this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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15 minutes of just sitting in the calm quiet is proven to reduce stress hormones in the body by helping regulate the hypothalamic-pituatary-adrenal (HPA) pathway. 15 minutes of quiet every day can work wonders on your mental and physical health. Deactivating the HPA pathway reduces the stress hormones in your system, which reduces every bodily systems stress reaction. This can help your mood, obviously. Anxiety, depression, irritability, all responses to stress. It can also help with autoimmune issues, though. Stress hormones cause your immune system to go into overdrive because your body is expecting to have to deal with a wound as a potential source of infection. Lowering those stress hormones has been demonstrated to help with autoimmune disorders like lupus, fibromyalgia, psoriasis and others. It's said that we operate in two modes: fight or flight, or rest and digest. When you're stressed, your body moves resources away from your digestive system. It's basically saying "We dont have time to digest food right now, we gotta run away from this bear". If you're stressed all the time, you're always running your digestive system inefficiently. So regulating the HPA pathway has been correlated with improvements in shit like Crohn's, colitis, IBS and other digestive issues. Constant stress boosts your heart rate, constricts your blood vessels and increases your blood pressure, so regulating the HPA pathway can lead to decreases in the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Thing about sitting quietly in a calm space is that a lot of us, myself included, will fill that space with thoughts that just cause more stress. Luckily for us anxious folk, meditation exists and is quite literally the culmination of millennia of smart, dedicated people trying to solve this exact problem. There are tons of resources online where you can learn how, many of them are free. They'll teach you how to detach from stressful thoughts and situations, how to stop agonizing over what's already done and being terrified of what could happen and just acknowledge what's going on right now. Try it. If I'm totally wrong and you hate it you're only out 15 minutes.
Tldr - stress hormones make your whole body go into emergency mode. Emergency mode is good during emergencies, but not good all the time. Bringing your body out of emergency mode when there's not actually an emergency helps pretty much every part of you be healthier. You can bring your body out of emergency mode with 15 minutes of sitting quietly in a calm space. Meditation can help you establish that calm space.
I've been on edge almost all the time when I'm at work. I feel like it's mostly my mindset though, and most of the time things happen to be not as bad as I imagined.
Now I can't work unless I'm listening to music.
When I can't sit in the quiet it's because my brain is circling around something uncomfortable. I wouldn't dare to presume to tell you that's what you're doing, or what to do about it. It could be something as simple as "I've got something I want to talk about with my partner", it could be something foundational to who i am as a person and I'm gonna have to acknowledge it and work on it.
Things like this are why meditation is important. Few if any of us are able to sit comfortably in the quiet in a way that will benefit our minds and bodies. It's natural to be looking to the past or the future, and doing so has its place. We learn from the past, and we plan for the future. What meditation will teach you is how to delineate between looking at the past and future and obsessing over the past and future past the point where it serves you. It teaches you how to, in the words of Ram Dass, Be Here Now.
Thank you for this.
Is it the quiet that does or the time to meditate? I have found in my own experience I can calm down and rest with music that is aggressive and chaotic. I think for me I find it very soothing to find the structure in the chaos.
I can't really answer that one other than to lean on my personal experience, which is that sitting and quieting my mind is what works for helping me maintain balance, and I get a different but equally joyous feeling from listening to the most violently aggressive and chaotic music I can find. What I can tell you is that you may be accessing a sort of concentration meditation. There are many techniques, some involve trying to empty the mind and let thoughts flow through like leaves floating on a river, some involve checking in with all the individual parts of your body one at a time, concentration meditation involves hyperfocusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others. I think that might be the space you're in. If you're curious to find more, Buddhist Geeks has a wiki with a great set of tutorials on focus meditation.