Are You Aware of What Your Body is Telling You?

Stress is unavoidable, it’s a fact of life.

Stress is unavoidable, it’s a fact of life. We can suffer from it out of choice by doing something outside of our comfort zone or doing something challenging, or we can suffer from it as a result of the uncontrollable  and random events that strike us all from time to time.  

This response to our environment is unconscious, no-one chooses to be stressed and we all have different stress responses and levels of this stress response. Some of these responses are learned and some are ingrained responses that go back to our embryological development and to the environment that we were brought up in. Our experience of life between 0-5 years can have a substantial influence as to how we respond to our environment and to how we unconsciously seek to reduce the stress response that we are undergoing.

The response to stress manifests itself in the hyper activity of the part of the nervous system known as the autonomic nervous system, this part of the nervous system controls the unconscious systems in us such as heart and digestive system. 

The autonomic nervous system composes of about 83% of our body’s nervous system, the remaining 17% is devoted to the spinal nerves, the nerves that run up and down our arm and legs and allow us to move, the nerves supply conscious movement.

Stress can be good for us, it can be both motivational as well as protective, but it can also be bad for us and cause us a multitude of problems that affect our health and our relationships. But there is hope for us!

We can become aware of our body and how it is responding to the environment and the immediate situation we are in. This process of ‘self-awareness’ takes time to develop and there is always a constant battle to maintain this awareness throughout the day!

Accessing our inner ‘self’ and understanding our  thoughts and feelings throughout the day will give us an idea as to the appropriateness of  what we are thinking and feeling  for the surrounding we are in. If we master this we can then start to tackle our health problems.

This process takes time but I feel that this is one of the best skills to develop and master, and it is one of the keys to recover from a long term or recurrent problem and to reach and maintain an optimal level of health.