As we discussed a few episodes ago, there are three ways Yoga minimizes stress.
First two are the Yama and Niyama steps of Yoga. These reduce the negative thoughts and reinforce positive thoughts. That puts almost an end to thought wars that create most of the stress.
But thought wars are the extreme stress inducing cases. Even without these thought wars, we often undergo stress.
Think of how your day starts.
You somehow get ready and start to your office or wherever you work. You start driving to your work place. You get irritated whenever you encounter the traffic jams. You will be worried about your boss’s reaction if you reach your office late. Whole lot of pending work half done the previous day, also worries you.
While you are somehow managing to free yourselves from all these irritations, you remember the petty argument you had the previous night with your spouse. You also are reminded of the financial crunch your family is facing – so many bills to be paid, home loan repayment, and so on. There is no end to the thought trains. And you would be drowned among all these.
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| Yoga way of stress reduction |
When you try to attend to one problem, some other problem pulls you back and you keep tossing between thoughts.
Well, all of us are forced to do multi-tasking each day. We are designed to do that. But there is a limit. Each task needs our attention and our brain cannot cope up with so many of them at a time.
What you need is to prioritize these nagging thoughts and attend to only those that need to be attended. Your arguments with your spouse, the nice dress your friend has and you want to buy, and so on can be put on the back burner.
If you can be selective in choosing the thoughts, you can be free of most stress. And that is where a well-focused mind comes handy. You attend to only those high priority thoughts and the rest of the thoughts gradually stop nagging you. How?
Thoughts are sporadic neural activities that erupt based on the activity in the surrounding clusters of neurons. These could be based on some memories, or something that we saw, or even something that we did.
This sporadic activity needs lot of information from other brain regions for them to go on. They need to get connected to remote brain regions. They also need periodic boosting to sustain their activity. All these need the attention paid by our attention system.
If the attention system does not pay attention to these sporadic thoughts, their activities cannot go on indefinitely, and they gradually die down. Now it is up to you to decide which activities should be attended and which to be ignored. That requires a well-trained attention system on which you have the control.
With a good focus, you can handle a small set of thought trains at a time and the rest will dampen out sooner or later. Since they get no attention, they don’t produce any new like thoughts either. So, effectively, the stress caused by this flurry of thoughts and the rapid switching of attention between them gets greatly minimized.
At this point I want to point out that unless you want to attain the final stages of Yoga, you don’t want to have a single pointed mind. For your ‘normal’ worldly activities, you need to be able to switch between a small set of thought trains. Too much of focus may not be good for you. That is the reason I often say that focusing techniques should not be over-done.
You need to be focused but NOT overfocused!
Well, there are nice things awaiting a well-focused person, which Patanjali calls as Ekaagra Citta – single pointed mind. Let us discuss that in the next episode.
A series revolving around Mind – Science of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Notions of reality, Mind modulation, Domains beyond Mind, and so on. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2019-2020
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