subject: Why is it important to relax… especially if I wanted to start my own business? [print this page] Why is it important to relax especially if I wanted to start my own business?
Relaxation is a really key component in creating a balanced physical, mental and spiritual reality for yourself. One of the main benefits of relaxation is that it is the best antidote to excessive stress in your life.
Let me explain how stress affects you.
OK. Transport yourself back in time you're walking out of your cave and are shocked to see a sabre-toothed tiger eying its next meal YOU!
What happens next is that part of the most primitive element of your brain, the paleo section, secretes cortisol (amongst other things) and prepares your body for action the fight or flight reaction. Heart rate increases and blood is pumped to your muscles. Eyes dilate. Blood is diverted away from extremities so that you don't lose too much blood if you are injured fighting or running (the expression "I've got cold feet" comes from this phenomenon). Adrenaline is circulated to fuel & facilitate all this activity.
Action time! You either fight the tiger or you run to safety.
Assuming you didn't become Tigger's tea, your body will have exorcised the stress through taking physical action and your body returns to its normal, more relaxed state. The hormonal balance returns.
In today's modern world, we rarely have a real need for this extreme bodily response to danger. However, that doesn't stop this self-same reaction occurring during our daily life but we find that we cannot exorcise the physical changes that are caused, for example, by a bullying boss. We can't pick up our spear and pin him or her to the wall (much as we'd like to). We can't run for cover either behind the office coffee machine. We just have to sit there and take it... without release.
This is where stress problems in modern life originate from a fight or flight reaction that has no outlet. No release. What tends to happen is that the fight reaction is replaced by ANXIETY and the flight reaction is replaced by WITHDRAWAL. Hence the common modern phenomenon of anxiety and depression.
Oh, and don't think that this is just a reaction to physical threats. Our subconscious mind treats real and imagined events in exactly the same way. So if you are sitting at home imagining that bullying boss raging at you the following day, the same stress reaction will take place. In fact, it's fair to say that the majority of modern stress is as a result of how we perceive the situation to be, rather than how it really is.
If the body is subjected to frequent or continual unreleased stress responses like this, our mental, spiritual and physical health will suffer.
