Traditional spiritual wisdom defines stress as the response of the body‐mind complex to a perceived gap between our actual and desired states of being. Stress is an unavoidable malady but manageable to minimize suffering of its myriad personal and social consequences. Deep diaphragmatic breathing is an effective non pharmaceutical strategy for personal management of stress.
One of the consequences of stress is related with collective harmony. A state of low stress is regarded as conducive to harmonious connectivity, integration and sense of belonging to the collective. On the contrary, a state of high stress is regarded as the breeding ground for self‐centeredness, disharmony, alienation and fragmentation. An ideal of zero stress is presented for a sense of belonging anywhere in the universe with fragmentation in none; on the other hand, a state of very high stress as a prelude to belonging nowhere and integrated in none.
Statistics Canada publishes data for 33 census metropolitan areas in Canada on the percentages of their people with stress and another of those with strong sense belonging to their communities. The availability of these nationwide numbers provide an opportunity of verifying the validity of the ancient spiritual ideas about stress in the modern environment.
The traditional wisdom on stress about the available numbers can be expressed as a model from antiquity. The percentage of people with strong sense of belonging is the percentage with low stress. Theoretically, this number when added to the percentage with high stress should equal 100. The study reported herein (download pdf here) finds a correlation between this model expressing ancient wisdom and a statistical equation expressing the census data.