Body Scan 3 - 20 minute body scan - Internship - Chapter 3

20 Minute Body Scan guided by Cassondra Graff
https://health.ucsd.edu/specialties/mindfulness/programs/mbsr/Documents/MP3/Cassondra-Graf-Short-Body-Scan-2.mp3

I did a shorter body scan today because my husband practiced with me.  I have been really enjoying doing the body scans so I wanted to share it with him so I coaxed him into the 20 minute practice. He wasn't as in to it as I am.  He says I like it because I get to rest.  He says he doesn't need rest because he is not as worn out as me.

Observations
- My legs feel very uneven.  My right leg is much heavier
- My feet feel as if they are pointing in very awkward directions that seems to be effective the rotation of my legs
- there is still a lot of tension in the right side of the calf and ankle
- I have very little awareness of my individual toes besides the big toe
- There is pulling on my knees. More on my right today.
- My right buttock is very tight and tense
- My quads feel relaxed and open will my hamstrings have this slight pulling
- my hips feel a pulling especially the right hip
- My hands feel heavy and tense as if they are hooks and my arms are also tense
- My shoulders feel as if they are collapsing forward
- There is tension in the back of my neck and jaw
- My head feels as if it is leaning to the left
- I experienced a lot of sadness when we went to the left knee the knee I have had surgery on and is bothering my again right now and I am working with it through physical therapy and yoga
- My chest feels like it is collapsing in around my heart

Reflections of Health from a Yoga Therapy Perspective

What is health and how do we evaluate it?

Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship. 

- Buddha

Health, from the yogic perspective, can be defined as unity, integration, oneness, and discovery on one’s own true nature. We experience health as an individual journey in which a person finds meaning and purpose in life within a universal framework. Health is the recognition that the life journey is a microcosm of the larger journey of universal evolution.

We evaluate health by looking at both pain and imbalance, as well as, ease and balance. We examine what can lead us ourselves our client towards wholeness and unity. The initial intake in yoga therapy is a perfect opportunity to begin the discussion with the client about lifestyle, feelings of unity and separation through use our assessment tools. These tools include but are not limited to: education, breathwork, mudra, asana, yoga nidra, guided imagery and meditation.  It is important to remember that we don’t just look at the physical body as yoga therapists we as interested at all the 5 bodies of the panchakosha system.

What is the role of the individual in their own health?

Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that's very important for good health. 

- the Dalai Lama

I believe we are responsible for our own health. In contrast, we our also responsible for our own dis-ease. The body expressed unity or lack of unity through the state of our health. We, not our doctors, are responsible for keeping  ourselves in unity. This doesn't mean that disease should be considered a punishment for leaving outside of the 8 limbs of yoga or for not doing our sadhana. Dis-ease or "bad health" can be used as information that we have become out of balance.  This also doesn't mean that we should reject doctors.  I believe that we should considered them as partners and consultants in our journey towards wholeness.

We can work on our health or our lack of health with the aid of the 8 limbs of yoga.  “.. when the mind-body is moving in the opposite direction of the basic intention of the creation in which it exists, that imbalance will be the result.” The good news is that since unity is the fundamental intention of life if we incorporate in our lives periods of restoration and relaxation then good health should naturally form the main part of our existence,

What is the role of those who facilitate health?

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work. -

Mother Teresa

A believe the role of those who facilitate health is one of guide, partner, teacher, consultant, confidant and compassionate friend. As yoga therapist we aren’t curing on healing anyone, instead we are sharing are tools of yoga to help people heal themselves. We can facilitate healing through understanding of appropriate asanas, pranayama, pratyahara and meditation techniques. We can also offer education and experiential exercises for understanding the Gunas, Kleshas and Koshas. We can also use the complementary philosophies of western medicine through the yogic lens including but not limited to explanation and awareness of  the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, and the muscular skeleton system.

What is the nature of the healing process?

The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind. - Paracelsus

We come back to unity, oneness and integration through the healing process. We attempt to find balance in the Koshas and the Gunas. We can work towards achieving homeostasis between Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nervous Systems.  We try to remember that Health is a process not a product and healing is not always synonymous with physical health or curing. Instead, health is a balance of individual and community

Our deconditioning is a key to healing. We do this by changing our beliefs and perspective on life and relationships. Individual health reflects and contributes to universal health.

