by MARK FLANAGAN
Your eyes dart up to the office clock, the minute hand creeks to 3:19. Great. Only an hour and 41 minutes to kill, then you trade staccato horn yelps with the rest of the city as you inch your way back home… and think of your unpaid bills, the garden that really didn’t get enough weeding, your son’s behavioral problems in school, and that ever increasing pouch around your midsection. Your mind tumbles and trips over itself as it attempts to navigate traffic and wrestle with your worries. Even if you get home without a collision, your body will still feel like it was hit by a truck. Who wants to weed then?
Your eyes dart again. 3:20. Great.
In American society, multi-tasking (especially mental multi-tasking) is a considered a requisite for everyday life and concentration on one single item is generally seen as un- or under-productive. The irony is, the more we take on, the less we seem to be able to accomplish.
Some recent studies highlighted in this two part post have begun to illuminate how and why focused and controlled awareness can allow us to get more done, and feel better about it.
Part one will touch on the body’s response to stress, how stress can be triggered by worry, and how mindfulness can bring about a sense of control and thus reduce the stress. Part two will focus more on the experience of mindfulness, using the example of addiction to demonstrate how the addictive process can be interrupted by focused, mindful thought.
However, reading this post might require that you forgo posting viral videos all over your friends’ Facebook wall (only for a minute or two, I promise).
Stress: Physiology, Perception and Health
The human body is well adapted for dealing with external threats by activating the stress response. In the short term, the human stress response serves to mobilize energy stores such as glucose, increase cardiovascular rates which provides oxygen for vital organs and muscles, and decrease processes, such as digestion and growth, not needed for immediate survival.
However, external physical threats are not the only way to activate the stress response. Due to the advanced social and cognitive patterning in humans, chronically experienced stress (excluding traumatic events and brain injury) generally comes in the form of psychosocial stress. Psychosocial stress manifests as a result of concerns about social relations and anticipation of future challenges.
Neuroanthropology for more