The aftermath of what the banks and Wall Street have done to America and to our finances has created a huge insomnia problem. Seventy million Americans now have one form or another of chronic sleep difficulties and the numbers are rising.

Sleeping problems are not merely an inconvenience. They can cause considerable health risks to both mind and body. We need to sleep well to maintain our health and well being. The fact is that sleep is as important to our brain as is nutritious food.

Most sleep disorders are stress-hormone related. Stress hormones interfere with our ability to fall asleep and/or to stay asleep because they prevent the part of our brain that keeps us alert and awake from deactivating properly. As a consequence our “sleep machinery” doesn’t work as it was designed to.

When we don’t get the sleep we need, we feel drained of energy, weary and, sometimes, grumpy, anxious and depressed.

Most  adults need between 6-8 hours of sleep to feel rested and rejuvenated. Some people, however, require as much as 10 hours a night while others can get by with three or four. It’s really the quality of our sleep that determines how many hours we need.

The lower your stress hormone levels, the higher the quality of your sleep. Best quality sleep occurs when we’re in a Delta or Slow Wave brain pattern. You can learn how to enter this brain pattern and sleep like a baby again.

Most people fall asleep within 10 minutes of going to bed and arise within ten minutes of awakening. Usually we are unaware that we wake up and fall asleep again an average of five times during the night for periods of up to two minutes.

A majority of sleep difficulties occur in one or another of these situations. Some of us cannot get to sleep and we lie there tossing and turning, sometimes for hours. Numbers of people have trouble getting up in the morning because they keep drifting in and out of a heavy sleep.

Trouble waking up is usually associated with not being able to get restful sleep during the night. Many of us have trouble getting back to sleep after one of the normal nighttime periods of waking up. This is a very common form of insomnia.

Our mind and body are an interdependent unit.  If we’re agitated and worried about money or work, for example, our worry will keep us awake. To a part of our brain, thoughts about financial disaster and actual financial disaster are the same thing. And so excessive worry can trigger the “emergency alert” or “fight or flight” switch on our nervous system. Once triggered, stress hormones release into our body and then we just can’t sleep well.

Mindbody strategies such as hypnosis, progressive relaxation, autogenic training and biofeedback can be very helpful in learning how to regulate our physiology so that we can lower our stress hormone levels and get to and stay asleep. These methods are capable of shutting down the fight or flight response and of creating conditions that support a good night’s sleep.

Mental exercises such as counting sheep or counting backwards from a thousand can be effective because they give our mind something repetitive and boring to do. This protects us from the results of our mind worrying and ruminating about our real or imagined problems.

Depression associated insomnia usually involves waking up in the middle of the night feeling agitated and blue and without being able to get back to sleep. Usually a sleep disturbing depression is caused by temporary life circumstances such as the loss of someone we loved.

Sometimes, however, depression can be caused by inner conflicts such as when we are living a life that does not honor our deepest needs and wants. This kind of depression can be a message and it wakes us up because it wants our attention.

If we cannot sleep, it may be best to get up and go to another room to read or watch TV. It is not a good idea to just lie in our bed and toss and turn while thinking about everything that is wrong in our lives.

You can take sedative and antidepressant as sleep aids. But although they can be useful in the short term, they’re toxic. Don’t take them regularly; they carry the risk of serious side effects. It is safer and far more effective, in the long run, to learn how to lower your stress hormone levels and to flush stress hormones out of your blood and tissues.

One out of every 8 adult Americans belongs to a health club. The majority of club members assume that their health and fitness club knows a good deal about health and fitness. But the truth is that most health clubs don’t.

Most health club programs are based on marketing science—not fitness or health science. There’s a conspicuous lack of evidence that their fitness and health routines actually lead to the claims made for them. Part of the problem is that fitness, health and fitness certifications are very big business.

