Stress Relief: Ready for Your Game Plan?

Stress is not only uncomfortable-it puts your health and quality of life at risk. Research continues to pour in showing how stress ruins hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

But cutting edge research also shows that there’s simple, yet powerful ways to protect yourself from stress. All you have to do is understand what stress really is, what to do about it and how. With other words, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you have an effective stress relief game plan.

And the news gets even better–the same game plan that will help you beat stress will also help you develop the “inner fitness” and personal power and control that will leave you a lot more effective and more satisfied with your life.

A Simple Fact

The simple fact is that we’re not wired to live this way, a fact largely unrecognized or misunderstood by most people and most health professionals. Our lives are too fast paced and complex for our hard-wiring. As a result we’re awash in stress hormones, toxic chemicals that do their damage under the radar. They not only drive heart disease, cancer and diabetes as well as other serious illnesses, but they also make life miserable with chronic anxiety and depression.

Other stress experts have said it well:

“Stress hormones continue to wash through the system in high levels, never leaving….and so the stress response that once gave ancient people the speed and endurance to escape life-threatening dangers runs constantly in many modern people and never shuts down.”

Drs. Chrousos and Gold Senior National Institute of Health Scientists

“Chronic stress kills. People wear down. Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death ….”

Drs. Lyle H. Miller and Alma Dell Smith Senior Stress Researchers

The #1 Health and Quality of Life Problem in the Developed World

According to the World Health Organization, stress is the number one health problem in the industrialized world. So much so that the American Academy of Family Physicians reports that the majority of patient visits are for stress-related problems.

Studies also show that high levels of stress are more predictive of heart disease than are high cholesterol, smoking and obesity.

OK-now for the good news: You can control stress-if you learn how. Your first task is to understand what stress is.

You Must Learn to Flush

Stress is more than feeling tense and burnt out. It involves the release of toxic hormones into your body, hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine. The simple fact is this: If stress hormones seep into and stay in your bloodstream and tissues, in time-they’ll make you miserable, ill and even kill you.

If you learn how to lower your stress hormone levels and how to flush them out of your blood and tissues, then-you’ll protect your health and quality of life and increase your chances of living long and well.

Saber Toothed Mind Tigers

You are wired with a survival response, known as the Fight or Flight Response. If 25,000 years ago we were sitting in a field and a saber tooth tiger wanted to make lunch out of us-you’d fight like hell or run like hell. If you survived, your Fight or Flight Response would end and stress hormones would flush out of your blood and tissues.

The problem today is not only that your life is very complicated; but that there are saber tooth tigers roaming around in your mind. And they trigger the Fight or Flight Response-unnecessarily.

Studies show that your mind and body are not two separate things-they are an interdependent unit-the mindbody. What you think and feel shows up in your body. If your mind perceives a situation as dangerous-it triggers the body’s Fight or Flight Response-whether or not it is actually dangerous. If you worry a lot about financial or other problems, your body can mistake your worry as evidence that you have the problem you’re worried about. And so it mistakenly puts your body on an emergency footing.

You’re Stress Relief Game Plan

You need a stress control game plan, one that allows you to do two things: 1) prevent and short-circuit the unnecessary release of toxic hormones, and 2) flush out hormones that do seep into your blood and tissues.

The plan needs to include making changes in your life that cause you predictable stress. This can range from changes such as leaving for work earlier and coming home later to avoid bad traffic, to leaving a bad job or a bad relationship. You must take control of your life-feeling in control is critical to managing stress. Even strong and powerful animals quickly die if they feel they have no control over their situation.

You also need to make sure you aren’t carrying baggage that leaves you prone to perceiving life situations as stressful. We all have baggage that can drag us into to fear and worry. My usually laid back yellow lab Tashi, taught me a lesson about perception and stress.

When she sees a medium or large size cardboard box, she goes nuts and barks up a storm as if the box were a dangerous enemy ready to attack her. The fact is that it’s often not life events that cause us stress-it’s the way we see life events that’s the problem. You need to work on seeing things more clearly.

Don’t think that sitting cross-legged and doing meditation is going to deal with your baggage, it won’t. Nor will yoga or any mindbody lite practices that don’t empower you to wrestle with your mind tigers so you can create the inner conditions for genuine calm and self-confidence.

We’ll be introducing the MESICS Method^TM in the next few weeks, a method that combines the best tools of both deep psychotherapy and deep meditation. You will LOVE this resource. It has helped many people beat stress and grow into their deepest possibilities. Here are two comments on the MESICS Method:

“The MESICS Method has become a way of life for me. It is a true, unfailing path from conditioned hell to authentic being. Like the welcome sight of my porch light after a long journey, the MESICS Method consistently guides me home to myself.”
Rita Heron, R.N., M.S.

“The MESICS Method turns even difficult moments into an adventure by enhancing self-knowledge. I welcome this deepening of my awareness. I marvel at just how good Jim is at what he does. His level of work is a rare find.”
Joanna Stull, R.N., M.A. LMHC

Do These Things

Tapping into your mindbody’s ability to restore itself should be part of your stress control game plan. Your mindbody has a built in resource meant to flush out stress hormones, rejuvenate your energy and keep you healthy-you just need to learn how to activate it.

When stressed, we tend to breathe shallow from our chest. You should breathe deeply from your diaphragm instead. By breathing this way and by relaxing your mind, you can short-circuit the Fight or Flight Response and save yourself a lot of trouble.

If you live on the surface of life without any connection to your real needs and deepest feelings-you’ll be primed for a lot of toxic stress. It’s important that you do what you want and love to do, things that really make your life worth living.

One thing worth doing is gaining control over your thoughts and feelings. If you can do this, a lot will fall into place. You not only will beat stress, but you’ll be able to dive much deeper into your life and enjoy the things that truly make life worth living. Training for this control is actually developing what we call “mind-side” and “inner” fitness.

The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack

We’re working hard to provide you with high quality and well-tested resources to do all this. Soon we’ll make available our Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack, a Pack containing 6 of the most powerful stress relief techniques you’ll find anywhere. They’re derived from both the western psychology and medicine traditions as well as the eastern meditative and healing traditions. They come with crystal clear step by step written and guided audio instructions.

If you want to try it-there’s no risk. Everything we offer is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee. It should be available on the site soon. If you don’t see it, send me an e-mail and I’ll arrange for you to get it. drjim@MesicsTraining.com

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 Dr. Jim Manganiello is an award winning clinical health psychologist, teacher and author. He’s a longtime innovator in the areas of stress, well-being, personal growth and “inner fitness”.

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