The mind often drives us to chase pleasures that bring no satisfaction. The further it goes, the sharper the sense of dissatisfaction and the greater the stress, which eventually disrupts the endocrine system and weakens immunity. Nune Rojas, creator of the YogaHormonal hormonal yoga method and a teacher at the Institute of Traditional Oriental Medicine at RUDN University, explains how to restore your hormonal balance through yoga and meditation.
By now everyone probably knows that stress destroys health. But most of us do not dig any further than that widely accepted fact. Life is arranged in such a way that avoiding stress is virtually impossible. We are anxious from morning to night, afraid of not getting everything done that we set out to do, or of not doing it well enough. We worry about those close to us. We dread the future and grieve over the past. Stress has become our constant companion.
All illness comes from the nerves
According to doctors’ unofficial statistics, between 80 and 90% of visits are connected in one way or another with stress. Even a common cold or viral infection is usually preceded by strain on the body and, as a consequence, a weakened immune system. But do any medical professionals tell their patients this? Do they explain how to avoid such a diagnosis in future? In this article you will learn how stress arises, what processes it sets off in the body, and why chronic stress is dangerous to health. But first, allow me to tell you a tale.
Why nothing is the way we want it
There once lived a gardener. All his life he laboured over his beautiful garden. Day and night he watered the flowers, pulled up the weeds, loosened the soil and fertilised it. And he often raged when an unexpected frost or a fierce storm destroyed all his plants. When the gardener passed into the next world and stood before the Creator, he asked him for a small favour. Let gardeners be allowed to control the weather themselves, if only for a single year. After all, they know better how it ought to be. The Creator agreed.
And so perfect order reigned across the whole planet: winter, spring, summer and autumn followed one another exactly by the calendar, and there were no disasters at all. The gardeners gathered an excellent harvest, but there was a snag: not a single seed was found in the fruit. Which meant they had nothing to plant for the following year. “How can this be?” wondered the gardener who had started the whole upheaval. And God answered: “Everything that happened to your crops was necessary. The cold at the height of flowering, and the hail during the harvest. It helped every living thing build inner strength and resist its environment, so that it could produce offspring, new seeds.”
It is easy to see from this tale that ideal conditions for life — the thing we all dream of — are impossible. And that it is precisely the non-ideal ones, the ones we experience as a source of stress, that help each of us grow and cultivate our own inner seeds.
So it turns out that stress cannot be avoided at all. What, then, is within our power?
Good stress and bad stress
To begin with, we need to understand that stress comes in what you might loosely call good and bad forms. Yes — anxiety and agitation can help us by sharpening attention or raising motivation. The fear of losing a bonus, for instance, will make you check a report as carefully as you can. In the right quantity, stress helps you prepare better for an important event, concentrate and carry out your tasks at an optimal level. But stress that is too strong or too prolonged often leads to physical illness.
How do we end up in stress?
If the brain perceives a situation as a threat, the higher endocrine glands — the hypothalamus and the pituitary — are activated at once. They signal the adrenal glands, which begin releasing adrenaline and noradrenaline. In this way the body arms itself to resist. Psychologists call this the “fight or flight” response. That is how the body has learned to react — either attack or escape. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is set in motion and cortisol release increases.
Normally cortisol peaks around the time you wake, usually about eight in the morning, and then declines gradually through the day. Cortisol is at its lowest roughly between midnight and four. So in essence, cortisol is our built-in alarm clock.
However, under prolonged stress, when the brain constantly signals that life is under threat, the body — instead of reducing cortisol production (it is already high!) — produces even more of it. This is the body signalling that it needs every resource in order to survive.
The consequence of such a situation is a failure of the endocrine and immune systems, which regulate the functioning of the whole organism. In the end the body starts to fall ill.