There’s more than 17,000 health Clubs in America today and their median income is over $5 million dollars annually. Fitness certification is not regulated and the evidence is strong that certification is mostly geared toward making money for those doing the certification—not toward training trainers in valid and reliable fitness and health science.

OK what are some of the facts about fitness and health that we can trust? There’s no doubt that a sedentary way of life can leave us at risk for one or another chronic illness and a shortened life. And exercise helps reduce stress. It’s safe to say that a fit and active way of life can protect us against illness and so can keep us alive longer. The question is—just what exactly is fitness? And beyond that—just what do we do, for how long and at what intensity— to get and stay fit.

Research done by Dr. Steve Blair from the highly regarded Cooper Institute found that most health benefits result not from strenuous workouts—but from mild exercise. For example, there are few health gains to be made by doing much more than walking briskly for 30 minutes five or more days a week. We can break things up and do two periods of fifteen minutes or three of ten. And we can substitute walking with biking or swimming etc. The key is frequency and regularity—we have to do it often to reap the health benefits from mild exercise.

The positive health claims associated with weight training, like those associated with intense physical workouts, can be overstated and oversold. Lifting weights does help maintain muscle mass as we age, but research has shown that the claims that weight training improves our metabolism or prevents osteoporosis are not based on solid evidence.

Most important to long term fitness is musculoskeletal alignment. Our joints, muscles and bones need to be properly aligned, if we are to avoid getting into trouble as we age. Lifting weights and doing cardio exercise in the wrong postural alignment can cause serious problems, problems that often don’t show up for years. If we want to maintain our independence in later life, if we want to move around without pain or restriction, if we want to walk without a cane or without our grandchildren pulling us around in a cart—we need to train for musculoskeletal alignment and flexibility and then practice it regularly—not just when we’re in the gym.

We tend to think that fitness means “body-side” fitness only. But thanks to medical and mindbody science we now know better. The mind and body are an interdependent unit and as the ancient Greek Olympians knew well—true fitness is a “sound mind in a healthy body”. Our rapidly growing scientific knowledge of how important the mind is to the health of the body has not entered into the public arena as yet. What are touted as mindbody programs in the majority of health and fitness clubs are only mindbody lite—if that.

Again—you can stick the name “mindbody” on this or that fitness program or health regimen, but naming it so doesn’t make it so. Most so-called mindbody fitness routines are not very mindbody at all. They have a thin veneer of mindbody paint on the surface of what are still essentially body fitness routines, routines based on views that no longer adequately define what fitness is.

The body-only vision of health and fitness is incomplete. It’s rapidly becoming an obsolete point of view, one displaced by new knowledge. We need to deeply revision our view of fitness according to this knowledge, so we wake up to a view of fitness that truly empowers us to live long and well. Mindbody lite has to give way to the real thing, because, from a true mindbody science standpoint, very little of mindbody lite is truly representative of the profound mindbody science discoveries.

When we look at the development of the past and present fitness equation in the history of Western Civilization an amazing fact stares us in the face: — the mind is missing. That is, except when we visit the Ancient Greeks.

The Greeks were concerned about the strength endurance and flexibility of the body. But they were also concerned about the strength, endurance and flexibility of the mind. And their knowledge about fitness was that the connection between mind and body could be harmoniously cultivated and developed into a state of Kalokagathia, an attainment that was more than the sum of its parts.

Kalokagathia was associated with the idea of arête—an ultimate view of human fitness—of being whole, fully functioning and optimally fit. Being fit meant being the very best you could be—reaching your highest potential.

Much time, expense and effort have gone into directly researching physical fitness and in developing the speed, strength, endurance, and flexibility instruction and technologies to develop physical fitness based on that research.

Unfortunately, very little time, expense and effort have gone into researching and developing a direct knowledge base for the mind side of fitness.

Yet new knowledge demonstrates the inherent and undeniable connection between the body and mind as well as the tremendous power the mind has to influence the body. This new knowledge points the way to not only how to train for mind-side or inner fitness but also how important fitness of the mind is for fitness of the body.

