What is stress?

I had met a young colleague yesterday for coffee. He has just quit his job and is going into independent practice. Looking for clients, the regular rejection, the travel etc has its own pressures and the young man was very stressed. It set me thinking on what stress is, and why we experience it.

I looked at it logically. The human body, despite being the most fabulous machine in design, evolved in a very wild environment. The primary threat to humans was physical and not mental. Humans could get attacked by wild animals. Humans could get attacked by other humans too! So while the terrain was difficult, it was not complex. i.e. the situations were simple:

If a smaller animal  attacked me, I would fight. If a tiger attacked me, then flight!

So the human body was primarily conditioned for two responses: Fight or Flight.

Here, there is zero stress, only action!

So stress is simply this: Stress is the gap between Fight and Flight.

However as human society evolved (?!), the situations this body finds itself in are infinitely more complex. Things like insults, bullying, abuses, Boss venting his anger at you, Mother In Law taunting you, someone falsely accusing you of something etc etc are common place these days. But the human body does not know how to handle these 'exceptions' to its programming!

For example the Boss is berating you (rightly or wrongly), you can neither Fight (beat him) him nor can you simply run away (Flight). Thus, at at instinctual level body is being forcibly held right in between the only two responses it knows!

This is stress.

The only way to rid us of stress is to move the operation of the psyche from the instinctual level to the conscious level.  This is possible only through Yoga, whether kriya or the classical yogasanas, learnt and practiced the right way.This was my prescription for my young friend.

Thought I would share these nuggets with my readers. Take what you like, discard the rest :)


I credit this post to my Guru, without whose inspiration I could not have written this.