Why we actually worry
Thousands of years ago the yogis concluded that body and mind, being energetic structures, are closely linked — or, more simply, are one. They also worked out the cause of all suffering, including bodily suffering. It all comes down to the mind. To the fact that we stop controlling our thoughts and instead believe almost every one of them, even when they are entirely detached from reality. In the end we see nothing beyond our own notions and fantasies, and become completely dissociated from the universe.
A spoiled mind often drives us to chase momentary pleasures that bring no satisfaction. As this repeats time after time, the degree of dissatisfaction grows and the stress rises further still.
From the standpoint of yoga, stress deforms the energy structures of body and mind. The balance of mental, physical and emotional energies is disturbed.
The weakest point
There are seven endocrine glands in our body. As many as there are colours in a rainbow, notes in an octave, strings on a guitar.
The adrenal glands — two glands the size of a hazelnut — sit on top of the kidneys. They are the base, our foundation, the first note, C, and the colour red on the palette.
If you ever learned to play the guitar, you will remember that before you can play you have to tune it. And the strings must be neither too slack (the analogy being gland hypotonicity) nor too tight (gland hypertonicity). That is precisely why balance matters — exactly the right tension, right on the tuning fork.
Now imagine a string vibrating so hard on its own that you cannot even touch it. That is what our adrenal glands are like when stress has passed all reasonable limits and taken the central place in life. What can be done in that case? Press on the string to quiet it. Press with your intention.
10 simple steps that will bring your hormonal system into balance and restore your health:
- Form the intention to approach your health consciously and not to let a cascade of uncontrolled feelings flood your mind and body.
- Keep track of your anxiety levels. If you find yourself getting anxious once again — over a job interview, say, or yet another report — remember that the final outcome will never be as catastrophic as you imagine it. Think back to your previous experience of “failure”: was it really so terrible? Unpleasant, perhaps, but nothing especially dreadful happened. Remind yourself of this more often and coping with any frightening situation will become easier.
- Accept the thought that your expectations of life and of the people around you may not match reality. What you want is merely your own picture of the world. Yours alone, and no one else’s.
- If you have lost your temper after all, do everything you can to calm down. To do this, find a quiet spot and make several sharp movements with your arms, out from the centre to the sides. Breathe out with each movement. Important! At the moment of the outburst, stress hormones had already been released into the blood for a fast bodily response. And if no response follows, those hormones go unused. They keep circulating in the blood, attacking other systems of the body.
- If the situation involved a particular person, remember that they, like you, are a student in this school of life, working through their own lessons and sitting their own exams.
- Lower your demands on the world around you. Perhaps it is not that something is being withheld from you; perhaps you simply have not yet worked out how to take it.
- Find reasons for joy. Every day, notice something new to take pleasure in. Remember such moments, or write them down. That way you will build a habit of joy in your mind, instead of seeing only the bad.
- Meditate. In the evening, before bed, find a quiet place for yourself where no one will disturb you. Sit with a straight back. Observe the flow of your breath, the air entering and leaving your body. Switch your breathing from “automatic” to “manual”, or conscious — that is, breathe in and out deliberately. Notice which colour you feel like breathing in, and fill your whole body with it. Breathe out all your problems and worries. To finish, rub the small of your back until it feels warm, and embrace yourself with love. Observe the area of the heart centre and, in your mind, widen its boundaries as far as your imagination will allow.
- Start keeping a journal and every evening write down the whole stream of thoughts arising in your head, trying not to control it. At the end, write down what the day taught you.
- Yoga and meditation train the body and mind to cope better with stress and to improve your health. As the creator of the YogaHormonal hormonal yoga method, I can say that this practice helps tune all the glands to one another and achieve endocrine balance naturally, without medication.
And remember that your resource is not the hours spent with a psychologist or the number of supplements you have taken. It is what you invest in other people, in those close to you and in those around you — love, support, help, involvement, a kind look, or even simply a smile.
There is a wonderful proverb: do a good deed and cast it into the water — that is, forget about it. That is precisely what expansion raises us, as human beings, to the level of the Creator and of infinite love, where there is no stress at all, only the flow of life.