The “mind-side” of fitness is a kind of critically important aspect of  ”Inner  Fitness”. If we’re riddled with insecurity, and worry, if we’re plagued by self-doubt, confusion and uncertainty, then we’re more prone to high levels of stress, unhappiness and illness. And research has shown that high levels of stress are more dangerous to our health than not being physically fit.

To be truly fit we need to develop strength, stamina and flexibility in mind as well as body. We need to address more than our waist and muscle size—we need to focus on what really matters in life. Questions such as am I living deeply? Is my life an adventure that moves me or like a movie someone else seems to have written? Have I discovered what I truly want and love or am I just doing what I feel I should or must?

These concerns will be included in the next generation of fitness and health programs now becoming visible on the horizon, programs based on reliable knowledge about what it means to be truly fit.

If you want to learn the art and science of Mind-Side Fitness and “Inner Fitness”, so you can:

• enter the Stress Free State at will, a state of calm, clear, and self-assured awareness
• lower your stress hormone levels and flush stress hormones from your blood and tissues
• break free from a conditioned surface identity that’s too small for who you truly are
• connect to your deeper identity and do more of what you truly want and love
• avoid premature aging and cognitive decline
• have more focus and more energy
• enjoy higher quality relationships and work that means something to you

then contact me now at DrManganiello@comcast.net. You will experience an array of positive changes very quickly.

And it’s a lot of suffering. Anxiety leaves people chronically miserable. A severe panic attack leaves people in cold sweat terror dreading they are dying.  And phobias leave people painted into a corner of fear and nasty limitation.

Anxiety disorders have become such a problem in the last 30 or so years that they are now recognized as the #1 “mental health problem” for American women and second only to drug and alcohol abuse for men.

But to label anxiety a “disorder” or a “mental health problem” risks confusing the issue. And it risks shaming the sufferer and leaving them prey to the vultures who seek profit and power by defining life problems as medical conditions, so they can medicate as many people as possible.

Just why are fear, anxiety and phobias so prevalent today? Just what has gone on in the last two to three decades that’s given rise to so much fear and anxiety?  I’m very clear on the one word answer because I’ve spent many years researching the problem. It’s STRESS.

Stress is the chief cause of most anxiety, panic and social phobias. But stress is not just about feeling tense and wired. It’s about the triggering of our hard-wired “Fight or Flight Response”.  And it’s about the release of toxic hormones—drip, drip, drip—into our system. These hormones seep into our blood and tissues where, over time, they set up conditions for “attacks” of fear, anxiety and panic.

In the last 30 years we’ve gone through about 400 years of social and technological change.  It’s been hard for humans to adapt to such speed. In a nutshell, the stress problem is rooted in the fact that we’re not properly hard-wired for this fast paced, complicated and too often meaningless way of life. We’re wired for a time that is long gone.

Many people feel lost today. They feel lost having to cope with a life that often makes little sense, a life lacking in clear cues and clues about how to live. And not only are many people under unrelenting financial and work strain, but often their souls also must endure an unsatisfied longing for a loving connection to life and a meaningful connection to other people.

Anxiety, panic, phobias, depression, addiction and many degenerative diseases such a s heart disease and diabetes—are an outcome of the fact that we are chronically stressed out.

Consider what happens during an anxiety or a panic attack: Suddenly with little or no warning, an anxiety and panic attack sufferer’s heart starts pounding. They have trouble breathing, their chest aches, they start sweating and feel fearful that they’re losing control and they’re about to die—for no apparent reason.

They stand there shaking and trembling in terror, but they have no idea why. And as if this isn’t bad enough, they are left anticipating that all this will happen again—at any moment, a moment they have no control over.  This anticipatory worry releases more stress hormones and sets up conditions for a vicious cycle of recurring panic attacks.