The Panchakosha System as an effective tool for understanding our health. Within the Bliss Body/Anandamayakosha health manifest as connection with spirit and source. When we feel contentment, peace and bliss this body is whole and healed. Within the Wisdom Body/Vijnanamayakosha we shift  our beliefs to the yogic perspective that the world is unity and we have a purpose. When we connect to our intuitive nature we will experience health in this body. Within the Psycho-emotional body/Manomayakosha we see unity instead of conflict. When we become aware if our core beliefs and how they effect our physical health we can work towards healing in this body. Within the Energetic Body/Pranamayakosha we become aware of the breath and our breathing patterns.  Working with appropriate breathing practices and taking time to be in nature, especially contact with water, nourishes ourselves energetically. Within the Physical Body/Annamayakosha we become aware of the flesh and blood body, the body that eats food. By listening to bodies signals and messages, knowing our Ayurvedic constitution, and following the appropriate diet and lifestyle for that constitution we heal this body.


What is the nature of the human being we are healing?

Yoga is a method for restraining the natural turbulence of thoughts, which otherwise impartially prevent all men, of all lands, from glimpsing their true nature of Spirit. Yoga cannot know a barrier of East and West any more than does the healing and equitable light of the sun. 

- Paramahansa Yogananda

It's important that we understand that we are not healing anyone but ourselves instead (with others) we are acting as guide and/or a mirror. We can look at an individual and help them understand imbalance through the models of the Koshas, Gunas and the Kleshas with the recognition that health and illness are messages with meaning and mirrors of our lives. Health and illness exist on physical, energetic, psycho-emotional, intuitive and spiritual levels.

As humans, we are already whole and healed but we lose our way or separate from our true nature.  Our true nature is health and homeostasis. Because it is our true nature we are always magnetized in that direction and that is the good news.


What is the influence of culture and society on health and illness?

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions. 

- Paulo Coelho

The individual is a network of conditioned responses and relationships.  These occur at the level of family, society, culture and DNA. Health and illness reflect the quality of our relationship. Illness and disease are the response of the physical and psychological organism to their total environment which includes but is not limited to family, work, social and cultural environments.

There is a clear link between diseases and modern lifestyle. Disease needs to be seen and responded to within the context of the culture, society, family and personality from which it evolves. American cultural has its particular soup of: Individualism, Competition, Free Enterprise, Consumerism, Technology, Mr. Fix it, Computerism, Science as Objectivity, Modern Medicine aka Body as Object, Drugs as Synthetic Unity, Fast and Processed Foods, Health Fod Addiction, Media as Model, Technology  as the Fountain of Youth, Addition as Experience, Nationalism, Perfectionism, Therapy-ism, Nuclear Family, and Gender Neutral Individual.

- Individualism: tends towards separation, egotism, and isolation. Isolation is considered a factor in stress related illnesses.
- Competition: separation and stress
- Consumerism: individualism, possession are paramount and become more important than other people,  also leads to isolation where people spend most of their time with television and internet and have little human contact
- Technology: Rational mind can fix any problem, world is a object for human use with man in control, thinking is more important than insight or intuition
- Computerism: digital life where relationship is mostly digital
- Science as Objectivity: observer is separate from that which is observed
- Modern Medicine aka the Body as Object: disassociation from the body, place ourselves in the hands of experts who diagnose the organism as separate from the human being that inhabits it
- Drugs as Synthetic Unity: drugs ease or mask pain which is a symptom of separation and a message of self-change
- Use of Fast Food for quick and cheap fix
- Health Food Addition
- Media replaces social interaction
- Obsession with being Youthful and having the perfect physical body by any means necessary
- Addiction to Experience; separates us from a balanced life because we can not process the experiences
- Nationalism: believing our culture is the best, don’t respect other people and other values
- Perfectionism: perfect grades,  always striving towards achievement
- Therapy-ism: freedom from our pain,
- Diminished importance of the Nuclear Family
- Gender Neutral Society: traditional roles of men and women are eliminated and people are expected to do everything
- Important to note despite all of our technologies stress-related illness has reached epidemic proportions in our society

Where do health and illness fit in the overall context and meaning of our lives?

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Health is a reflection of unity and illness is a reflection of separation. “From the yogic perspective, illness begins at the most subtle level and manifests at gradually more physical levels.”  In contrast, the physical body is a vehicle for the evolutionary journey toward unity. We are equipped with physiological responses for fight or flight or relaxation based on the situation we find ourselves in.

