Mass phenomenon stress

Our daily working lives are getting busier and more fast-paced, and we hardly ever unwind in our private lives either. Yet not all “stress” is harmful. Leading an active life full of challenges can actually be fulfilling. However, when mental and emotional pressure become too much, it’s important to find methods to better manage this. After all, that’s when stress can cause us problems. It distracts us from all the things that are actually important to us. It diminishes our enjoyment of life and in extreme cases, it can even make us physically ill.

Yet stress is now a mass phenomenon. According to surveys, around a third of Germans rate their stress levels as “high” or “medium”. One in five suffers from constant stress – and the trend is rising. But why does our body produce “stress” in the first place?

Why does our body produce stress?

Fundamentally, the stress response is nothing more than our built-in survival mechanism. Stress has always been there to save us from dangerous situations. When we feel threatened, a part of the brain called the “amygdala” sounds the alarm. Our nervous system is prepared to escape or fight – the famous “fight or flight response”. Stress hormones are released into the blood, our heart begins to beat faster and our blood pressure rises. This delivers more oxygen into the muscles and allows us to act more quickly. In truly dangerous situations, this mechanism is essential for survival. However, when it comes to everyday stress, such as at work or in a relationship, this reaction is exaggerated and has a negative impact on our well-being.

Why is permanent stress so harmful?

In the short term, stress can actually be beneficial because it enables us to perform at our best. However, if stress persists for a long time, it can lead to a number of negative side effects or even illness. The reason for this is that this state of emergency in the body directs all energy toward our capacity for attack and defense, thereby restricting those bodily functions that are not necessarily vital in that moment. In stressful situations, our body slows down digestion for example, it curbs the immune system, delays healing processes and inhibits reproductive functions. So, in addition to psychological effects such as mental imbalance and disturbed sleep, long-term stress can cause us to gain weight, fall ill more often, heal more slowly, and it can even affect fertility.

What meditation can do against stress

When meditating, our body reacts with what is called the “relaxation response”. This state counteracts the stress response and brings our body back into balance. Our heart rate and blood pressure decrease and our breathing slows down. We become calmer, our system regulates itself and the negative effects of stress are slowly reduced. If practised regularly, these effects don’t just happen during meditation, but they go over to our everyday life. Numerous scientific studies have shown that meditation not only helps us relax in the short term, but also changes our brains in the long term. After a total of just eleven hours of meditation, neuroscientists have been able to prove the formation of new pathways in the brain by means of brain scans. These changes in the brain enable people who meditate regularly to remain more relaxed even in difficult situations, to feel less stressed and to prevent stress-related illnesses.

The 7Mind course on stress shows you how you can learn to use these effects to your benefit. XcenteredTextPlaceholderX

Medi­ta­tion vs stress: scientific studies

Mindfulness meditation vs. relaxation training (Shamini et al., 2007)

The stress-reducing effect of mindfulness meditation is well known by now. However, what exactly does mindfulness do to reduce stress? To answer this question, scientists from various universities in the US compared the stress levels of people who had practised either relaxation training in the form of autogenic training or mindfulness meditation for one month. The control group did neither of these things. Participants in both intervention groups showed a general decrease in psychological stress and a more positive state of mind. The participants of the meditation group displayed a more positive mental state than the relaxation group. In addition, the participants in the meditation group reported having fewer distracting thoughts and worrying less at the end of the study. The same could not be proven with the relaxation exercises.

Mindfulness meditation thus has the distinct effect of reducing distracting thoughts and worry. This unique mechanism leads to lower mental stress.

Mindfulness, brain changes and stress (Hölzel et al., 2010)

After completing a mindfulness programme (MBSR - Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction as defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn), the participants reported experiencing less stress. This also coincided with the results of brain scans (MRI). These scans showed that the participants in the mindfulness programme displayed a change in the density of the grey matter in the amygdala.

The amygdala is one of the most important structures of the limbic system, it regulates stress and anxiety. Receiving information from sensory perceptions it passes these on to other areas of the brain, which then initiate appropriate reactions. Thus, the amygdala decides whether to pass on information that, for example, causes stress hormones to be released, blood pressure to rise or anxious facial expressions to develop. If a person is chronically stressed, resources are first saved in emotion regulation, among other things: our body switches to autopilot and the amygdala carries out the “fight-or-flight response”. For our bodies, this means: high levels of stress hormones, high blood pressure and tense facial expressions.

Meditation causes the grey matter in the amygdala to become more dense. In our everyday life, this means that meditation allows us to better regulate our emotions and thus react less strongly to stress, and when stress does arise, we can remain calm more easily.