Picture 1. Prehistoric man rushing to survive
At the point of writing this I am sitting in a coffee shop in London watching the vast majority of people outside rushing to get to the tube station. It’s currently 07:51 and the majority of them look stressed whilst carrying out what must be a daily routine for them.
Now don’t get me wrong, I full understand and appreciate that their are occasions where we need to be somewhere at a certain time and that does put pressure on us to focus, move faster, and meet that goal. However, it strikes me that “rushing” is almost something of a cultural imperative in our lives now. The closer you live to a city, the more it seems to be ingrained. Why that is, is not the focus of this blog (save that for another time). Rather I am going to look at the consequences this daily habit has on us all.
Firstly, too much stress is well documented to be bad for the human body and is stated as the cause of the vast majority of chronic illnesses in the Western World.
Secondly, it activates the sympathetic portion of your autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS is the controlling system behind all of the physiological functions which go on in your life at an unconscious level. It has two strands, the parasympathetic and sympathetic portions.
The sympathetic portion is responsible for the “fight or flight” actions in the body. When in this state you are literally preparing the body for short term immediate threat which could result in your death within the next 60s. Anything which requires long term action in the body (e.g. immune function, digestion, sexual reproduction, logical thought etc.) is literally switched off and all available energy and resources are directed to the large muscles of the body (e.g. arms and legs) to help you either fight your way out of danger or run as fast as you can away from it.
Picture 2. The effects of the sympathetic nervous system
The issue is that your body does not know what the threat actually is. When you “perceive” stress – the body moves into “fight or flight” and remains there until you don’t “perceive” the stress anymore. It doesn’t even have to be a real physical life threat. If you “perceive” your train being delayed by 5 mins as stressful then your body will respond accordingly. If you don’t, then it won’t.
Now in modern living “stress” is still useful to get us up in the morning, get us going, focus us for a deadline or performance. But, it is detrimental to us in so many ways when we never switch off and relax and allow our body to move back into a state of growth and repair.
I suggest that next time you feel yourself getting stressed, just take a moment and try to put the cause of that stress into context. Does it really deserve all the energy and attention you are placing on it or have you just got swept up in our high paced culture of stress?
Look after yourselves and each other.
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