Rest and sleep help overcome fatigue and restore energy to the body. Everyone needs rest and sleep but the amount required differs for each individual. Most adults require about 7 to 81/2 hours at night. Young children may need more sleep at night besides a daytime nap. Everyone often has trouble getting sleep. Insomnia indicates physical or emotional disorders. Rest and relaxation are as important as sleep. After strenuous work, a person may need a period of rest and at others he may require just relaxation or a change of place. Pleasurable and relaxing activities helps the body to shed tension and remain robust.
If rest and relaxation do not relieve fatigue and tension, the individual may have a physical or emotional problem. Exercise helps to keep the body healthy and fit. Vigorous exercise strengthens muscles and improves the function of the circulatory and respiratory systems. To achieve fitness, a person should start an exercise programme slowly and build it up gradually to a level that maintains a healthy heart and strong muscles. Daily exercise provides the greatest benefits.
Health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being. It involves more than just the absence of disease. A person who is in good physical condition has the strength and energy to enjoy an active life and withstand the stresses of daily life. Proper nutrition, exercise, rest and sleep, cleanliness and medical and dental care are essential parts of hygiene. Handling stress is essential for avoiding both mental and physical illness. No one can avoid stress but a person can do a few things to helps lessen the danger of becoming ill due to stress.
Regular exercise and sufficient sleep strengthen the body’s resistance to stress. Everyone should learn to relax by resting, taking a walk, meditating, working with a hobby or by another method that is found successful. Discussing a problem with a friend, relative or other person sometimes helps relieve stress.
Relaxation
Stress is the spice of life Without stress, life would be dull and boring. When you are tense your speed increases, your reaction time becomes shorter, you are able to finish your work with a timebound precision. Your job will be a challenging one. It is when you fix goals. To reach them in time strive hard. With every goal achieved you become stronger and are able to reach higher targets.
A nagging wife is a good wife because she keeps you tense and compels you to finish important work in time. Tension is good for students to keep themselves on their toes. They strive to do their homework and study properly and secure good marks. A little tension slowly becomes bigger tension, a temporary tension becomes a permanent affair. When a nagging wife starts nagging for little things, all the time, and lets you not to live in peace in your own house, when a student is goaded by his parents to higher ambition or to get distinction marks, that is the time of tension.
This is more so in the case of a student who is not very bright and in fact not capable of achieving much in studies. If you set high targets, which are not within your ability or something that may take a lifetime to complete and you are still not sure whether you will be able to cope with them, your tension increases.
Tension keeps building up. It is like your bank account, if you are lucky, you keep on depositing money. Slowly, steadily and gradually it swells into a big account, when you will be able to buy a car, a scooter, a fridge or TV or build a house. Tension keeps on mounting in the same way gradually and steadily if you are not able to find a solution to your problems. It gets deposited slowly and gradually in your account. You are aware of your bank account building up, but may not be conscious about your tension building up in the body.
There is no accurate measuring scale to know how much exactly your tension account is and how much has been deposited in your body bank. A small tension is spice, but too much tension becomes poison for your existence. An elderly well-wisher advised me at an important juncture of a prolonged stress, I was passing through : “Dreaming is good as long as you can fulfill your dreams, but if your dreams are big and you cannot reach them in spite of your best effort and resources they will fill you up with frustration”.
Some stress for a small duration does not harm the body, the changes which comes in the body during stress, return to normal when it is over. In other words ambitious persons who have no perspective of their own limitations, believe they can do it all. If they fail to achieve their desired goal, they refuse to settle for the second best.
We call this nervous tension. It can create a havoc in the body. A saying in Hindustani goes : “Chinta jwal sharir me Dawanal Lagi Jaye” (when you are dead your body is kept on a pyre to be burnt, but in life, tension burns you while you are still alive.)
Tension is part of our modern living. It is a product of industrialisation and materialism. This has already come in a big way in Western countries. As the speed of life increases, it builds tension with equal speed. As the struggle for existence increases so does tension. When you find it difficult to get a job, or set up a business, when there is difficulty in getting a house, or admission for your children in a school, there is cause to become tense. You exhaust yourself in collecting the basic necessities of life.
This plight goes on all the time even during an emotional adjustment with your family members, how far can you come up to their expectation. This comes about also in competition with your relatives, friends, your neighbours. Trying to keep up with the Joneses, you tend to show off what you are not and crave for appreciation and prove yourself bigger than you actually are. All this is capable of generating unhealthy tension.
