Modern day society is a demanding place to live in with a lot of overwhelming things to choose from.

To protect ourselves against stress, nature has provided us with a build in stress defender; an energy pathway that runs through the body and transports the flow of energy.  This particular transport system goes by the name of Triple Warmer.  It jumps to attention when danger threatens  to invade our lives.

Triple warmer stems from the days we were living as hunter and gatherers and needed an adrenaline boost when a sabertooth tiger was threatening to attack us or when we needed some extra energy  power to go on a mammoth hunt.

Between then, 10.000 years ago and present day life, Triple Warmer basically still functions the same. The thing is though, the sabertooth tiger has become extinct and we get our mammoth in the supermarkets these days. Triple Warmer however is still there, waiting to fight off foreign invaders and dangers. It regards a lot of what is taking place in our lives these days as reason to be on guard, such as:

• artificial sweeteners, preservatives; colorings in our foods;
• overcrowded public transport
• mail from the tax office
• toxic relationships
• financial challenges
• constant exposure to pollution (both visible as invisible, such as electromagnetic radiation from wireless systems/cellphones/computers
• breaking news of natural disasters. terrorist attacks; even when they happen way beyond your doorstep

Next to that; the big difference between our hunter and gatherer days and our present day and age is that in the old days the
mammoth at some point would have been hunted down and be roasting on an open fire. The sabertooth would have gone back to its den. Triple warmer, at some point, would have switched itself off and would have taken a break.

Our modern day lives however provide very little of  such downtime. Today’s hunter and gatherers are constantly pressured to achieve things; meet the costs of living, watch breaking news from all over the world.  Without us even noticing it, our bodies are on the alert 24/7. As a result the Triple Warmer meridian is constantly drawing energy from the general supply of the body; as such depleting the other energy pathways of other bodily functions. Worst case scenario, this can lead to burn out.

The good news is that once you become aware of this process you can take conscious steps to de-stress. Grounding exercises, yoga, tai chi, qi gong, nature walks; tv-less nights; conscious cooking; mindful living, they all help you to unwind and signal TW  to relax and be cool.

Ingrid Schippers, 06-02-2018

 Click on the card to learn more about its background

The spoken version of this blog, features as end note on  ‘Dutchbuzz’, the radio hour for Internationals every Tuesday  from 10 to 11 pm on ‘Den Haag FM and can be found in the Programme Archive of  the Dutchbuzz podcasts, dated February 06, 2018.

More on the meridians and their pathways can be found in the blog of June 18, 2017: meridians and their affirmations. 

The post Feeling constantly stressed out? appeared first on EN Energycounseling.nl.

The other day I heard someone say; “I don’t understand the hurry of all these people, we’ll all reach the finish line one day anyway, whether we hurry or not.”

Have you noticed that too? How sometimes people are stressed even when it doesn’t serve a purpose ? Caught up in a traffic jam or train delay with the certainty they will be late and yet they keep looking at their watch?

The thing is though that constantly looking at a watch won’t cure the delay or slow down time, on the contrary, it only confirms the stress and stalls everything else that goes on at the same time.

When you’re stressed you can’t think of anything else.
All that occupies your mind is the stressor, that which makes you feel stressed.

So not only does stress cause you to be anxious, it also debilitates everything else going on in your life, as you have no energy left to direct towards other things.

Being late for an appointment is only an easy example in this context.
It also goes for being stressed over a relationship, financial problems, health issues, worries over children, parents or friends. Once we are stressed over something, anything at all, human beings are programmed in such a way that all energy is directed towards that which causes the stress.

This behavior originates from our hunter and gatherer days when an attack from a saber tooth tiger still required all of our attention, leaving no time for other issues.
The problem with this spontaneous reflex however is that the world today offers many more stressors on a daily basis than the occasional saber tooth. Time frames, deadlines, in fact the invention of the watch itself, the workings of economy, money issues, bills, stockexchange, morgages, alimonies, they are all little saber toothes, or should I say saber teeth in themselves.

How to de-stress, so that you are able to function again in other fields of life, when a stressor occupies your mind, may well be one of the biggest health issues of the era we live in today

For apart from taking up time and personal space, stress also affects your immune system, for the simple reason that all of your resilience is directed towards the stressor leaving the rest of body, mind and spirit unguarded against other invasions of the nervous system.

Now lets see this as a learning curve. Today, I invite you to think of a personal cure against stress. We all have different Tools in life. For one person curing stress might mean a walk past the shoreline, for the other taking a stiff glass of wine and for a third to sit down and meditate.
The first requirement is to realize you can actually actively weapon yourself against modern day Saber-teeth simply by becoming aware of the phenomenon.
The fact that the beach walk might be healthier than the stiff glass of wine is secondary.

Just think, what you, you personally yourself, so that’s you, could do to diminish stress in your life.
I wish you creative thinking.

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