Photo: Courtesy Fitbit
Dr. Deepak Choprasays that in any situation, no matter how ordinary or how critical, we can re-interpret our experience and make a choice to move away from anxiety. But it’s a skill, and it takes a lot of practice.
“When you have stress, anxiety, anger, depression, you can intervene,” he says, while acknowledging that the global COVID crisis and political and social justice emergencies over the past year have put an increased strain on our mental health.
“Anything that we can do to minimize stress [is good], especially now during the pandemic. In the U.S. they are reporting the highest rates of mental health concerns like stress, anxiety and sadness from March 2020 to May 2020.”
People with prolonged mental health concerns should get professional help, but a mindfulness practice can also be a tool to ease anxiety. Dr. Chopra, 74, says that one way to work with depression and anxiety is to get into the habit of choosing love over resentment. But how? And what does that mean?
“There are so many ways to choose love,” he tells PEOPLE. “And if you choose love, of course, automatically, your body relaxes. All you have to do is to think of someone you love, imagine their presence in your heart, and everything relaxes.”
Another way to choose love, he says, is to forgive and to “feel gratitude for all the things that you have in your life, especially the relationships in your life,” he says. “So you can choose love, not just one way, but many ways.”
He says there is scientific evidence to support the way that thepractice positively affectsour health.
“When you are feeling resentment, grievances, anger, hostility, anxiety, guilt, shame, or depression, there’s a biological component to it. And the biological component is that your hormones, first of all, go out of balance. So there’s a hormone called cortisol, which goes up and cortisol, when it’s chronically up is responsible for things like diabetes, obesity, a weak immune system. The other hormone that goes up is adrenaline. And that causes inflammation in the body. So between those two things, cortisol going up and inflammation in the body, everything gets disrupted.”
“So what we’re learning now, and this is part of big research these days, is that stress causes something called sympathetic overdrive, inflammation, weakening of the immune system. And when you relax — choosing love is one way to relax, deep breathing is another way to relax — as soon as you do that [you shift to] the vagus nerve, and we now call it the rest, reset, and renew nerve. So what you’re doing is you’re shifting from sympathetic overdrive to rest and renew.”
Dr. Chopra teaches this technique and other mindfulness exercises in his new Mindful Method series, a collaboration withFitbitavailable to premium members. “They range from 2 minutes to 20 minutes a session, so you can fit them into your day in a week that works best for you and for every level.”
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“This pandemic, I think, is an opportunity for us to reinvent our lives and reinvent how we feel in our physical body, but also improve our emotional wellbeing.”
source: people.com
