Welcome back. The last lesson we looked at our coping mechanisms, our strategies for de escalating stress and if they actually help our biological reaction. Now let's look at mindfulness and meditation themselves. How do they actually help? Your Why? Why is it worth doing three weeks of this?

So there are two main ways that mindfulness and meditation can help with stress. Notice I say can help. Nothing in life is guaranteed. But with commitment, and with practice, mindfulness and meditation can contribute a lot to your life. I can't guarantee a thing though, I'm afraid as much as I'd like to. So first of all, mindfulness meditation give us the tools to resolve a stress reaction by calming it.

So when we're feeling ready to fight that tiger, run away from that Wolf, freeze so that we can be ready to run from the lion. figuratively speaking, I hope not literally, then we can calm ourselves, we can end that reaction before we get to stage two, or stage three, when we start to really, when stress is really affecting our health, and the chemicals are affecting our health. So mindfulness and meditation can help us calm ourselves in the moment, giving us some breathing room. Maybe it won't solve everything right away. Maybe we won't feel completely calm, but we'll feel calmer. And that can make all the difference.

Mindfulness and meditation can also help us look at the situation more clearly. When we're feeling stressed, when we're feeling emotional, it's difficult to see what's actually happening, because we have a story in our mind that we've bought into that we're playing a part in. So once we calm ourselves, practice calming, just ending that stress reaction, we can look at what happened. And to the best of our ability See? What what set me off? You know, and how did I respond when I was triggered and this can help us prepare for the future, once we see our habits around stress, and how we respond when we feel stressed or threatened.

Once we see this over and over, we really learn a lot about ourselves and noticing them, we can spend a bit to weaken these these instinctual reactions, and that leaves room for a different choice. We can choose a different action that might help us live healthier, that might not escalate the stress. This takes time. This takes commitment, but it is possible I speak from personal experience. My relationship to stress personally is vastly different from what it was completely, not really. So this is how mindfulness and meditation can help with stress.

I'll see you in the next video.