Now imagine the following. Imagine that you are on a vacation in the Florida Everglades. You are out one early morning in a canoe with your expert guide. Suddenly, unexpectedly—you’re guide loses consciousness and falls over, capsizing your canoe. Then more trouble. Thirty yards away on shore there are two alligators.  They see you and enter the water. They are coming at you fast— to eat you for lunch. How would you feel?

Like this—your heart would be pounding, you’d have trouble breathing, your chest would ache and you’d be shaking and trembling in terror. You’d be thrown into a Fight or Flight Response where you’d have to fight or flee to survive—or die.

What happens to you in an anxiety or panic “attack” is amazingly similar to what happens to you in an alligator “attack”—except in the latter you know why. Stress hormones play the key role, hormones whose real purpose is to prepare you for a life or death struggle.

With this knowledge, it’s easier to understand why there are so many people experiencing “attacks” of fear, anxiety and panic, and we why so many people would rather stay at home where it feels safe.

The key to preventing and controlling anxiety and panic attacks is to lower your stress hormone levels and flush stress hormones out of your blood and tissues.  To learn more about this, you can download my “Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets” FREE at the top right of this page.

Don’t hesitate to get expert therapy for anxiety and panic—you can overcome them both.

God came down and met with Jack and Amy. He told them, “I will grant you three wishes and three wishes only. After that, don’t bother me anymore. I’m busy.” They were thrilled but they were uncertain about exactly what to ask God for. Finally, they decided. For their first wish, they wanted to be so rich that they could leave and start a huge business in New York City while they lived at Trump Towers.

God granted them their wish. However, after a few months they grew homesick. And they were having a lot of complicated business problems; much of their money was at risk. Jack and Amy missed the simple life of their grocery store and the daily connection with their family. They were ready to call God for their second wish, but they were so shaky and uncertain about exactly what to ask for that they were beside themselves.

Amy woke up one morning with a brilliant idea. She told Jack and they called God. “Dearly beloved God”, they began, “we are so unsure, confused and stressed out about what to ask you for that we’ve decided that for our second wish we want you to tell us what to ask for—for our third wish.”

God laughed out loud. He said, “That’s easy. Ask for “Unshakable Certainty”, then you’ll be happy, fulfilled and satisfied no matter what.”

How much better would your life be if you were more clear, more steady and more secure about who you are, about your work, about your relationships, and about where your life is going?

How much different would your life be if you had Unshakable Certainty? I’ve written a book that shows you exactly how different.

If you had Unshakable Certainty you would live much better than you could possibly live without it. With it, you would be comfortable with yourself in virtually all circumstances. You wouldn’t second guess yourself because you would know who you are well enough to understand and accept your own responses to life’s challenges.

Less Stress, Fear, Worry, Self-Doubt and Depression

Your inner trust and self-assurance would allow you to control or eliminate the nagging worries and apprehensions that trouble most people. Unshakable Certainty would give you the master key for a deeply satisfying life that could be well-lived, loved and understood.

With Unshakable Certainty, you wouldn’t have to battle with fear, self-doubt, worry, anxiety and depression. As a matter of fact, you would know how to deal with these and other negative states of mind skillfully without becoming identified with or defined by them. Your life could rest on the rock solid self-assurance, security and conviction that only Unshakable Certainty can bring.

The Power and Relief of Deep Self-Assurance

With Unshakable Certainty, you could create success in the world from the inside out, success based on your unique and personal vision. You wouldn’t burden yourself by dwelling on your failures and shortcomings; instead you would highlight and honor your strengths and successes, and your self-assurance would allow you to build on them.

Moreover, your successes wouldn’t be just about outside recognition, they would be about inner satisfaction, the kind that bring you the joy of accomplishing things that really mean something and matter to you. Your life and achievements would be pulled from up ahead by your purpose and dreams, instead of being pushed from behind by your fears and worries, or pushed from the side by popular opinion and social pressure.

