Personal values: daily coping: 'Reflecting on one's personal values reduces cortisol responses to stress'

A great quarrel today has to do with the relation of science and religion. Just today, new medical science results have ascertained a relation between the mental acts of thinking, meditating, referencing, or otherwise mentating on one's most basic meaningful values in a manner which embraces re-affirmation and confirmation that has the psychosomatic result of reducing stress in one's daily life. We already know this, vastly, from anecdotal evidence in all sorts of situations, including those of prisoners of war being subjected to torture (to cite an extreme case). Now, medical science has pinpointed, apparently for the first time, the human bio-chemical somatic activities that underlay but do not determine the power of prayer and the possible release as an outcome in the physiology of stress.

Of course, the news report does not use the P-word, prayer. One should not assume that prayer, as conceived and practised within the framework of any particular religion, is the only form of "meditating" or "referencing one's most meaningful and ultimate values." But, on the other hand, the specifics of a given denominational or particular-religion practice may be relevant. For instance, a religion that does not believe in a human state or condition of sin, simply does not generate in misbehaving adherents of said sin-denying religion, an added feeling of sin. (Tho, there may nevertheless by a sense of guilt, due to God's common grace. Guilt, rather than mere shame (please excuse the word "shame" here, as that too can result in severe stress where there is no feeling of guilt whatsoever); yet guilt can function very positively to bring an end to the pattern of misbehaviour and thus the build-up of additional stress due to the active practice of the pattern of misbehaviour. Guilt is guided in two religions of which I have some knowledge, Judaism and Christianity, to result in repentance and penitential repair actions, but also tresult in confession of sin to God and to those against whom the offense was made. Christianity, in the procedures of many of its denominations and pastoral theologies of counselling, has ways of granting a declaration of forgiveness. This is emphasized in evangelical Christianity; it does generate for most such believers a general feeling that is less stressful. So, the cortisol physiological function is not the beginning, end, or complete story of how ultimate values and sincere referencing of them reduces stress.

One needs to understand how one's own religion - in my case, evangelical Christianity according to a reformational worldivew; but yours may be as specific but quite another point of reference - reduces stress in one's own life.

Now, that is not the only further consideration for any or all of us. Patterns of misbehaviour that cause one stress may be reduced somewhat or very temporarily by to one's ultimate values and sense of meaningfulness philosophically. This is also true for some people because they have deeply embedded psychic wounds ("to the bone," as it were) that remain in place, producing stress that the usual recourse to one's faith, religion, ultimate values, ideology, set of prostrations and breathings (as in most Buddhism) - or whatever one has to rely on - just can't in the ordinary ways reach down to the bone toward eventual healing. Also, one may overgenerate the human bio-chemicals such as cortisol in sufficient (micro-)amounts to produce the cortisol effect, even with the most sincere sustained prayer, meditation, or prostations.

Psychologically and medically-aware counselling is important for some people. At a Heallth Center, where one can consult both a trained counsellor of one's faith (or as near as possible), a psychologist MD in cases where a pill may also be in order, and additinally a fully-trained psychiatrist skilled in helping a person delve into the unconscious to discern the protectively self-hidden traumas of one's personal development history: At just such a health center committed to a multi-dimensional approach to healing - where religion and religious specificity has its important role and where the variety of skills required to take care of the minor cases and the most intractable as well, because of the exitence there of a team approach to the healing task/s, permits a truly integral approach to stress as a greatly diverse general malady. There, one has the best chance of finding relief from the crippling effects of stress that bedevil too many people in our society. - Anaximaximum