You! And part of you is your body. Your body accompanies you throughout life until you leave it to go wherever it is we go. It colors every experience just as much as your mental thought does. How you use it effects not only how it is in the present moment, but into the future as well. If you ignore it, your body will eventually get your attention with signs, symptoms, aches, pains and eventually dis-ease. If you treat it well and fill it with your essence, it will treat you well for the rest of your life.
A Stress Summary
Stress lives in us. It gets up with us, accompanies us throughout our day and has ultimately found itself intertwined with our fitness clubs. The environment of the club itself can produce stress. Loud music, noisy crowds and trying to look good are all forms of stress. Applying the various complexities and nuances of traditional fitness techniques can also be stressful. (I have had many clients afraid of using free weight because they don’t want to be seen doing it “wrong”). And finally, the very act of using weights, performing cardio and attending exercise classes is a stress upon the body.
The definition of stress is:
1. A force that tends to distort the body
2. A factor that induces bodily or mental tension
There is beneficial stress, which is called (eustress) and harmful stress (distress). From the zero point up to a certain level (based upon the individual, that individual’s day and that moment), stress can be considered beneficial if it challenges you to adapt, learn and grow. Beyond this level, stress causes breakdowns. If your day is spent being stressed with no relief, layer upon layer of tension is stored in your body. Eventually, a breakdown will occur. Now, one could say, yes but when I exercise I am releasing stress and I feel better. However, I caution you once again. Relying upon exercise to release your stress makes you dependent upon exercise. If you are not able to go the gym for any period of time (which periodically happens as your life takes you places you cannot foresee), your stress will build up. Additionally, if you’re building stress during the day and releasing it during the evening, all you are doing is maintaining a stress status quo. Stress is stored in our body in layers. If you use exercise in this way, you will not reach these deeper levels.
Stress is the single most significant cause of physical and mental degeneration or aging. It has been estimated that 75% - 90% of all medical doctor visits are the result of some sort of reaction to stress.
External stress causes internal tension to be held in the muscles of our bodies.
The amount of energy used to maintain this level of tension along with the amount of energy used to ignore it is astronomical. The energy required to maintain any degree of tension diminishes daily vital energy reserves and prevents free flowing movements within each joint of the body. The results are inflexibility, a build up of constant aches and pains, fatigue, and the potential to develop injury and dis-ease. Furthermore, given enough time, our bodies will adapt to any stress placed upon them, and this tension eventually becomes “normal” for that individual. In other words, having this tension is eventually solidified into movement strategies, behaviors and habits.
James Allen said, “Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.”
Right now take this moment to check in with your neck and shoulders. Are they tensed? Are they raised? Most of us are in such a constant state of tension that these muscles groups suffer from constant activity but we are not aware of it.
What most of us are doing in our workouts is taking our stressed out bodies that have not released their daily tension and we are encouraging, reinforcing and locking this tension into our bodies through repetitive, weighted, and linear movement traditionally designed to increase the mass of body builders. Bicep curls have no meaning for a Wall Street investor. All they do is make a tight muscle tighter when all day long he is in his head while completely ignoring his body. There is no personal expression in this method of working out and no meaning towards people’s lives other than what science and the media tells them.
While running off this stress may get the job done (temporarily), what you are ultimately doing is practicing a habit of holding stress within your body. Some people believe tension is the same thing as strength. Most of us have learned to brace the muscles of our bodies in a tight grip. They feel the tension is what strength and power feels like. This is an illusion. What this gripping does is to shut down our flexibility and limit our freedom to move. Instead of being loose and open, we are tight, less adaptable and thus more easily breakable.
The condition of your body influences the clarity of your mind. One affects the other. If your mental and physical stress is high and your awareness of it is low, you are heading for problems.