The modern world is filled with a variety of stressors that bombard our brains and bodies. These stressors - diet, especially sugar and caffeine, a noisy or polluted environment, an alarm waking us in the morning or a timer going off to alert us to the next item on our daily agenda, the bicycle horn, or “Bell tower,” “Robot,” or verse of a favorite song telling us we’ve received a text message, traffic, or simply surfing the internet and trying to keep up with all the news that’s “fit to print,” at least electronically - triggers our sympathetic nervous system, our “flight or fight” response. Our sympathetic nervous system is a survival tool, an ancient survival tool that should be used only in “fight or flight” – life-threatening - circumstances. It is a perfect, vital marriage of function between the brain’s amygdala and adrenal glands. It has kept us alive for 500,000 years. So, it works.
We can think we are multi-tasking throughout the day: texting and driving, cooking dinner while helping our children complete their homework, or practicing our yoga while distracted by our agenda for an important meeting with a new client at work. The brain and body suggest otherwise. In fact, try balancing in standing bow pose for a minute while creating a Thanksgiving dinner menu and I bet you fall! Studies have shown that our brains actually do not multi-task, but shift focus from one task to another a micro- second at a time. This results in ineffective work and actually lower productivity. More importantly, our bodies cannot multi-task when it comes to the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and digest” system. It’s either one or the other. The default is the “fight or flight” mechanism, putting tremendous stress on our body and brain, flooding our system with adrenaline and cortisol. Our primordial self wants to survive and this system has been successful for 500,000 years. Why fix something that isn’t broken, right? …