Entry #6 Unda pressa

"Silver Lining", Tiffany Holman, Oil

        About a week ago I was taking a yoga class here on campus. The room held just a handful of students in with our yoga mats laid out like staggered notes on a staff. The instructor here on campus has the most adorable European (German, I think?) accent, colorful laugh, and twist of sarcasm. We began our class with a little discussion about stress. She told us a story that evening about the early yogi's and how different their purpose was. They used yoga as a tool to experiment with the breath, just as a wood wind musician would, Except in this case your body would be the instrument (I Don't know if that metaphor makes a whole lot of sense). Nowadays There are many different variations of yoga ranging from Buddhist monks to people on Instagram. 
       While on our topic about stress, I shared a little bit about what we had been talking about in my psychology class that week. Stress can do a lot of horrible things to your body (heart attack, autoimmune diseases, and the inability to fight off illnesses for example ). Many studies have been done on it, but one really stuck with me was an experiment they did on rats...It was pretty inhuman... But interesting. They had three rats in individual cages that were a tight little cylinder shape so they could only move back and forth. One rat was the control subject (let's call him rat C), so nothing happened to him except that he was in the same environmental situation and had the same amount of food as the other two. A little bell would go off periodically and when that happened, the other two (rat A and B)  would receive an electric shock 10 seconds after the bell would ring. The two rats that were being shocked had one small difference between their cages. One rat (rat A) had the ability to push a little button with its nose that would stop the shock and if it happened to do so then rat B would not get shocked either. So they received the same amount of shocks. The only difference in their two scenarios was that rat A had the ability to do something about it's situation. Rat B on the other hand had no choice in what happened to it. After the experiment they decapitated and dissected the rats and looked at their stomachs. They found over several case studies of this experiment that rat B with no control over the situation had over twice the amount of ulcers in its stomach every time. They had no environmental differences except that psychological one. The fact that one was hopeless in its situation and the other could do something.  
          They related it this back to humans and how we process stress. Our cortisol levels don't jump up when we do activities such as running. They do when you enter a stage of fight or flight mode, in order to affect your adrenaline levels like if you were being chased by a bear. Although stress can be harmful to our bodies, it has withstood time and human evolution. We don't experience the same kind of stress our ancestors did though. We didn't have to hunt for our food in the woods or deal with the same environmental situations that our elders did. Today it takes its form in prolonged states, and in many social situations. But what this study of the rats has taught us all about stress is that it is much more harmful to our bodies depending on our psychological states. Whether or not the person burdened by the anxieties of day to day believes that they have the ability to change things vs someone who believes that they are hopeless in stressful situations. For example, someone who gets promoted at work. One can become stressed realizing the more responsibilities and time they are going to have to put in or, someone can take it as an opportunity for growth and do new things. 
           Life has a wonderful way of taking hold of a person and turning them upside down. The unexpected can send ones cortisol levels through ozone. Stress effects all of us deeply and in many different ways. But it's important to remember, no matter what, whether you are chronically ill or are dealing with a hectic life, you do have a choice to change things. Even if it's just the way you perceive the situation. We live in a world with endless possibilities. "Save up your hopes friends"(Listener).


Attached is another song by the band Listener. This song got me through the election season and after.

The art at the top is a painting I did about a year ago about this topic. The concept of it is to symbolize being swept away in chaos and up to her neck in it (the red) and the figure reaching for that "Silver Lining". The fish are there because I was going through a fish phase and decided to have them flying through the air.