Relaxation without the Drama
Happy New Year! We just rang in 2015, which is exciting. At the start of a new year, we traditionally make important promises to ourselves and our family.
Last year, we learned that we live in an extremely stressful time. The world around us is so turbulent, and we still must deal with our everyday stressors. There was a recent cartoon in The New Yorker in which a patient tells his therapist, “I’ve stopped watching the evening news because it made my problems seem so insignificant.”
Imagine stress filling a big cauldron that sits in the hearth of an old cabin. There is a fire under the vessel, which is pressure from the outside. There are stressful elements in life swimming around in the pot. As the heat
and the ingredients increase, we become vulnerable to “boiling over.”
In professional sports, the basketball coach throws a chair across the court. Recently, the coach of the New York Jets was fined $100,000 for using profanity, and this was not his first time. Some of my patients needed to learn management of stress. One man threw his wife through a glass door. Another, who thought he could cater to all of the wife’s demands, hit a point where he destroyed all the Christmas decorations.
As the cauldron grows, so does the danger. A while ago, I was involved in a case in which a man became so stressed that he developed an autoimmune disease. However, a critical moment came when a gun appeared and the wife was killed. Now our friend has 30 years to reflect on how to manage stress. As I told my class in criminal psychology, most of the people I have met always want to return to the few minutes just before the incident.
We are all vulnerable to the “chaos in the cauldron” and it need not be anger induced. A woman came in overwhelmed with family illness. Her husband was an invalid, totally dependent on her, and she recently learned that her grandchild suffered a mild head injury. These stressors created a sense of despair, and she needed to gain control of her life. When I mentioned relaxation techniques, this busy and pragmatic woman immediately resisted, saying, “I don’t have the time or the agility for yoga. I don’t want to go to a place with New Age music and everyone seems spacey.”
I needed to impress on her that relaxation and meditation are essential to health, and they need not involve going to dramatic environments with music and accouterments. The investment in relaxation and meditation may take only an hour a day but it is a time you entrust to you. It can make you feel better, avoid stress-related illness, and make you clearer in your thinking.
Over the summer, my wife and I spent some time at a retreat with proper eating, exercise classes and lectures on health. My favorite was those little enclaves of flowers and water where one could find solitude and comfort. It was here I could meditate and get in touch with “me.” If one has difficulty with entering into meditation, they can begin with a prayer, which can provide the map to begin a journey into oneself.
Life is very real and so is our health, which we must protect. We need to dedicate time for relaxation/meditation. There are patients you may consider Type-A personalities. They can be competitive with an impatience. They can be aggressive and demanding with a tendency to alienate others. This personality type has been related to hypertension, heart disease and social isolation. This personality type can benefit from an hour a day of relaxation/meditation. People, even the Type A, are beginning to realize the truth about meditation, which is stimulating the development of meditation studios. In Manhattan, one studio invites people to attend an 8:00 a.m. session for $20. Ninety people show up to the session, which is significant. Patrons are competitive Type As who may network after the session but see the health benefits of meditation and relaxation.
Let us make a resolution to dedicate an hour a day to relaxation. It does not mean we are lazy but means we are getting healthy.
