The 'Race' to Wellness

I had gone for a medical check up as part of taking life insurance. As I completed the tread mill test, the attending doctor shared an interesting insight. As you would know tread mill test is about how much time it takes for you to get to a particular heart rate. Typically it should be in 11-12 minutes. [I was at 10 minutes!:-(] So then I asked him what should I do? He said you can eat and diet better, but he said that this does not ensure that your heart is strong. He said many corporate professionals who do marathon are able to hit the 11-12 minute, but are still prone to heart diseases and attack. And that he said is because of stress!

This got me interested on how do we then build ourselves for a healthy life and what is this animal called stress?

It is all about stress, my friend! And therefore let us also not make it a race!

(There is much writing on this already out there especially in these times…so I am going to share few dimensions from my personal journey.)

Stress

Stress is the tension that we provide to any material or thing. We call it the stress test when we do a quality check of certain materials. Of course I am reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes strip. 

Thank god we do not build our lives like this!

So if our definition of resilience is about how do we build ourselves up for that extreme pressure and tension on our system, we seemed to be approaching it a little convolutedly. By definition stress is about extremities and it includes both quantity of resistance and unpredictability of it.

Let me try and explain this from a physical dimension which is the most gross manifestation and so we should be able to relate to it. If you go to deadlift 200 pounds 1 time, your body is forced to adapt in a different way than if you picked up 150 pounds a few times. By forcing your body to adapt to a very heavy workload, your bones, nervous system, joints and muscles all need to adapt and become more anti fragile in order to pick up that much weight.

Talib(1) argues that we should be forcing our body to adapt to the maximum level of chaos (heavy strength training), which has an effect of pushing us beyond our limits in a way that differs from doing medium weight for lots of reps or light weight for even more reps. Thus preparing for stress – any kind! – requires us to engage with the extreme situations both in terms of quantity and unpredictability. There is a catch 22 situation as by definition stress is unpredictable! The current pandemic is not something anyone of us could have anticipated.

So how do we create this 'anti-fragile'-ness in ourselves? We need to build our 'anti-fragile'- ness on not only 1 dimension of the body i.e. only the physical. The unpredictability puts a stress on the mind more than the body. Hence we need to approach it from all the dimensions. Let us study therefore how do we build such an approach to our life across the 3 dimensions of Body, Mind/Intellect and Spirit.

Body

Of course physical exercise is an important part of building resilience as it creates a certain flexibility and above normal stretch to your body different from the regular sedentary work life. However this is just a myopic view to how to build the body. What are the crutches you have created for yourself to get your body going?

·      Is it that cup of coffee in the morning?

·      Is it that health drink which you have after every game?

Being mindful of these crutches are important as it is not your body in its natural level of readiness that is going through the physical asks of the day, but the injected doses or these artificial flavours or ingredients that is keeping you going. Hence when that crutch is not available, there is a larger resistance. 

We are training the dog... or is it ..?

As in an evolutionary arms race (referring to the weapons race during the cold war era) (2) - a struggle between competing sets of co-evolving genes, traits, or species, that develop adaptations and counter-adaptations against each other - the consequence of these crutches is that, the requirement either increases or starts spreading to other aspects as we grow older. The arms race starts. This is relevant even to medicines. Though this proposition may be unpopular, but can we design our life without the daily tablet that we need to consume every day (whether it is for the diabetes or the blood pressure)?

Before you say this is inhumane, let me share the alternative. Almost 90% of these are lifestyle diseases (unless they are hereditary strains) which you can control by reducing that extra fried item in your diet or the sweet that you enjoy once a day. I understand medicines are important for diseases like cancer etc., but by modifying our life we can stop having tablets for many of the common ailments that we hear about.

By reducing these crutches we become more agile, resilient and anti-fragile to the context! Of course, the will required is very high!

Mind/Intellect

When one looks at sharpening the mind or the intellect, the practice of yoga and meditation is always talked about. There are many principles around the various yoga practices and of course pranayama being one of the critical ones. I used to believe that yoga is about practicing and preparing oneself for the day and not just about the 30 minutes of relaxation/unwinding. Though, I have not built expertise in these areas yet but even that belief was turned upon its head while listening to a talk by Swami Chinmayananada.

We have got used to meditating or practicing for 20 to 30 minutes in the day in order to be able to prepare ourselves for the daily challenges and stresses. He said that that is a wrong way of approaching it. Live your whole 23 other hours in such a manner that the 20-30 minutes of meditation leaves with you with a sense of awareness and realisation and quietude! We have filled our lives with choices that make it necessary to engage in these routines; but we do not realise that it is about those choices, those decisions, those reactions that actually decide the extent of turbulence in the mind.

Hence choose your day wisely and not only the school of meditation! It should not be like filling a leaking bucket!

Do we do this… every day?

Spirit

We need to immerse ourselves in the ‘spirit’ behind all these practices (pun intended). What do you mean by the spirit? It is the vision or perspective with which we look at the world and life... and even these practices. This perspective gets strengthened from what we reinforce to ourselves while we contemplate or reflect or meditate... or live. I would like to share with you a learning from our upanisads.

One of the practices of meditation is the chanting of AUM. Katha Upanisad declares AUM as the most effective support towards it. Many of us have learnt that AUM has 3 dimensions - Akara, Ukara and Makara. However, the Mandukya Upanisad (verses 1.9, 1.10. 1.11, 1.12) talks about the 4th dimension -the total silence between two chants of AUM- which transcends. It is important to dwell on this before understanding what it means for all of us and our lives.

1. As you chant the ‘A’ letter, it is the oneness of the manifested physical aspects of the world, that we dwell upon.
2. U brings to awareness the oneness of the 'manifested subtler’ aspects of this world and
3. M the oneness of the ‘unmanifested’ aspects of this world.
4. However it is in the 4th dimension of the silence (amatra) in which one realises the oneness of this creation and our lives.

Imagine operating in this world with the continuous and conscious awareness of this silence, which is actually transcending any distinctions, judgements, classifications etc. ! This interpreted differently is the pause between the stimulus and the response; maybe what even Covey was referring in his 7 Habits.

We need to imbibe this status of awareness of oneself and oneness in the moment in every moment of the day, beyond just during the meditation!

World

There is a reason that the Bhagavad Gita was shared in the battlefield - the symbolism was attaining the equanimity amongst the body, mind and spirit as we lead our daily lives with all the battles that we need to ‘fight’, the anger, the happiness, the victory, the rejection etc. It is not about realising this awareness in the mountains alone.

‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ is a phrase often shared by leaders to justify the state of affairs in our life. We have defined success in this world as something that necessarily comes with a lot of cost, giving up on things and has to be with stress.

I believe that happiness comes more from the ‘how’ than the ‘what’. It is therefore the choices that we make. Even for people who want to achieve great successes, there is a path that involves the selflessness and the oneness, of course may not give you the glory for your ego!

“Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say 'We have done this ourselves.”

― Lao Tzu –

References

1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, 2012
2. Richard Dawkins and John Richard Krebs, Arms races between and within species, 1979
3. Swami Chinmayananda, Commentary on Mandukya Upanishad