Let us go back 30,000 yours to the times of our ancestors. They lived and struggled for food and shelter. Imagine their existence. What is the setting? Entering a forest clearing, if a hunter suddenly comes face to face upon a ferocious and hungry tiger looking for his prey, confrontation takes place, their eyes meet. The body becomes tense the man feels the accelerated pounding of his heart, blood pressure rises, the mouth becomes dry, sweat appears on his brow. Breathing hard and thinking fast, man has to make a decision. Stand and face the animal and fight to death, or turn around and run into the thickets. Evolution has equipped us to react to a stressful situation physically.
As the body receives stress signals, the concerned nerves begin their work to stimulate the pituitary gland. This is the master key gland which in turn stimulates other glands to secrete a hormone called adrenaline. This is a substance which excites all the body systems. With a racing heart and fast breathing, more oxygen is pumped into the blood raising blood pressure and pulse pressure. With a shaky stomach man is in readiness to fight or run. If the stress subsides, these response die away. The body is released from tension and returns to a state of equilibrium. Thus an athlete after his event comes back to a normal state. His body reaction subsides and no harm is done to the body. Same thing happens to a student who has to undergo an examination. Or a job seeker who goes for an interview.
What happens if a person is all the time in a condition of high stress. It is then that the body does not come back to the post-stress normal physiological state. This is the time which is fraught with danger. Now when we are not obliged to fight or flee we may get a palpitation sitting at our desk. A constant panic turns itself into a situation which gives rise to clammy hands, a racing pulse, high blood pressure, stomach hypersecretion, a nervous system that goes hay-wire. Instead of improving the performance under stress, we reach a point where greater pressure is actually counterproductive and can result in physical breakdown. We may then feel restless, tense, irritable or depressed. We may suffer from loss of appetite, insomnia, extensive fatigue and a loss of sexual potency.
During the 1970s there was considerable research into the relationship between stress and disease particularly regarding stress and cancer, heart disease, diabetes, peptic ulcer, tuberculosis, eczema and asthma. Headaches caused by tension affect an estimated 15 million Americans, while high blood pressure affects 20 million.
A lady was suffering from diarrhoea, but neither medicine nor a change in the diet could help her. Ultimately, she was put right by a psychoanalyst. A problem so obscure, so remote, so different can be due to tension. The modern medical world is agreed that the mind or in-built tension can play a dominant role in all diseases and a major role in 60 percent of all diseases. To live in this world facing all challenges, hearing all misfortunes, and to overcome the prevalent greed and jealousy you need to be relaxed and have a clear mind.
Greed and jealousy are the root causes of all mental and physical diseases. See that they do not enter your mind. Forty years ago people were dying of cholera, small pox and plague. The scene has now changed. More people are dying of heart attack, blood pressure, cancer, and diabetes. It is the reward we pay for the so-called progress, industrialisation and for getting more affluent.
The Atherosclerosis Research Centre in the U.S.A. tried an experiment to find out how stress could induce heart attacks. They took two groups of animals and fed them on low fat and low cholesterol diet and matched them for their body weight and blood pressure reading. For one group they made living very stressful by putting them in cages to break up their normal sort of way.
At the end of the experiment, 21 months later, it was found that the stressful group was suffering from serious signs of fatty deposits in their arteries. This happened when both the groups were kept on a healthy diet and at a normal weight. This experiment has proved that there is definite evidence that heart disease is induced by stress. If this is true of monkeys, our pre-historic ancestors, it must be true of us.
Following an earthquake in 1981, in Athens, the incidence of fatal heart attacks rose sharply. The heart stress connection is too powerful to be ignored. Who does not remember the awesome Bhopal tragedy when over 2,500 people died due to gas leak! A survey conducted by the Indian Council for Medical Research and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience showed that 22 percent of the screened population were suffering from mental disorder. The severe emotional crisis in the people was due to conflict and guilt and not due to the nature of the disaster.
In the panic situation, many adults are known to have run away without ensuring the safety of their family members, women, children and elderly people. Later this caused a feeling of guilt in them being those who were left behind they died. Many found difficult to adjust to bereavements, material loss and disability.
In a survey among 205 children of a school, 68 percent had difficulty in keeping up with the studies after the tragedy, 48 percent of them had been rendered unconscious by inhaling leaked methyl isocyanate gas. An elderly woman from a colony adjacent to the Union Carbide factory could not speak or hear after the accident. Yet physically there was nothing wrong with her. Only after psychiatric help both her hearing and voice came back to normal.
Sometimes in stress, the morale of people rises high, their cohesion and unity helps them to rise above their fears and overcome the extreme periods of distress most successfully. During the second world war, the people of Britain showed extreme sense of cohesiveness, according to psychologist Irving Janis. The fear reaction subsided within 15 minutes after the end of the air raids. The people paid less attention to the sirens. They were apprehensive actually only when they heard the noise of bombs and aircraft. Business would resume in a short time after the raid.
