This day in age, we’re constantly bombarded with stimuli making it increasingly hard to manage stress. Everything from our phones to email to work, family and traffic, its constant. It’s a nonstop stream of information flowing right to our brains. We’re overworked, overwhelmed and stressed the fuck out.
It used to be that we would pick up this external stimulus throughout the day and then get rid of it while we are sleeping. Our brain would kick into high gear and check all that stimulus against our values, long-held beliefs and organize it all. It would file away memories, get rid of metabolic waste and detoxify. In fact, the brain swells during the day as it takes in all the info and then can shrink up to 20% while were sleeping. It’s our brain’s way to help us manage stress. But, this only happens if we are getting proper sleep. And most of us aren’t. We’re too jacked up from constant screens and being pulled in multiple directions. We don’t spend enough time in each cycle of sleep.
Sleep used to be all we needed to effectively manage stress.
Think about it like a numbers game. We wake up in the morning, go out into the world and pick up 10 units of stress. When we go to bed at night, because we’re not sleeping properly, we only get rid of 8 units of stress. So, this means we start the next day with 2 units before we even get out of bed. We then go out into the world, pick up another 10 units but only get rid of 8 during sleep and then you start the next day with 4. And, so on it goes. This is how chronic stress in the body starts to build and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage stress.
You see, the brain and the body weren’t designed to both be on at the same time during sleep. When your brain kicks into high gear and does its filing, that’s when the body rests. The parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and conserves energy. It slows the heart rate, increases intestinal and gland activity, and relaxes sphincter muscles in the gastrointestinal tract. But, if we can’t get our brain to do the work, our body can’t relax and we start to hold that tension and bring it forward into the next day.
As a society, we need to start finding different ways to manage stress
We need to start finding other ways to manage stress because what we’re currently doing just isn’t cutting it. If we don’t, it can lead to burnout and in some cases illness and disease. One way to do this is through meditation and more specifically, light meditation. The Lucia N°03 is a form of brain entertainment that helps you sink into the deep parasympathetic nervous system rest we need.
The Light entertains your brain in a way that you slowly start to drift. It holds you in the space between wakefulness and sleep. When we spend time there, our body can start to release the stress that we’ve been carrying with us from day to day. More now than ever we have to find ways to manage stress and the Lucia N°03 can help. Click here to book your appointment and get under the Light.
Recent Comments