
Spirituality and stress
Spirituality gives a sense of connection to higher and bigger entity or God. Spirituality helps in improving mental health and reducing stress. It helps by shifting our concentration to a spiritual goal rather than worrying about what will happen.
Scientifically speaking, spiritual people deal with stress better than non spiritual individuals. Regular prayer improves confidence and self-esteem and thus reduces negative thoughts and its resultant stress. Spirituality may include prayer, chanting of mantras, meditation, ritual etc.
Spirituality teaches kindness, helping and loving others and caring for everybody, even animals. Spiritual practices can break the stressor-response stress cycle and stress-induced symptoms like headaches, anxiety, and sleeplessness.
What is stress?
A definition of too much stress might be when you see your environment as taxing or exceeding your ability to cope, endangering your well-being. Stress is a state of physical, mental, emotional or other strain.
It is the pressure exerted on a person by his environment. It is a shortening of distress, which means extreme anxiety or suffering. Man feels stress when he feels that his ability to cope with the demands is not enough.
Stress is the negative response of the body and the mind to external stimuli, so if we change our response to external stimuli we can reduce the stress or even we can convert the negative situation to a positive one.
Hans Selye, the father of “Stress Phenomenon” first described the effects of stress. He said,
“Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older…..mental tensions, frustrations, insecurity, aimlessness are among the most damaging stressors, and psychosomatic studies have shown how often they cause migraine headaches, peptic ulcers, heart attacks, hypertension, mental disease, suicide, or just hopelessness, unhappiness”.
Scientific studies have proved that most heart attacks are caused by anger and emotional stress. It is observed that quite a good percentage of heart attacks are caused during a time of anger or emotional outburst.
When a Client comes to me and starts describing their ailments, I ask a few questions about their job, family life, and social life. My talks with them give me an idea about the level of stress they have and whether they belong to a high-risk group of future heart attacks or not.
“Relax. Calm down. Stop rushing around and take hold of your life. You must be able to handle tension, not let it manhandle you.” – (George Shinn)
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