What was the author’s purpose in writing the book - Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

I think the author's purpose in writing the book is summed up well on the back jacket of the book

This book is "practical advice to explain how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers. colitis, heart disease and more."

He is very interested in showing parallels and differences between humans, other mammals especially primates and laboratory rats.

"When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal's body does, but we usually don'y turnj off the stress-response in the same way-through fighting, fleeing or other actions. Over time this chronic activation of the stress response can make is literally sick.

He is also bringing science to the non-scientist/layman. He is also telling us that are stressors can be managed because the really aren't as dire as the direct threat a zebra experiences. The final paragraph of the final chapter of the book I think gets to the meat of what Sapolsky is demonstrating in the book.

"Perhaps I’m beginning to sound like your grandmother, advising you to be happy and not to worry so much. This advice may sound platitudinous, trivial, or both. But change the way even a rat perceives its world, and you dramatically alter the likelihood of its getting a disease. These ideas are no mere truisms. They are powerful, potentially liberating forces to be harnessed. As a physiologist who has studied stress for many years, I clearly see that the physiology of the system is often no more decisive than the psychology. We return to the catalogue at the beginning of the firstchapter, the things we all find stressful— traffic jams, money worries, overwork, the anxieties of relationships. Few of them are “real” in the sense that that zebra or that lion would understand. In our privileged lives, we are uniquely smart enough to have invented these stressors and uniquely foolish enough to have let them, too often, dominate our lives. Surely we have the potential to be uniquely wise enough to banish their stressful hold."

Would you recommend this book to others? Why or why not?

For me Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers was extremely hard to read.  I started reading in April and finish it in November.  I know there is a ton of great info in the book and there is humor but it reads more like a textbook than prose.  While Healing into Life and Death was a pleasure to read this book was a chore.  I know I will refer to it over and over again in my practice.  I know it is an important read. I know it is incredibly informative. It was just a lot of work to get through.

Final Notes on Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Were any previous ideas you had on the subject changed, abandoned, or reinforced due to this book? How is the book related to your own path as a yoga therapist?

I am going to answer these questions together

Chapter 1 – Why Don’t Zebras Get Ulcers
- I never really thought about us humans having physiology that doesn’t quite match up to our experiences in the modern world before this book.  I can use this explanation when talking to clients in yoga therapy.  I already have heard myself talk about it any times since I started reading the book last April.
- I never had heard the terms psychological and social disruptions are the one of the ways we get upset
- New to me is the definition of a stressor and stress response. I will use it with my clients.
“A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance, and the stress reponse is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis.” P,6
- I never had heard anything about Selye before
- I like the simple statement on p. 8 “If stressors go on too long, they can make you sick.” I will use that with my students and clients.
- I found this interesting on p. 11 “With sufficiently sustained stress, our perception of pain can become blunted.”
- Also of great interest: “. . . during stress, shifts occur in cognitive and sensory skills…” p.12
- Problems with constant stress p,13 “the stress-respinse can become more damaging than the stressor itself, especially when the stress is purely psychological” and “If you constantly turn off long-term building project, nothing is ever repaired,”
p. 16 “If you repeatedly turn on the stress response or if you cannot turn off the stress-response at the end of a stressful event, the stress-response can eventually become damaging.”
p. 16 “chronic or repeated stressors can potentially make you sick or can increase your risk of being sick.”

Chapter 5 – Ulcers, The Runs, And Hot Fudge Sundaes
- There is this idea that we should lose our appetite when we are stressed but I always just eat more and more. I find interesting ideas of hyperphagic and hypophagic different people have different reactions in their eating to stress and it depends on their relationship to food.  I will use this with my clients and students when talking about mindful eating.
- “. . . ulcers are not formed so much during the stressor as during the recovery. This predicts that several periods of transient stress should be more ulcerative than one long, continuous period, and animal experiments have generally shown this to be this case.” P.89

Chapter 6
- Interesting this whole story of the dwarfish ending with the boy with the nurturing nurse. This is helpful to talk to people on how important nurturing and support is.

Chapter 7
- Very interesting about the sex organs of the hyena. I am not sure how I will use this as a yoga therapist accept anecdoctally.

Chapter 8 – Immunity, Stress and Disease
- Interesting how during stress first immunity is enhanced and then reduced. I will use this explanation with clients.

