If you have MS or any other autoimmune disease, I am sure you have noticed stress’s effects on your symptoms. When our mind and body become overloaded with stress, flair-ups are undeniable.
Autoimmune disease is the most significant health problem today; over 100 exist. Research shows that autoimmune disease has nearly doubled over heart disease and twice the number of people living with cancer. We must learn tools to handle stress and negative emotions in healthy ways and our children’s anxiety. Holding on to stress and negative emotions makes us sick and our children sick. Research shows that 90% of all illnesses and diseases are stress related.
Autoimmune Disease Effects Women More than Men
Autoimmune disease affects women 3-4 times more than men. What makes me cringe most of all, autoimmune disease is one of the top 10 leading causes of death in female children and all age groups up to age 64. Research shows that these diseases have doubled in numbers, even tripling in the last half-century.
Stress Effects and Autoimmune Diseases
Everyone has triggers that lead to the stress response. The body’s stress response is natural and hardwired into us. It is not a fault or defect. Keeping inflammation down in the body is hard to do when we cannot get a grip on our stress levels and emotional body. When you have an autoimmune disease, higher bouts of inflammation are in the body. This is detrimental to your body’s immune system, making it hard to fight the common cold.
The hypothalamus is tied to the stress response. It is connected to the body through the autonomic nervous system. Releasing hormones in the body, but if stress levels are present too long, adrenal glands release high doses of cortisol, the stress hormone. It is seriously affecting the immune system’s ability to do its job.
Research has shown that MS, as well as rheumatoid arthritis and crones disease, lupus, and many more. In addition, chronic stress is associated with abnormalities in stress hormones and inflammatory markers.
Change The Way We Handle Stress
The ways we handle our stress can be changed. Meditation and breathing techniques retrain the body’s response to stressful situations. At the same time, rapid breathing is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. Deliberate focus to slow the breath with deep breathing stimulates an opposing parasympathetic reaction of “rest and digest.” Therefore, calming the nervous system’s response to stress.
The fact that we can retrain our body’s response to stress less negatively is fantastic. Research shows that breathing techniques can even change our gene expression. In other words, we have the ability and power to alter the basic activity of our body cells with our minds. Practicing daily meditation increases the amount of the brain’s gray matter in the auditory and sensory cortex int he brain. Your senses become enhanced. The brain’s gray matter also increases in the frontal cortex, a region associated with memory, and enhances decision-making.
Meditation Changes the Brain; The Brain Also Changes the Body
In one study, researchers found that in people who meditated for only eight weeks, their brains were modified in several ways. These included the posterior cingulate, the left hippocampus, the temporal, parietal junction, and the pons.
Therefore, studies prove that while meditation changes the brain, the brain also modifies the body. So, with such a powerful free tool at our disposal, why wouldn’t we meditate?
Teach Your Children to Release Stress and Emotional Upheavals
Teaching children to meditate is also essential. There are many simple ways for children to enjoy meditation and reap its calming effects on their nervous system. With autoimmune disease in the top ten causes of death in female children, we need to pay attention to the stress and emotions our children are holding. Children can feel and hold the stress and emotional upheavals we feel. They take on the energy of the stress and emotions we carry. As a result, children need to express their anxiety and feelings as much as we do.
As parents, we don’t recognize that our children are holding stress, anxiety, and negative emotions. We think because they are young, they don’t deal with the same feelings and upheavals as we do, but they do. So they need to express and get these negative emotions and stress out of their bodies as much as we do.
When your child is acting up, you don’t know why to talk to them. Instead, ask the child what they are feeling. Get them to speak and express their emotions instead of sending them to their room or standing in a corner for acting out. Children do not act out for no reason; they hold emotions that need to be expressed. Children holding on to negative emotions and holding stress is making them sick, just as it does adults. Research shows if they don’t have an autoimmune disease as a child, they are likely hospitalized as adults with an autoimmune disease.
Teaching Children to Meditate Made Simple
Teaching children to meditate is essential; other cultures teach meditation in schools. Only we in the Western World do not consider the importance of reducing stress and negative emotions and how to handle them in healthy ways in our school systems. Children learn and enjoy meditation and reap its calming effects on their nervous systems.
- Laying on the ground and looking up at the clouds to find shapes is a meditation for children. As a result, it enhances the focus it takes and the calming sensations it produces.
- Sit quietly and blow bubbles. Sitting and blowing bubbles and focusing on them as they rise and fall to the ground before blowing another. Therefore, building focus skills and patience as the bubbles hit the ground before beginning again.
- Breathing exercises are easy and fun for the parent to do with the child, for it is good for releasing stress and tension for the parent and child. Sitting and placing their hand on their bellies, breathing exercises. Focusing on the rise of their belly in the in-breath and the fall of their belly in the out-breath. Counting the breaths also enhances focus; counting one on the in-breath and two on the out-breath, and so forth. Doing this simple breathing exercise for 5 minutes is all it takes. Again, enhancing focus releases stress, calming the nervous system.
- When a child becomes angry, teach them to breathe deeply, counting to four in the in-breath and four in the out-breathe, for about 3-5 minutes. As a result, this releases the energy of anger and negative emotions connected to these feelings. Bringing the child back to center calmness.
- Art is another meditation; doing art projects with your child enhances focus and releases stress and tension. Children enjoy doing art projects, which help them express their emotions and feelings in the art—releasing stress and producing calmness.
How to Meditate For Beginners at Home https://1111newme.com/2022/10/27/how-to-meditate-for-beginners-at-home/
Stress Can Have an Impact on Autoimmune Diseases https://arapc.com/stress-and-autoimmune-dieases/
The above post has affiliate links. I connect to this company because they have helped thousands of people relieve their stressors by learning to take control of their thoughts and emotions with meditation. Individuals learn how to meditate and take charge of their lives instead of stress and anxiety running their lives, causing illness and disease. Learn to let go of chronic stress and live healthier lives.