The Hormones of Stress and How to Conquer Them

As our society has progressed technologically, our day to day lives have picked up pace in ways that have never been observed in our recorded history.  Despite all our technology designed to make our lives easier, we find ourselves busier and more stressed and worn out than ever before. 

As we progress through our days interacting with family, co-workers, friends, and so on, we are constantly distracted by a host of random things happening around us.  Whether it is traffic, social media, global and political events, or anything else, our outside environment has the potential to vastly increase our stress levels.

In times of stress, our bodies produce a powerful cocktail of chemicals that are meant to help us deal with stress.  Those chemicals put our body into a primitive survival mode state commonly referred to as the ‘fight or flight’ response.  When we are in this state, our body reallocates all its energy to deal with the perceived outer threat.  It’s like running your car in high RPM’s without ever shifting the gears, and in the western world, people live by the hormones of stress as much as 70 percent of the time.

It’s no wonder, then, that we live in a society that is plagued with mental, emotional, and physical issues.  Many us suffer from fatigue, anxiety, depression, or we are in a constant state of worry.  Research has shown that long-term exposure to stress chemicals can eventually lead to physical illnesses such as cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, etc.  To improve the outcome of our lives and reduce our risk of future disease, we really must get beyond our emotion response to our outer environment and learn to master our emotional state.

The work of reclaiming control of our subconscious and emotional response to our outer environment starts the very moment we wake up.  For most of us, our morning routines usually include a mental rehearsal of all the things that have bothered and challenged us from the days prior.  We take stock of all the things that we need to do throughout the day, and we worry about how we are going to get everything done.  As you rehearse your daily events and stressors in your head, your subconscious mind is not capable of distinguishing between an imagined event or one that is occurring in your outer world.  In other words, your body will respond to your imagination in the same way as it would an actual outer event and begin producing the hormones of stress in reaction to your imagined scenarios.  Within a few short minutes of waking up, your body is already in fight or flight mode.  To change this, we are going to have to train our mind and body to do something different at that crucial moment.

As counterproductive as it may seem, this is the moment where we need to quiet our mind and bring our thoughts back to the present moment.  The moment we wake up in the morning, our brainwave patterns are already operating at a slower frequency.  This gives us the ability to get beyond the analytical, thinking mind and access the brains operating system.  This is where you can begin recoding the programs that cause you to react a certain way to your outer environment.  Using meditation, you can recondition your mind to become conscious of your unconscious thoughts and feelings related to imagined negative future events, ultimately preventing the hormones of stress from taking root in your system at the start of your day.  You will repeatedly bring your mind and body back to the present moment until your body surrenders to your conscious will.  When this happens, there will be a liberation of energy and you will no longer be subject to the thoughts and emotions that have kept you trapped in a state of perpetual emergency.  You will feel safe, peaceful, and more balanced than you ever have before – and you will become greater than the conditions of your outer environment.  As a side-effect, you will start to notice how the conditions in your outer environment will begin to shift to match the state of your inner being.

There are many people who have practiced meditation that have successfully healed themselves from all the conditions cause by the hormones of stress through that very process.  If you would like to start working on starting a morning meditation routine, we have several incredibly good free guided meditations that you can use to start this section of our website: https://www.quantumind.org/category/guided-meditation/

For more information on how you can begin to manage through day-to-day stress, please checkout this article by the HeartMath Insititute – The HeartMath Experience: 5 techniques to help you respond to day-to-day challenges with ease and composure