Chapter 9 – Stress and Pain
- I thought this was very helpful about pain
p. 187 “Pain is useful to the extent that it motivates us to modify our behaviors in order to reduce whatever insult is causing the pain, because invariability that insult is damaging our tissues.”
p.189 “A striking aspect of the pain system is how readily it can be modulated by other factos.  The strength of a pain signal, for example, can depend on what other sensory information is funneled to the spine at the same time…”
p,191 – Interesting to me about slow fibers and fast fibers. I find this useful when talking to clients
“The pain physiologist David Yeomans has framed the functions of the fast and slow fibers . . . fast fibers are about is getting you to move as quickly as possible (from the source of the piercing pain). What the slow fibers are about is getting you to hunker down, immobile so you can heal.”
- pain is subjective
- there is a real thing called stress-induced analgesia this was show in hot plate test in rats  but there is also stress induced hyperalgesia like in the dentist

Chapter 10– Stress and Memory
These were the concepts that I related the most to in Chapter 10. I think especially when working with yoga nidra it can be important to talk about the different parts of the brain.
- “memories can be transformed between explicit and implicit forms of storage.” P. 205
- importance of cortex and hippocampus
- think of the cortex as your hard drive where your memories are stored
- think of the hippocampus as the keyboard
- excess of stress and/or glucocortoids can disrupt the functioning of the hippocampus
- major depression is associated with a smaller hippocampus
- glucocortoids damage the human hippocampus
- grandmother neurons
- p.212 “So stress acutely causes increased delivery of glucose to the brain, making more energy available to neurons and therefor better memory and retrieval.
- Amygdala
- inverse U relationship
- Cushing’s syndrome
- some findings show stress disrupts executive function
- higher glucocorticoid level enhance long term depression


Chapter 11 - Stress and a Good Night’s sleep

I suffer from middle insomnia so all these concepts were very interesting to me.  I taught a workshop using these concepts a couple months back. I xeroxed the chapter and we went through it and it was very helpful.
Sleep is not a monolithic process
There are different types and stages of sleep: shallow (stages 1 and 2), deep sleep (stages 3 and 4) aka slow wave sleep, REM  and brain works differently in different stages of sleep
90 minute cycle: shallow, slow wave, REM and the back up gain 
Frontal Cortex is the most recently evolved part of the human brain and is disproportional large in primates
Frontal cortex like super ego - helps you do the harder rather than the easier thing (helps you think sequential as opposed to bouncing all over the place)
Frontal cortex disciplines and inhibits the emotional limbic system
During REM sleep, the metabolism in the frontal cortex goes way down, disinhibiting the limbic system from moving forward ie outlandish ideas/dreams
REM sleep is super important
Sleep plays a role in cognition 
Slow wave and REM sleep also play roles in the formation of new memories
Sleep deprivation stimulates glucocorticoid secretion
75 percent of insomnia cases are triggered by a stressor
Poor sleepers tend to have higher levels of sympathetic arousal or of glucocorticoids in their blood stream

Chapter 12 - Aging and Death
I am thinking a lot about aging with myself and my mother. My clients are also dealing with aging and these are some important tips for longevity.
P.243 Aging can be defined as the progressive loss of the ability to deal with stress
P.245 There is evidence that an excess of stress can increase the risk of some of the diseases of aging
Programmed Die Offs (Salmon and Marsupial Mice) 
Max Rubne: there is only so long a body can go on - only so many breaths, so many heartbeats, so much metabolism that each poun of flesh can carry out before the mechanisms of life wear out

Chapter 13 - Why is Psychological Stress Stressful

This is very important to mention when working with clients.
The body can not only sense something stressful but it also is amazingly accurate at measuring just how far and how fast that stressor is throwing the body out of allostatic balance
The physiological stress response can be modulated by psychological factors. Two identical stressors with the same extent of allostatic disruption can be perceived and appraised differently, and the whole show changes from there
The stress response can be made bigger or smaller depending on psychological factors
When given an outlet for frustration a rat is far less likely to get an ulcer
Outlets can be (drinking water, sprinting, or running on a wheel)
A central feature of an outlet is that it distracts from a stressor and is positive
Social support reduces the stress response
People with spouses or close friends have longer life expectancies
If you are a member of an ethnic minority, the few members there are of your group in your neighborhood, the higher your risks of mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization and suicide.
Predictability makes stress less stressful
Loss of predictability triggers the stress response
Joan Silk of UCLA has emphasized that among primates a great strategy for maintaining dominance is for the alpha individual to mete out aggression in a randomly brutal way. This is our primate essence of terrorism.
Overabundance of predictability can lead to boredom 
Stress responses can be modulated or even caused by psychological factors, including loss of outlets for frustration and of social support, a perception of things worsening, and under some circumstances, a loss of control and of predictability.

