As our modern-day lives become increasingly busier, faster and consequently more stressful, we need to find effective methods to help address the negative impact of stress on our health, relationships and quality of life.
Stress is a subjective experienced condition that triggers a “flight” or “fight” response, which affects our nervous system, releases hormones and impacts on our immune system.
People who experience high-levels of perceived stress often develop stress-related illnesses such as hypertension, (high blood pressure), heart disease, depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, insomnia and other mental disorders.
Results from a study with veterans and employees have found that repetition of a mantram (syllable) was helpful in a wide variety of situations, including, managing emotions other than stress, managing stress, managing unwanted thoughts and managing sleep/insomnia.
The results show that frequent mantram repetition, a mind-body technique, was found acceptable and useful for managing a variety of stressful situation, even in situations such as driving, participants found briefly repeating a mantram reduced negative feelings towards other drivers.
Unlike other techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, hypnosis, yoga, relaxation techniques which require a quite place and a period of uninterrupted time to practice, mantram repetition can be done anywhere, anything, without any external aids or in particular postures or positions.
People were able to use it while working, one employee stated “well, lots of times when I m working, you know, I m working and there’s something happening around the area and I get stressed about it and I want to do something about it….so I just do some mantram, just to take my out of it. It works!”
Exercise:
Symran (Mantram recitation) (by Dav Panesar)
Ref: J E Bormann et al. Mantram repetition for stress management in veterans and employees: a critical study. Journal of Advance Nursing 2006
