Countering stress is about ensuring the right balance with personality traits. Padraig O'Morain outlines the Dr Donn Brennan approach with help from Indian medicine
"It's fascinating that one person can respond with depression while another gets aggressive and another gets totally panicked."
GP Dr Donn Brennan is talking about the differing ways in which we react to stress. "We respond to stress in different ways according to our natures and, according to our natures, different things stress us."
Dr Brennan did his GP training in Ireland (he qualified in 1990) but along the way he became fascinated by Ayurveda, a form of medicine practised in India for thousands of years. According to this approach, there are three organising principles (called Vata, Pitta and Kapha) which affect our mental and physical constitutions.
One or, more usually, a mixture of two of these principles can be dominant. The Vata type dashes about skipping meals, jumping from activity to activity. This type could go out running to train for a marathon to keep healthy and then flit off to a midnight party, fuelled only by a salad - that's if they're not fasting to keep healthy. The ballerina has a good chance of ending up "physically, emotionally and mentally wrecked trying to get healthy," he says. Vatas need to relax, take a day off, get a little iron into their diet, give themselves some comfort, he says.
If you have a Kapha nature, then you are in danger of giving yourself too much comfort. "Kapha's attitude is mañana. Kapha is slow: if you want a decision, come back next week. You can even see them thinking. They talk slowly. They move slowly. They are slow to pick up information but they never forget."
Absence of challenge stresses Kaphas who can respond by becoming sedentary. The Kapha will sit at home eating cream cakes, which is a bad idea because "he's already heavy and slow". His heart grows heavy - in other words he becomes depressed. He gets headaches, sinusitis. He ends up taking medicines along with his cream cakes.
"The solution is to lighten up," Dr Brennan says. He needs "midnight parties, light food and exercise". The Kapha needs to take on some of the Vata lifestyle.
The third personality type is the Pitta. The Pittas are fiery, they're impatient. "They are perfectionist and danger is they can burn themselves out. Ask Pitta people to wait for their dinner and they will devour you," he laughs.
"They get irritable with the ones they love." When they get angry "they blast you out of it. But they are quick to forget their anger and cannot understand why other people are still annoyed with them when the explosion has died down."
Deadlines, he says, "overheat" them. "They have forgotten the universe was there before they were." Pitta people need to chill out, he says. "Nice cool foods suit Pitta. Food is one good strategy, fun is another: play with your children." Pittas need to have more fun, to laugh more, he adds.
"All the secret in Ayurveda is balance: keep your balance," he says. "The question to ask is 'How should I live in order to keep my balance and improve my health?'"
Dr Brennan's major interest is in Maharishi Ayur-Veda which is promoted by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who popularised Transcendental Meditation in the West. He describes TM as "a vaccine against stress.
It's quite an expensive course to do at €1,800," he tells his audience in the Royal Marine Hotel.
"Their mind quietens to stillness," he says of those who practise TM. "The breath quietens to stillness. The stress hormones drop."
People over 40 years of age who practise TM "end up in hospital 70 per cent less," and 56 per cent fewer have psychiatric problems, he says; 80 per cent fewer have heart disease. Stress arises from the sheer amount of challenge we encounter in our lives today. "We rise to meet the challenge but in our society we are constantly challenged. We are using up our reserves and no longer able to compensate. We deteriorate in health."
The result is high blood pressure, insomnia, pulled muscles, a bad back or headaches. He is not opposed to conventional medicine. "Through this knowledge you can prevent problems and you can create better health but it's not replacing medicine," he says. "Take your medicine."
But he believes a knowledge of Ayurvedic principles can help people to prevent much of their illness and it adds an invaluable dimension to the process of curing illness. As time goes on, he believes these principles will be increasingly accepted by doctors because they will see that they work in practice. "The main thing with doctors is if something works they will want it. I feel this is the medicine of the future."
Dr Donn Brennan "came into medicine because I wanted to find a solution to suffering." During medical training, "I really enjoyed finding out how the body works." But he also learned TM "and I was meeting people who, through TM, were healing their bodies. I became a TM teacher."
Medical colleagues were not always impressed. "One colleague told me he would disown me." However, he pressed ahead and developed a deep interest in Ayurvedic medicine, used in India for thousands of years. It is a highly developed medical discipline.
For instance, Ayurvedic physicians described the circulation of the blood thousands of years before it was described in the West. He studied Ayurveda for 18 months in the US and continued his studies in India. With that under his belt he returned to the Irish hospital system to complete his training with the aim of qualifying as a GP.
He found there had been "quite an interesting change" in how doctors looked on the work he was doing. Where there had been scepticism and sometimes hostility, now they were interested in what he was doing.
He qualified as a GP in 1990. Since then he has visited 30 different cities in Britain, the Channel Islands and Iceland to promote the Ayurvedic approach. Now he is focusing his efforts on Dublin, London and Glasgow. He lives near Liverpool but visits Ireland once a month for patient consultations. An initial consultation costs €120 for one hour - repeat consultations are €60 - contact 01-2845742.
Dr Donn Brennan will explain the principles of the Ayurvedic approach at a meeting in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dún Laoghaire, next Monday, October 18th (8 p.m.).
Admission costs €10. People interested in the Maharishi TM course can find out more from Noel O'Neill at 01-2845742