Chapter 14 - Stress and Depression
I have suffered from periods of depression so it is a subject I am very interested in. I took life-force yoga training to help with learn more techniques for dealing with depressions.

-The defining feature of major depression is loss of pleasure
Anhedonia = inability to feel pleasure
Depression represents a state where those two independent axes tend toward collapsing into one inverse relationship -- too few positive emotions and too many negative ones
Accompanying major depression are great grief and great guilt. We often feel grief and guilt in the everyday sadness that we refer to as “depression.”
Some cognitive therapists consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought rather than emotion
Psycho-motor retardation is another frequent feature of depression. The person speaks and moves slowly. Everything requires tremendous effort and concentration.
Architecture of sleep changes with depression
Elevated glucocorticoids is experienced by depressives
There are many different types of depression
Amgydala is involved with fear and anxiety
There is some evidence that depression involves abnormal levels of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine
The pleasure pathway seems to make heavy use of dopamine as a neurotransmitter
As mammals we have large limbic systems
Cortex does abstract cognition, invents philosophy, remembers where your car keys are
Simplifying: Depression as an occurrence when your cortex thinks an abstract negative thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is real as a physical stressor
You can think of depression as the cortex whispering sad thoughts to the rest of the brain
Activation of the right prefrontal cortex is negative emotions and the left with 
The more prior history of stress you have, especially early in life, the less of a stressor it takes to produce those neurochemical changes. But the same stress signal, namely glucocorticoids, alters norepinephrine synthesis serotonin,
. .. 
Chapter 15 - Personality, Temperament and Their Stress-Related Consequences

I have a client who is dealing with anxiety these definitions are useful.
- We are ecologically buffered and privileges enough to be stressed mainly over social and psychological matters
- Baboon problems stem from inability to keep competition in perspective and social isolation
- Anxiety: a sense of disquiet, of disease, of the sands constantly shifting, menancing beneath your feet
- Unlike depressives, the anxiety prone person is still attempting to mobilize coping responses
- Anxiety and fear conditioning are the province of the amygdala
- The amygdala is also about aggression

Chapter 16 - Junkies, Adrenaline Junkies and Pleasure

I have a few clients who are in recovery.
- Brain contains a pleasure pathway that makes heavy use of the neurotransmitter dopamine
- Element of surprise produces even a greater amount of dopamine
- Dopamine plays an important role in the anticipation of pleasure and energizing you to respond to incentives
- Wanting vs Needing
- Context Dependent Relapse (many of them come from cortical and hippocampal regions that carry information about setting)
- Anxiolytic - a drug that lyses or disintegrates anciety
- Stress increases the likelihood of self-administering a drug to an addictive extent

Chapter 17 - The View from the Bottom

As a yoga therapist I hope to work more in underserved communities.
- Stress can make you more likely to get diseases that make you sick
- Chronic Poverty means stress
- Longevity is inversely related to poverty
-The more income inequality the worse the health and mortality of the society
- Wilkinson: In societies with more income inequality both the poor and the wealthy are healthier than their counterparts
- Poverty, and the poor health of the poor, is about much more than simply not having enough money. It’s about the stressors caused in a society that tolerates leaving so many of its members so far behind.
- “When humans invented poverty, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.”

Chapter 18 - Managing Stress

This chapter was a great summation.
-Successful Aging: no smoking, minimal alcohol, lots of exercise, normal body weight, absence of depression, a warm stable marriage, a mature, resilient coping style, being respected and needed, right sort  of infancy
-Handled Rats more successful aging
- People handling their own meds and consumption goes down
- Increasing control 
- Giving and receiving social support
- Cognitive Flexibility to switch strategies
- Few of the things that we find stressful are real in the sense that zebra or lion would understand. Because we have privileged lives we have invented stressors which we permit to dominate our lives. Surely we have the potential to be uniquely wise enough to banish their stressful hold.

How were you affected by the book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers"

Reading the book we zebras don't get ulcers was a very upsetting experience for me.  I work in a very high stress high pressure environment in TV and the more I read the book the deeper trouble I felt I was in life wise.

