Cultivate your calmness quotient
By I.M. Soni

TRUE, modern life has become more exciting but it has also become fatiguing and tense. The tense person is under pressure from life-situations. He feels trapped and miserable. He is always on pins and needles. He spreads his tension, others too get the "infection" from him.

Some are ambitious, hard-driving persons frustrated by their own failures. Stressful emotional factors play a leading role in all forms of dysphoria today. Involvement in the rat-race is a major factor which shatters emotional equilibrium.

Stress is a scientifically measurable condition of chemical and physical changes in the body. In other words, outside pressures such as financial crisis, trouble at one’s job or in the family cause reactions and create wear and tear in the body.

When one is faced with a physical or emotional emergency which makes one afraid, angry, or worried, the brain sends an alarm to the pituitary gland at the base of the brain. The pituitary, in turn, sends a "battle" call, by means of messenger hormones, to the adrenals.

These are the central posts of the body. When the body is no longer able to adapt itself, it breaks down. When these two are in a state of balance, one is in good health.

If the stress situation is short-lived, the body relaxes and goes back to the normal. But if it goes on for long, or is repeated too frequently, things go wrong. The chemical "messengers" send messages to the organs. A weak organ may break down from overstrain.

In order to beat such situations, the use of drugs serves no purpose. Drugs create a psychic smoke-screen between you and the emotional factor. They do not change that disturbing factor. They simply dim your response to it.

If you control and neutralize your own reactions to the factors which cause disturbing emotions, you build your own "immune" system to them. The secret thus lies in cultivating and perfecting the self culture of relaxation. You must improve your calmness quotient.

Do not invite emotional or physical strain by over-working any one part of your body or mind by repeating the same action to exhaustion. This applies to your personal as well as professional life. Be careful to avoid the senseless repetition of the same activity when you are fatigued.

If you are tired from working in office, you are asking for trouble by spending leisure time in doing paper work at home. This is office operating in the bed-room.

The pressures of life tend to force people into highly specialised modes which become monotonously repetitive. You sink deep in a rut and suffer the results of stagnation. To avoid this, you need digression or spread the stress around. When a person acts without excessive tenseness, it means a minimum of tensions in the muscles required for an act, along with relaxation of other muscles.

When someone makes an unwelcome comment, do not flare up. Nor store ire inside you. Ask yourself, "Is he right?" If he is, smile it away. If he is wrong, brush it away. Only a fragile personality gets hurt easily.

Avoid the urge to be a superman. Aim at the highest attainable goal but do not put up resistance in vain. Re-cast your priorities. Give up, if necessary — for a while. Begin again.

Take the initiative to end a quarrel or a misunderstanding whether it is with a spouse or a colleague. Making every situation a prestige issue, does not add to prestige. By initiating compromise, you raise yourself in your estimation and an emotional wall against future stress. Your emotional fort is fortified.

Also, take the wool off your eyes as far as people are concerned. Do not expect too much from others. Expectations are often belied and cause frustration.

Avoid extravagant waste of energy. Very few people have successfully cultivated the art of conserving energy. Most fritter it away in senseless flings. You have seen your colleague wasting several sheets of paper while drafting a letter. He has not acquired the discipline which controls nervous energy.

The secret of relaxation is not idleness but spending less energy and accomplishing more. This is another name of efficiency.

A hobby is rewarding and enriches personality. Besides, it earths tensions. Writing is engrossing and unfolds personality. Good reading is cultural riches.

Take a walk. Go to a park or open space. Fresh air rushes into the lungs, clears the mind and invigorates the body. It unties the mind.