MENTAL DIGESTION AIDS US WHEN WIRED AND TIRED
FEBRUARY 6, 2010: As Americans we spend a lot of time thinking about physical digestion (what we eat, when we eat, what we're not going to eat, how many calories stuff has) but what about Mental Digestion. When we have poor mental digestion we experience stuff like poor sleep, obsessive worry, lethargy, impatience, fatigue, anger and an annoying degree of anxiety. How does this happen?
1. Being too sedentary keeps us in our heads, leading to overall mental stuckness. We need to move and breath, like we do in yoga.
2. Watching others move like on dancing with the stars doesn't help our mental constipation. We still need to move and breath.
Two articles that support this:
(1) Well, health experts say that sitting is deadly. "Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods - even if you exercise regularly - could be bad for your health. ANd it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place - just the overall number of hours it occurs. Several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals says Elin Elblom Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences as reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
(2) In the January 29th, 2010 issue of the The Week, page 23 an article suggests "TV can kill you. Watching too much television may shorten your life by years. Australian researchesrs tracked the medical conditions of 8,800 healhty adults for several years; the more television the participants watched, the more likely they were to have died during hte years examined. On average, for every hour per day spent watching TV, a subject was 18% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease, 9% more likely to succumb to cancer, and 11% more likely to die of any cause. The culprit is the inactivity TV promotes. Prolonged watching of TV equals a lot of sitting, which invariablly means there's an absence of muscle movement, study author David Dunstan tells CNN.com. Long, unnatural periods of doing nothing physically, he says, clearly lead to premature death. The antidote is to just get up and move, he adds. The more you move, the greater the health benefits likely to be."
Our mental digestion is relieved by using the breath led poses in vinyasa yoga to help us circulate our energies, both physically and mentally. Otherwise our minds feel both WIRED and TIRED. We have this need to burn off excess energy that's pent up from sitting too much and we also need to breath and refresh our brains. Remember as John Doulillard, Director of LifeSpa School of Ayurveda in Boulder, Colorado says, "everyone thinkgs that when you can't sleep, you have too much energy, but usually people have too little energy: they are TOO exhausted to get to sleep." Please stay with your commitment to yoga and let your life be free of all constipation, mental or otherwise! Peace and light, Silvia