Author Archives: Reino Gevers

A growing number of companies are realizing that the mental health of their employees is a real issue on a competitive market, demanding maximum output and performance.

I have just come back from a creative brainstorming session with a group of people involved in corporate health management. There are really interesting developments out there.

Burnout and other psychological and social stress factors at the work place are a complex issue. But companies and individuals can do much to boost their stress resilience. So how do we deal with stress?

What is generally described as burnout often comes at the end of a long period of having to deal with the same stress situation, like having to work in a dysfunctional team. Some of us in high-powered jobs have become so accustomed to a stress situation that we have lost touch to the needs of our innermost being, the basic physical need for a rest or time-out.

Prior to a burnout, patients often withdraw behind a protective wall as they stomp the work treadmill, cutting themselves off from family and friends.

Neurological research has found, that those grey brain cells in the prefrontal cortex of our brain, that is also responsible for feelings such as empathy, are greatly affected during stress. Certain regions of the brain and body are literally switched off to mobilize all resources to combat a perceived fear or threat.

Several researchers such as molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn and neuro-psychologist Rick Hanson have looked at ancient Buddhist mindfulness training techniques. What Buddhist monks have practised for centuries can be a most effective way to boost your stress resilience and train your mental state of mind to be more content and happy.

Zinn has developed from Buddhist practises his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique. The good news is that even though stress causes a reduction of brain cells in such regions as the prefrontal cortex, techniques that make you relax enable the brain to regenerate completely. Relaxation techniques such as meditation can even help you develop new mental capacities .

It starts with self-compassion and loving yourself and your body. By treating yourself with respect and loving care, you will be more mindful of others and your surroundings. Developing more self-compassion is a powerful tool at staying mentally healthy. But in order to overcome mental patterns that have formed barriers over many years it is necessary to keep up a regular training routine. Try out the 40 day method which I wrote about in one of my recent blogs. An effective mental training routine can be followed over three steps:

• Relaxing: Yoga, Taiji, or Qi Gong exercises help the body to relax. Especially if these exercises are accompanied by a mental image. “I feel all the weight of my mind flowing out of my head through my body and into the ground…”

   

• Focusing: Sit down in a meditation position, focusing all your attention on your breath, observing what feelings and emotions come to the surface without being judgmental to yourself about them and wanting to change them, for example: “Ah, there is anger, or fear or sadness or joy.”

   

• Loving meditation: With the third step you focus all your attention on yourself as an outside observer wishing you all the best of health and happiness in your life. Then you move on thinking of a special person in your life who makes your heart glow with loving warmth. Send this person all your love and good energy. Then send all that loving energy to a stranger you don’t know or might have just spotted on the subway. After that comes the hardest part, sending all that loving energy to a person you don’t like or has done you harm. End the meditation by focusing again only on your breath inhaling and exhaling. Then open your eyes and start your day.

 More information on the Five Elements in my book “Yield and Overcome”

Rick Hanson: Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

On a rational level most of us are aware that we have our health under control by exercising regularly, eating the right foods and avoiding negative stress.

So why do we have such great difficulty in just doing what makes us feel better mentally and physically in extending our lifespan and overall quality of life.

Let us look at 54-year-old Harry. His wife has chased him to a doctor after many hours of persuasive argument. The doctor does some check-ups and tells Harry. “Look your cholesterol levels, blood sugar level and blood pressure are way above average. You need to change something…”

Harry of course ignores the doctors warning. “You only live once. We all have to die some day. You won’t stop me from having my smoke, enjoying my Big Mac and a good beer after work.” Some years go by. At the age of 60 Harry has double by-pass surgery to his heart and is diagnosed with diabetes. Two years later he has a stroke, is confined to a wheel chair and is forced to go into early retirement with his poor wife also having to give-up her job to take care of him.

All of us know at least one such scenario in our own family or among close friends. The food we eat, the amount of exercise we give our bodies and the balance we find between activity and rest will especially determine the quality of life you lead as you get older. So how do we motivate ourselves to do that which makes us simply enjoy life a lot more. In my previous blog I referred to the phenomenon of self-mutilation that seems prevalent among so many young folk these days. Well older folk don’t seem much better in the way they treat their bodies like machines that just need to function. If the body starts faltering, you just take some pills to keep going.

