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(…continued from last week)

Brainwaves & Breathing

The word stress is a derivative of a Latin word, “stringere.” Stringere means to bind tightly. And unfortunately that’s what many of us to do ourselves on a regular and ongoing basis. We tie ourselves in knots over things. We bind ourselves up. We get kinks in our necks and tight muscles in our back, and we move too fast and we stretch things out of whack. We bind ourselves up. We tie ourselves in knots.

Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, two medical researchers, Dr. Thomas Holmes and Dr. Richard Rahe created what was called the Life Change Index, or the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. They spent many years researching stress and the affects on the normal human life, body, illness, adjustment, the way that you are resilient or not resilient.

They looked for many, many, many different ways to be able to test whether you were in a stress response or not. Well when they finally figured out how to do that, what they realized was that stress is a brainwave pattern response.

You have four brainwaves; beta, alpha, theta and delta brainwaves. Beta brainwaves are any brainwave that is 14 or more cycles per second. It’s a small, very rapidly moving brainwave. Fourteen or more vibrations up and down per second. Alpha brainwaves are eight to 14 cycles per second. Theta is four to eight cycles per second. Delta is two to four cycles per second.

You normally experience a prominence of delta brainwaves only for a few minutes at a time, when you’re in the deepest levels of sleep. When you’re conscious, when you’re wide awake, you have prominently beta brainwaves going on. Some alpha, some theta, but prominence is beta brainwaves.

What Holmes and Rahe found was that when we become stressed the beta brainwave changes and begins to have high peaks and valleys. It is no longer this smooth moving little line, but it gets these big blips, big jumps high and low, and that shows a stress response going on in the brain.

Brainwaves and Hormones

That mental stress response, brainwave response, causes hormonal triggers in the body and a change in our physiology so we’re ready to respond to that battle with our battle axe. So, the brainwave triggers the body. It sets it off.

Once doctors Holmes and Rahe found these brainwave patterns, they had a method for rapidly, accurately detecting the stress response. Even if someone didn’t know how stressed they were, the doctors could hook them up to an electroencephalogram, monitor their brainwave pattern, and see the stress patterns in the beta waves. With that brainwave pattern, they could also tell the level of stress.

Holmes and Rahe tried various means to bring the stress brainwave down. They sent some of their test subjects to counseling. They put some on medication. They had people who were in high stress jobs, alter their job or change their job function. They had others who were having a struggle with money, find better positions where they made more money. If they were in tough relationships, they had them sometimes do what they could to overcome the problems in the relationship or increase communication or go to counseling.

For some research subjects, they had them drink alcohol to see how it affected the stress brainwave. Have a few cocktails here, have a few more later, have a few more later. Well that may help on one hand, but you do that too long and that takes care of your liver for you.

During the 60’s, there was a prominence of people smoking marijuana. They even tried this with some test subjects to see how it affected the stress response if they smoked pot. It helped but it didn’t work really well. And, it’s illegal—so much for that one.

They hypnotized some people. They had people try martial arts or tai chi. They had other people take up yoga. They had some people do breathing exercises. They had other people meditate.

The Relaxation Response

They tried dozens of things to combat the stress brainwave. But the only thing that they found that was consistently able to handle the stress response, were deep relaxation strategies; deep breathing, meditation, tai chi, yoga, hypnosis, contemplation strategies where you sit and you just watch a bubbling stream, or you sit and watch the fish swim around in an aquarium, and just sort of let your mind go.

What do all those things have in common? Breathing. What’s one of the first things they tell you if you take up yoga for instance? Take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, release it when you’re ready. That’s one of the best, most saged pieces of advice most of us ever got. You remember your mom or your dad telling you, “Okay, I understand you’re upset, so just take a deep breath, count to 10, calm yourself down.” You ever heard that? Most of us did multiple times.

That’s some of the best advice any human being ever gave to another human being on planet earth. Why? Because that simple deep breath relaxes your brain and calms your body. It is an automatic signal to quiet your physiology, to calm your heart, to relax your breathing, to let things go. That one simple thing can make a giant difference in the brainwave pattern especially if you do it over and over, over a brief period of time.

(to be continued…)

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