Imagine a stressful situation. It will, I hope, show how important it is to avoid the cause of internal imbalance and to release accumulated tensions inside the body.
You’ve gone camping with your family and have just spent the day backpacking into the mountains. It was a rigorous but fascinating journey. The wild flowers were in bloom, and you even walked behind a sparkling waterfall.
Now it’s evening, and the fire has died into a few glowing embers. Everyone’s asleep, but you’re not quite finished relishing the peacefulness of this beautiful day.
You decide to take a short walk under a clear, star-bright sky. Walking up the trail a bit, you smell pine and feel an evening breeze against your face. You’re relaxed and more content than you’ve been in years.
Then, suddenly, ahead of you to the right, you spot a dark figure in a grove of trees.
It’s a grizzly bear!
Immediately an involuntary metabolic change occurs. A threat to your survival is perceived, and your body is instantly alarmed and alert. Without your even realizing it, your heart-rate, blood pressure, rate of breathing, blood flow, muscle tension, blood clotting agents, white blood cell count, and body metabolism increase dramatically.
Within six to eight seconds, your entire body is activated for one of the oldest, innate reactions of which the human body is capable – fight or flight. Your body naturally adapts to this new set of circumstances.
Without your conscious participation, your endocrine system releases thousands of full-strength hormones into the bloodstream, and your autonomic nervous system sends impulses filled with thousands of instructions to all parts of your body – and at tremendous speeds of 200-300 miles per hour.
Being of sound mind, you decide to run.
Being of sound mind, you decide to run.
It doesn’t matter one bit whether there actually is a grizzly bear in those bushes or whether you just imagined one. Somewhere you’ve learned that bears can be hazardous to your health, and that knowledge along with the perceived threat to your survival, is enough to set off a whole chain of physical reactions.
Of course, the run back to camp releases some accumulated tension; that’s positive. But even after you get back to camp and relative safety, the tension isn’t over. You can’t get that grizzly bear out of your mind. You lie awake listening to every noise – the wind now sounds eerie as it whistles through the trees, and every crack of a branch is the grizzly bear coming to get you. Even as you’re snuggled safely into your warm sleeping bag, your vivid imagination races, remembering every gruesome bear story you’ve ever heard.
The familiar terminology for this type of imagination is worry, and as long as you keep worrying and replaying the incident in your mind, the alarm continues. Your body remains alert. Stress is prolonged as long as you harbor the thought of danger, Your body, including the brain cells, is unable to regenerate and regain its balance. Your system remains in a state of attention.
In this condition, you drain your own energy reserves, keep muscle attention mercilessly taut, and involve your brain, heart and liver in a complex chemical process that can push them to their highest capacity without relief.
This distress, whether from a real or imagined source, does two things: it sustains tensions and intense bodily changes, and it drains energy needlessly. These are tremendous demands on your body’s metabolism. When they are allowed to persist, imbalances like this sabotage your health.
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