iv: Anthroposophical Views
The sound of a butterfly's wings Dora Wagner There’s a song in all things swinging Lost in dreams and still unheard. And the world breaks forth in singing If only you choose the magic word. Joseph von Eichendorff
"Oh, if only it were always like this and I could stop time." This cherished wish in a moment of leisurely relaxation contrasts with that heartfelt sigh when we run out of breath: "I wish the day had more than 24 hours!" We all experience challenges and pressures in our daily lives, burdened by that widespread stress— scientifically, ‘dysstress’ —that can make us sick in the long run. Your heart is swimming in your chest, you have no appetite, your hands get clammy. These are definitely stress reactions. Yet that's exactly how it feels when you've just fallen in love, and which of us would avoid that experience just because hormones set our bodies on alert? On the contrary, we are impatient; highly tense until that desired moment arrives, then wishing it would last forever and never end. And there it is— that positive, good stress that focusses our attention and energy on accomplishing exactly what is of greatest importance to us. It can make us perform at our best, be inspired and successful. This ‘eustress’ does not harm us, but gives us wings, activating our strengths. Dedicating yourself with passion and enthusiasm, acting almost non-stop and yet with great energy, getting the job done— this is not an experience you have while sunbathing on a deck chair. Our autonomic nervous system oscillates in a temporal process, moving back and forth between tension and relaxation, between activation and inhibition, between eustress and distress. Stress is a physiological adaptation of our organism to internal and external demands. Whether a demand evokes eu- or dys-stress depends not only on unconscious and reflexive processes, but also on our individual socialisation (Opalka, 2015). In the hustle and bustle of today's world, with all the demands of life and work, there are
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many occasions to feel overwhelmed or unwell. Every fear, every tension, every grief, every overload we experience is reflected in physical symptoms— shortness of breath, distractedness, rapid pulse, hypertension, sweating, insomnia, diarrhoea, a tense posture that invites back pain. What a pleasure it is to find ourselves in situations of ‘flow’, where our thoughts or activities run smoothly in the here and now, when hours pass like minutes, where we are absorbed in what we are doing, oblivious to worry, neither overstrained nor bored. Reactions to stress are controlled by the central nervous system's connection to the immunologically important hormones of the adrenal glands and gonads. Disturbances of fundamental rhythms, such as the sleep-wake rhythm, have a negative effect on health. They directly affect our immune system, impairing its ability to deal with stress. This suggests that stressful experiences can also decisively damage our immune system by shifting or overriding internal rhythms. Understanding the importance of these rhythms is the ambition of chronobiology, which examines the temporal organization of physiological processes and the repeated behavioural patterns of living beings. For those ‘internal clocks’ to function, an ongoing resonance between inner and outer rhythms has to be established continually, being especially responsive to the cosmic periodicity of day, month and year. As the Earth rotates on its axis, environmental conditions such as the amount of light, temperature, and availability of food, change rhythmically. To improve their survival advantage, organisms adapt to such profound changes. There is a permanent interaction between the external signals of the environment and the internal systems of the