One huge problem I have when I am stressed and I am stressed most of the time is over-eating.  I am always hungry and I never fear full.  Chapter 5 gave me a lot of insight into this.

"You're a zebra running for your life, don't think about lunch.  That's the reason we lose our appetites when we are stressed. Except for those of us who, when stressed, eat everything in sight, in a mindless mechanical way."

I realize I am what is called "hyperphagic" (eating more).  I always wished I was one of those people who lost their appetite when stressed but it is just not me and I always wondered whu.

"..of there are large amounts of CRH and gulcocorticoids in the bloodstream, you are probably in the middle of a sustained stressor. Also a good time to have appetite suppressed. You can pull this off only if the appetite-suppressing effects of CRH are stronger than the appetite-stimulating effects of glucocorticoids." p.73

"What else separates the stress hyperphagics from the stress hypophagics? Some of it has to do with your attitude toward eating, Lots of people eat not just out of nutritional need, but out of emotional need as well.  These folks tend to be overweight and to be stress-eaters....At evene given point, about two-thirds of us are :restrained" eaters. These people who are actively trying to diet, who would agree with statements like, "In a typical meal, I'm conscious of trying to restrict the amount of food that I consume." ... Restrained eaters are actively restricting their food intake. What the studies consistently show is that during stress, people who are normally restrained eaters are more likely than others to become hyperphagic."

This restrained eater hyperphagic propensity thing sounds like me.

I really got worried about all the talk about chronic stress and disease risk.  My stress is just too long and too frequent.  Also there is an incredible lack of predictability in my work life. I don't ever know when the producers and directors are going to like that sets and when they aren't and I am going to have to make last minute changes. This lack of predictability is the source of much of my anxiety. Also I am a free-lance and have gone from job to job for 22 years. Jobs last from 1 week to 10 months.

I also don't have much control of my life working in TV. My work schedule is changing all the time. I don't know what people want from me most of the time because they have a hard time explaining.  Also where I go every day to work changes.  I don't chose any of these things.  They are all sent to me late at night in the form of a call sheet.

On the positive side, I was encouraged by the idea of outlets for frustration helping the rats to be less likely to get an ulcer. Yoga and Art are my outlets for frustration.  But sometimes I have to work so many hours I let them go and that's when I get in trouble emotionally.

I also have a lot of social support in the form of my husband Tim and my cousin Lucretia. Their love and encouragement have helped me deal with my difficult career,

As to the "perception of things worsening" that's something I am very guilty of. I hear myself and others say all the time "the business (TV and Film) keeps getting worse."

These are the reasons I want to get out of TV and be a yoga therapist. I hope I can pull it off. I need a change for my mental health.

Why is psychological stress stressful?

Physiological Stress

Sapolsky talks about in great detail in the book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" that "when we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses (as a zebra would if it were being attacked by a lion)-but they ate potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships and promotions."p.6

"But when we get into a physiological uproar and activate the stress response for no reason at all, or overs something we cannot do anything about, we call it things like "anxiety", "neurosis", "paranoia," and "needless hostility." p,7

"..,the stress-response can be mobilized not only in response to physical or psychological insults, but also in expectation of them...a physiological system activated not only be all sorts of physical disasters but by just thinking about them as well."

So this is what according to the book gets us into so much trouble leading to strokes, ulcers, dwarfish, reproduction issues, immunity issues, insomnia, depression, addiction, etc.  Our body reacts in a physiological way to psychological situations and activates the stress response over and over again. And basically we aren't designed for this, Our stress response was designed to handle short term physical stressors.

There is some good news: Firstly the body is incredibly smart.

"The body not only can sense something stressful, but it also is amazingly accurate at measuring just how far and how fast that stressor is throwing the body out of allostatic balance." p.253


And there are some positive extenuating circumstances.

"An organism is subjected to a painful stimulus, and you are interested in how great a stress-reponse will be triggered. The bioengineers (have mapped) the relationship between the intensity and duration of the stimulus and the response. . . when the painful stimulus can reach out for its mommy and cry in her arms. Under these circumstances, this organism shows less of s stress-response." p.254

"the physiogical stress response can be modulated by psychological factors. Two identical stressros with the same extent of allostatic disruption can be perceived, can be appraised differently, and the whole show canges from there. Suddenly the stress-response could be bigger or smaller depending on spychologcal factors.  In other words, psychological variables could modulate the stress-response."