So lets get to the point. Some religions have the tradition of fasting over 40 days to detox the body both physically and spiritually. They found that such a timespan is necessary to feel a significant change taking place. In some Buddhist traditions Mantras are recited every day at a certain time over a 40-day period.

Most people have great difficulty and find they need enormous self-discipline to integrate an exercise programme in their daily routine, especially if you come home in the evening with everyone from the dog to the children demanding attention. Here are some ways of getting around those barriers:

• Find a fixed time during the day where you are really alone and undisturbed to do your exercise routine. My wife Alyce and I have found the ideal time at 6 am in the morning. That hour of exercise in yoga, taiji and meditation gives us much more energy for the day’s challenges than that extra hour of sleep.

   

• Choose an exercise routine that fits your personality and that you really enjoy.

   

• Choose your food wisely. We are really what we eat. Without going into any dogma a good mixture of vegetables, fruit and a little meat or fish will do it. Ban white sugars and industrial salts from your diet.

   

• Find a friend, a family member, colleagues or an exercise group so that you are not alone. We are social animals and can give each other enormous motivational support.

   

• Try and keep up the routine for at least 40 days. It is the time your body needs to adapt to the change. After this time you will feel a change taking place.

   

   

You will start feeling a positive mental and physical change taking place. You will become a lot happier because you simply will start feeling much better in your body.

More information on the Five Elements in my book “Yield and Overcome”: http://goo.gl/TXSgw0

What is the Dan Tien: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dantian

I am just reading a fascinating book by Michael A. Singer “The Untethered Soul”. He goes much into why we get stuck in pain by the things that hurt us. Here is a quote that I would like to share:

“If life does something that causes a disturbance inside of you, instead of pulling away, let it pass through you like the wind. After all, things happen every day that cause inner disturbance… If you want to be free, you have to learn to stop fighting those human feelings. When you feel pain simply view it as energy.

This goes much in line with the yin-yang philosophy which teaches us to accept that we live in a world of polarity. There will always be good and there will always be bad. There will always be moments of happiness and moments of sadness.
 

In practising Taiji we learn to stay grounded and aligned by never confronting the force that comes at us with the same energy. If you resist you will lose your balance. If you soften your body if a hard force comes at you, you will win the battle.

Singer writes that every time you relax and release a pain inside your heart and actually dare to face it, it will pass.  It will be released and open up your heart and emotional body to new and more powerful energy…

More on yin and yang: https://reinoblog.wordpress.com/yield-and-overcome/
My book “Yield and Overcome”: http://goo.gl/TXSgw0

Our western culture finds itself in an extreme state of imbalance. We are buying too many things we don’t really need, eat too much unhealthy food and allowing our mind to be captured by a cacophony of so many voices that we can barely be alone in total silence for more than a few minutes.

We have become sidetracked. There is much we can learn from ancient eastern culture to regain our bearings. According to the ancient Daoist principle the universe is constantly striving toward a balance between the polarity of yin and yang.

We can understand the principle of yin and yang best by looking at the yin and yang symbol.

Within the dark yin is also yang and in the lightened yang is also yin. Day turns to night and night turns to day. The entire universe is based on this polarity which is constantly in flow and in movement. Without the polarity of the male and female there would be no life. Like this universal principle the body will always try to restore balance between these energies and set the stage for the next growth cycle.

Illness, imbalance or destruction proceeds where there is too much yin or too much yang. The advertising world is indoctrinating us 24-7 on what we need to buy or do to live a happy life. In most cases we don’t even notice how subtle these influences are. These mostly “external needs” can never be met. We live a hollow life of what we perceive to be unfulfilled personal needs and wants. Our western culture feeds on us comparing ourselves with Joe next door who has “a big house and can afford to buy a sports car.”

A couple of years ago I visited Malawi, a small south eastern African country and one of the world’s poorest countries with a gross national income per capita of 870 dollars (or personal income per person annually) compared to 27,000 in the United States. I have never seen so many happy and smiling people around me than in Malawi. It is a subjective view, but still set me thinking why people in the wealthy countries look a lot more glum. This is not to be misunderstood that you need to be poor to be happy. I presume however, that the people in the mainly agrarian culture of Malawi know that they are dependent on each other and feel a much greater sense of being part of a caring family and community.

