Smith, a 43-year-old manager of a computer sales company, spends a terrific amount of energy trying to get everything done. Unable to wait in line at the railway reservation counter or movie theatre; he also carries extra weight, has high cholesterol, and smokes three packs a day to relieve the tension.
Linda, a 36-year-old mother of three, reports a range of physical symptoms relating to stress, including aches and pains in her lower back, neck, wrists, and knees. Restlessness made her rely on six cups of coffee a day just to keep alert and she seemed to catch every kind of cold and flu. She frequently suffers from ‘depression blues’.
Smith and Linda are not alone, most of the complaints people report in doctors’ clinics today, are related to stress, and include insomnia, fatigue, anxiety, and depression.
Writing prescriptions for sleeping pills or tranquillizers may not solve the problem. On the contrary, it may produce rebound anxiety, rebound insomnia, and debilitating side-effects. Worse still, these drugs are addictive.
Fortunately, for Smith, Linda and other such persons, it is possible to find natural, non-addictive ways to restore balance to the body, mind and emotions through Ayurveda.
Stress and Its After-Effects
Apart from the physical stressors, such as infectious disease and lack of food or shelter, today’s stressors include rushed schedules and emotional pressures such as financial worries, work-related frustrations, and marital conflict. Equally important are spiritual difficulties, such as meta-physical emptiness and lack of fulfillment.
Stress is the excessive wear and tear on the nervous system. In today’s stressed-out world, your optimum health and peak performance depend on remaining calm under pressure. Most debilitating types of stress, called negative stress or distress, generally occur when you view change and pressure as burdens and rising demands as threats. You feel a sense of isolation, frustration and helplessness. This results in disease, disorder, and dissatisfaction.
Repeated or prolonged negative stress can trigger complex physiological reactions involving multiple chemical changes in the body. These lead to an exhaustion of mental, physical and emotional energies, thus increasing your susceptibility to disease. Research shows that stress raises blood cholesterol and blood pressure, and lowers immunity. It destroys brain cells, lowers IQ, and impairs memory and thinking. Cancer, heart disease, immune-deficiency diseases, and even the common cold are related to stress.
Now it is a known fact that free radicals (the reactive oxidizing molecules that can destroy the cells internally, causing mutations in the nucleus and destruction of mitochondria) can cause damage to cells when the body attempts to defend against stress. Free radical damage results in less energy, and causes deterioration of the organs and systems of the body. Free radicals are causative factors in most of the degenerative diseases and hasten the aging process.
Self-Help Guidelines & Ayurvedic Remedies
To be effective in treating stress, it is important to be individualistic. The ayurvedic approach is to target the causative factors and then bring that area into balance.
There are three different manifestations of stress from the perspective of Ayurveda— mental, emotional, and physical. Each requires different solutions and therapies.
Mental stress, according to Ayurveda, is caused by an overuse or misuse of the mind. For instance, if you perform intense mental work many hours a day, or if you work long hours on the computer, it can cause an imbalance in praana vaata, the mind-body factor concerned with brain activity, energy and the mind. The first symptom of praana vaata imbalance is losing the ability to handle stress. As you become more stressed, it alters mental functions such as dhi, dhriti, and smriti, or acquisition, retention, ability to think positively, to feel keen, and even to fall asleep at night. To treat mental stress, you begin by managing mental activity. Secondly, you can take measures to pacify praana vaata.
• Favor vaata-balancing foods, such as sweet, sour, and salty tastes.
• Favor warm milk, ghee, and other light dairy products.
• Sleep well, minimum eight hours a day.
• Perform a full-body warm oil massage with ksheerabala tailam or dhanwantari tailam everyday.
• Try meditation.
Emotional stress can be caused by problems in a relationship, the loss of a relative, or any situation that might hurt the heart. Emotional stress shows up as irritability, depression, and emotional instability. It affects sleep in a different way than mental stress—it causes you to wake up in the night and not be able to sleep again.
With emotional stress, the treatment is quite different. Emotional stress disturbs saadhaka pitta, the mind-body factor concerned with the emotions and functioning of the heart. To stabilize emotional stress, always favor pitta-pacifying foods and routine.
• Eat sweet juicy fruits.
• Favor pitta-pacifying foods—ones with sweet, bitter and astringent tastes.
• Drink a cup of warm milk with Gulkand (rose petal preserve) before going to bed.
• Try sweet lassi with gulkand in the noon meal.
• Cook with cooling spices such as cardamom, coriander and mint.
• Massage with coconut oil or chandanaadi taila.
• Go to bed before 10.00 pm.
Physical stress is caused by misuse or overuse of the body, such as exercising too much: or working for extended periods at a job that is physically taxing. You may experience physical fatigue along with mental fogginess, difficulty in concentrating, and dullness of the mind. Excessive physical strain causes three sub-doshas to go out of balance: shleshaka-kapha; the sub-dosha concerned with lubrication of the joints and moisture balance in the skin; vyaana-vaata, that governs the circulation, nerve impulses and the sense of touch; and tarpaka-kapha, which governs the neurological factors. Another cause of physical stress is little exercise, which results in a slow digestion and the formation of aama, the digestive impurities that block the channels. In either type of physical fatigue, the cellular regenerating process slows down, and thus the cells themselves become physically tired. The treatment is to balance vaata and to support kapha to make the body more stable and strong.
• Take vaata-kapha pacifying (invigorating and energetic) diet.
• Perform the full-body warm oil self-massage everyday.
• Certain foods are also natural stress busters. These include almonds, coconuts, sweet and juicy fruits such as apples (cooked if possible), milk, lassi, ghee, and fresh cheese such as paneer.
• Dhaara treatment, an exclusive ayurvedic pre-panchakarma therapy is proved to be beneficial.
The general herbs recommended in stress are brahmi, ashwagandha and arjuna. Different formulations are available in Traditional Ayurvedic Medicine (TAM) with these herbs as main ingredients. In widespread research, brahmi has been found to enhance dhi, dhriti, and smriti. Ashwagandha is an adaptogenic, which means that it combats physical fatigue that converts into mental dullness. Research shows that arjuna supports cardiac health.
Stress, unfortunately, is a part of life for many of us. If you do not find ways to manage stress, it could lead to heart disease, peptic ulcer, or even cancer.
On the other hand, if you build your spirit to stress through natural methods, you can begin to experience stressors more as a challenge or a positive opportunity for growth.
Learn to evoke the ‘stay and play’ concept rather than the fight or flight response, with which you can truly live a stress-free life of self-actualization, and become a healthy being.