So what are the five most
stressful situations?
Here is the ranking according to the highly-
regarded Holmes and Rehe Stress Scale:- DEATH OF A SPOUSE
- DIVORCE
- MARITAL SEPARATION
- IMPRISONMENT
- DEATH OF A CLOSE FAMILY MEMBER
You’ll notice these five actually break down
into three major areas: loss, relationship
breakdown and imprisonment. Let’s look at
some specifics.Loss
My first zen teacher used to say that one of
the consequences of love is grief – sooner
or later you’re going to lose your loved ones
(or they lose you). Does that mean we don’t
love? “No,” he would say, “It means we learn
to handle grief.”
My grandmother was an incredibly
important person in my life. One summer I
came back from holiday in France and she
was gone. She’d been getting frailer but none
of us expected her swift exit. What do you doom mind om mind
How to survive life’s 5 most stressful
situations with zen. By Julian Daizan Skinner
S
tress is a serious matter.
The American Psychological
Association links it to the western
world’s six leading causes of death.
In life too, it causes widespread
misery, ill-health and premature ageing.
For the past decade or so I’ve been
running a training for meditation and
mindfulness teachers. Dealing with stress
is a cornerstone of our work. My own
training happened in Japan, where stress
contributes to suicide being the most
significant cause of death for young and
middle-aged men. From homeless people
to Tokyo Stock Exchange executives, my
teacher’s temple was a place they could all
come and find respite and grow resilience.
Before we look at some of the things I
learned about handling stress, let’s take a
backwards look. The roots of the human
stress response arise from our earliest
days. For many millennia we lived in small,
vulnerable bands on the African Savannah.
All too often we would encounter something
aggressive, for example a lion. As you most
likely know, the immediate reactions would
involve fight, flight or freeze. Non-essential
functions would be shut off and energydiverted towards handling the threat. Then a
second phase, a resistance reaction, would
follow. Here the body would be flooded with
cortisol and other glucocorticoid hormones
which increase blood sugar level, blood
pressure and reduce inflammation –
keeping you going, so that you could reach
a place of safety and start recovering. If
that never quite happened and the stress
hormones kept flooding your system, you’d
enter the third phase: exhaustion and
eventually burnout.
You’ll have experienced the same
full-blown stress reactions in your life.
Even a brush with burnout is surprisingly
common. But your day-to-day experience
will also involve multiple smaller stressors
that trigger the same mechanism and,
if unaddressed, will build and combine
towards overload. If you can learn how to
manage these daily stressors - through
meditation and mindfulness, for example- you’ll not only reduce this build-up, you’ll
also be much more able to deal with the
big stuff. When experiencing stressful life
events, there may be times when you need
professional help. But there is a lot you can
do for yourself.
It will all
be fine