The citizens of Hiroshima also showed tremendous resilience, though the destruction, death injuries, illness caused by this tragedy were unprecedented. The extent of the adverse effects was astonishingly small in intensity. Within 3 months of the attack 140,000 people returned to the city. Israeli sociologist Aaron Anthonovsky claims that 25 percent of those who survived the tortures of the concentration camp did so without succumbing to psychiatric disorders despite their long years physical suffering under constant fear of death and terrible atrocities.
The unity, the moral support to each other, the great social admiration turned them into heroes. They could all join together to fight their common fear and the enemy. Who does not remember the great tales of the morale rising high, and instances of bravery and strength displayed during the days of India-Pakistan War? A weak politician in the face of scarcity, of general grievances, upheaval and fears of disintegration is known to exercise control over everything by waging war against the enemy.
In the medical college in 1959, in Kanpur, one day in the early hours of the morning, we were taken to Central Jail, to witness a hanging. Three brothers had wiped out a whole family in a land dispute. One was given imprisonment for life and the other two were to be hanged that morning. It was dawn and we were standing at some distance from the hanging area. We saw the two condemned brothers coming with policemen. One of them was walking straight and looked fearless.
The other was not able to walk. His legs were trembling and he was full of fear. He was being supported by two policemen. They were brought to the hanging platform. The first person stood in the spot where he was told to. The second accused was begging to be pardoned. The first one uttering Ram Ram Ram placed himself firmly on the platform called the hangman and asked him to inform him as he pulled the handle to make the platform fall so that he will be able to say Ram for the last time.
Hindus believe that if you call God’s name just before death, you go to heaven. Black covers were put on their heads and the loop, put round their necks. Moments later, the hangman pulled the handle and both the brothers were swinging by their necks over the ditch below. There was not even a tremor in their bodies. Both were dead. Of course, the hangman did not warn them before he pulled the handle. It is believed that this is the most painless methods of execution than the electric chair or a firing squad.
Both brothers had committed the same crime and had the same punishment. But one remained strong and ready to face the end, the other got weak in the face of death. One’s own temperament is important in the face of severe stress. A few can take big stress easily. Others may crumble under much smaller stress. A number of interviews were conducted with the survivors of Nazi concentration camps to determine how they had been able to survive and cope with stress.
A few of them told an investigator that they survived for a purpose : to help a relative, to bear witness and show the world that happened to them or seek revenge. A lady developed the delusion that the soldiers who were raping and abusing her were devils incarnate and that one was above their assault. Some inmates focussed their attention to small gratifications such as getting through the food line.
Humour also plays a great role in the survival process and there are a few who can keep up humour in the most difficult circumstances. A man in front of a firing squad was asked, if he would like a last cigarette, he refused saying, “No thanks, I am trying to give up smoking”. Both laughter and tears seem to release stress. Bulman and Camille interviewed 29 people suffering from paralysis caused by different types of automobile accidents, or a fall or by injury in the football field.
A few were coping better than others. The fellows who were doing well were those who accepted reality and tried to deal with it positively. Others were coping poorly, particularly those who denied to themselves the knowledge, the extent of the injury and expected to get well miraculously. Some thought it was in their fate, felt helpless and were unable to develop control over the future. Patients who felt responsible for their injury also felt responsible for their recovery and were coping better.
In one study some 30 percent of the women who had undergone mastectomy (removal of the breast after cancer) were in an upset mind even five years after the operation. Some 26 percent of the rape victims did not feel that they had recovered from assault even four to six years after. Studies of widows revealed that 25 per cent of them felt sufficiently distressed in the first two years after the death of their husbands. In another study 40 percent of the bereaved continued to experience anxiety even two to four years after the loss of their loved ones. Vietnam combat veterans had a high rate of mild to severe depression and anxiety.
In “Death and Dying” that an individual must face up to death by going through a sequence of reactions like denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. When there is a constant fear of terrorist attacks or war or uncertainty of political and social upheaval, there may be need for denial in order to feel better and maintain hope and sense of self-worth. Denial dampens the idea and feeling and allows an individual to adjust gradually to unpleasant circumstances. A weak and helpless victim of polio, burns, or spinal cord injury often uses denial at first in order to cope with stress in the early stage. Later they begin to rehabilitate and shift to move direct means of coping with stress. It can be destructive at times, when women deny the significance of lumps on their breast, or men experiencing heart attack deny the significance of pain.