In the Book of Wisdom, the I Ging, one of the central themes is finding the right moment to withdraw into yin or to become pro-active by going into yang. The Daoist and other wise women and men teach us that we need to let go of attachment and that this is one of the main reasons for misery and unhappiness. Unhappy and sad moments in our lives are just as transient as the happy moments. Thus the happy person is the one who has found peace in himself or herself that everything is impermanent, in a constant cycle like the seasons going through birth, growth, death and rebirth. Sadly much of organised Christian in the West focuses too much on the crucifixion and pain aspect. It is my personal view that the deeper meaning of the Christ is that we constantly go through cycles of birth, crucifixion and resurrection. After walking painfully over the path of hot coals lies growth and light.

Are we victims of our genes or can we largely influence our health?

 The debate has been raging all the more since the 38-year-old actress Angelina Jolie went public earlier this year by revealing that she underwent a double masectomy after discovering she had inherited a cancer gene that killed her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

While it remains a very personal and painful decision to undergo such a radical step, one side of the medical profession is lauding Jolie while others are questioning whether this was really necessary.

For the past decade most research has concluded that genes play a major role on whether we are obese, die of a heart attack or cancer. But this appears to be only half the truth. A new field of research called epigenetics tells us that the choices we make in our daily living and in what environment we live can actually alter our health at the molecular level, even if we are born with genes that give us a predisposition of contracting certain types of disease.

The good news here is that we have the choice. We have the freedom to decide how healthy our lives are going to be. The amount of exercise we get, the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe has a huge effect on our health.

According to the research, exercise may well alter the expression of our genes in a positive way, preventing a variety of disease such as Alzheimer, heart and circulatory problems.

Certain types of stem cells appear to determine their direction at an early stage, depending on how well we exercise and what food we eat. Using treadmill-conditioned mice, a team of researchers from McMaster University, United States, led by the Department of Kinesiology’s Gianni Parise has shown that exercise triggers those cells to become bone more often than fat. In sedentary mice, the same stem cells were more likely to become fat, impairing blood production in the marrow cavities of bones.

 “The interesting thing was that a modest exercise program was able to significantly increase blood cells in the marrow and in circulation. What we are suggesting is that exercise is a potent stimulus, enough of a stimulus to actually trigger a switch in these mesenchymal stem cells,” according to Parise

The research appeared in a paper published by the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Most of us human beings see ourselves at the top of the evolutionary ladder endowed with enormous intelligence with the capacity to reflect on our own patterns of behaviour. At the same time we are extremely rigid in our ways, unable to change a lifestyle that we know is doing us great harm.

If you ask people what is important for their happiness, most will reply that it is their loved ones, good health, friends or a good job. If you add another question: “What are you actually doing to stay healthy?” there is a long pause or an excuse like: “I don’t have any time to fit a physical exercise programme into my busy schedule.”

Ask any seriously ill person what her/his greatest wish is, it certainly won’t be a win in the national lottery. When the body no longer functions as it should be, a lot of it has to do with what kind of lifestyle you have led for the past years or decades. Most of our modern diseases like diabetes, heart circulatory ailments, cancer, skeletal and bone problems and many mental illnesses can be directly attributed to the kind of lifestyle we lead. Only a small percentage is actually hereditary and some health experts are even questioning the “cancer gene” theory, arguing that there might be some risk of dying from a heart attack like your grandfather and brother but that this need not be inevitable . There is much you can do to compensate for an inherited body weakness.

In 2011, five major causes of death (heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, and accidents) accounted for 62 per cent of all deaths in the United States. http://goo.gl/a5rdR
The figures would be much the same in other western countries. Life expectancy is increasing but how many people over the age of even 55 or 60 can really still say of themselves that they are fit and healthy.

Until the late 1950s most people in the western world had jobs demanding some kind of physical activity. Mortality rates were mostly as a result of respiratory diseases. Diabetes and obesity were rare by today’s standards. To put it bluntly: We are poisoning our bodies with the wrong foods and not getting enough exercise to stimulate our body metabolism. The amount of sugars, fats and salts we eat daily actually requires a good 20 kilometre run a day to get rid of all those excess toxins. The sad truth is that in Germany for instance the average person has less than 20 minutes of active exercise per week! Television, computer and other electronic consumption is more than four hours per day.

There are many ways you can motivate yourself to do more for your health. The reward comes in a much improved feeling of well being both physically and mentally. Watch this blog for more details. Maybe you would also like to have a look at my book.