Flowers, Doctors and the Art of Reducing Stress

I have to admit right away that I'm a little off-topic, because Wednesday was yesterday, and the place where I was doesn't exactly bring positive emotions.

People in medical gowns were looking at what was inside me. Everything is fine, everything is where it should be, everything looks good. Maybe they were doing something else too, I don't know, I was asleep.

By the way, I learned an interesting fact. It turns out that 50% of people in developed countries (and the percentage is even higher in other regions) have a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori living in their digestive system. What's interesting is that until the 1980s, medicine believed that no bacteria could survive there at all because of the acidity. Then they discovered Helicobacter pylori... quite a survivor and quite a troublemaker.

But let's get back to the walk.

For the third year in a row, our city has been hosting a flower festival. It seems that this tradition has established itself by default, and that's both wonderful and a little shocking.

Why shocking? Because it's impossible to imagine how much it costs the city every year.

Just imagine: right in the middle of a megacity, on the central streets, entire gardens made of living trees, wild grasses, and seasonal flowers appear in the form of islands, flower beds, and decorations.

They literally bring in tons of soil and entire pieces of forest — northern, southern, subtropical.

During our last walk, we only captured a small part of these beautiful decorations.

Honestly, I've become so used to this environment over the last three years that I didn't even think about taking pictures.

But while walking and watching the tourists, I realized how amazed they were by the scale of it all. And it really is beautiful. The concrete jungle turns into an actual jungle. The city transforms.

All of these flowers are constantly maintained. I even saw a climber on a bridge above the river trimming violets. Up until September, they will keep replacing flowers and grasses, and sometimes entire compositions throughout the city. And of course, there is the wonderful contrast between nature and architecture.

You keep shifting your eyes back and forth, reducing stress, lowering cortisol, and living longer.
By the way, speaking of health.

Since I currently have plenty of free time and excellent health insurance from my employer, I went through every possible medical check-up. Every doctor — whether a general practitioner, cardiologist, gastroenterologist, or even a urologist — keeps saying the same thing:
Reduce your stress levels. Most illnesses come from stress.

By the third doctor, I couldn't quite hold it in anymore (not because of stress), and I said: "Okay, I get it. Apparently we're all mostly dying from stress. But what confuses me is that it's not clear how to understand whether you actually have stress or not. And also, how exactly are you supposed to reduce it?"

And once again, every doctor gave the same answer: Walk. Walk in summer, in winter, in the morning, and in the evening. And look. Look at trees, the sky, water — anything that is not connected to the source of your worries. So basically, people, let's go for a walk.

But seriously, does anyone use other methods of stress management? For 25 years I thought all of this was nonsense, and I laughed at meditation. After four years of intense work under constant pressure in pursuit of career goals — a period when I didn't notice stress itself, but I definitely noticed the pace and the fact that I was working until 3 a.m. — I started to think that maybe this isn't a joke after all.

To be honest, if I hadn't gone to a doctor six months ago and learned how those four years had affected my body (and there wasn't much good news), I would probably still think of stress as something mythical. I simply didn't notice it.

Can you share what actually helps you? Have yoga and meditation really earned their massive followings for a reason? From my own experience, I'm convinced that walking and exercising in general really do work.