With Unshakable Certainty you’d be confident that you could deal with whatever comes your way; you would handle people and new situations with ease. You would be able to stand free from guilt, doubt and insecurity, and you would feel good about what you are doing and where you are going. You’d be able to make the high quality choices required to live a high quality life.

Want to Be Happy When You Wake Up Most Every Day?

Unshakable Certainty would allow you to discover your special gifts and to take the sure and steady action necessary to develop them, action based on an accurate understanding of the forces at play within yourself and of the forces at play outside in the world around you. Self-assurance, deep conviction and integrity would allow you to live life on your own terms while making creative and meaningful decisions rooted in who you deeply are.

Your personal choices would then honor and express your own needs and interests—needs and interests you could guide with a compassionate concern for others and by a desire to make a difference in the world. You’d be able to create a life filled with freedom and with a sense of mission, a life that you’d be very happy to wake up to every day.

If you are shaky and uncertain in your life, one thing is for sure—it won’t be satisfying or a lot of fun. Here’s why. Your life will be made small by fear, self-doubt and hesitation. Without Unshakable Certainty, you’ll live in recurring doubt about who you are, about your work and relationships, and about what your life means and should be all about. Your life will feel a bit like something you just don’t have the manual or the tools to make work properly. You’ll spend your days caught in self talk, self-doubt and anxious hopes for relief and fears that relief won’t come.

Without Unshakable Certainty—It’s Almost Always Raining

You’ll experience conflict and confusion on a regular basis. In the morning you might feel OK about your marriage or your work and your approach to life only to have the sands shift by noon when you feel just as sure that your marriage is wrong or that you should have left your well-paying, but uninteresting job to do other more meaningful work. Then the next hour or day, you can feel completely different again; your values will tend to shift so much that you won’t be sure what to believe any longer. You can find yourself at the mercy of your last state of mind or of the last expert you listened to or book you read.

And as if all this wasn’t bad enough, without Unshakable Certainty, you’ll feel more stressed out, bored and bummed out, and as a result you’ll be more vulnerable to health problems that limit and that can even shorten your life. Shaky uncertainty generates a lot of chronic stress and unhappiness, an awful combination and one that causes illness and that claims many lives each year.

The Dream Killer—Self-Doubt

If you lack Unshakable Certainty, you’ll tend to avoid the risks of learning how to do what’s necessary to live a more exciting, more creative and more rewarding life—but it won’t be because you don’t want to. You’ll want a better life, but because you’ll doubt that your efforts to have one will be successful, you won’t act to create what you want. You may want badly to cross the street, but if you don’t believe and expect that your legs will get you there—you’re not going to take that first step. With shaky uncertainty clarity is not possible, and doubt and hesitation will leave you standing still while your life just drives by.

If you are shaky and uncertain, recurring moods of self-doubt, confusion and inner conflict, and the worry, indecision and resentment that come with these moods, will force you to play it safe. Like a big corporation that has its worried eyes glued on the short-term bottom line, we miss the big rewards that life can deliver if we live it as a long-term adventure—rather than as an occasion to avoid short-term risk.

Is Your Identity a Few Sizes Too Small?

Your biggest danger is that shaky uncertainty will keep you trapped in an identity and in a life that’s too small for who you truly are. Then you’ll become more like a passenger than a driver on the road of your life. You’ll do what you feel you should and must, not what you really want and love, and worse still, without deep self-assurance and conviction—you might never even discover what you truly want and love.

So how can you find Unshakable Certainty? What do you need to know to get free from stress, anxiety, and depression, stay healthy and live with the steady self-assurance and deep conviction?

MESICS® is an organization dedicated to helping as many people as possible find and live from Unshakable Certainty. M-E-S-I-C-S is an acronym for the Latin phrase: Mens Sana In Corpore Sano. It means “A Sound Mind in a Healthy Body”.

MESICS Training translates western scientific discoveries and eastern meditative and “Inner Fitness” wisdom into actionable knowledge. We bundle that actionable knowledge with powerful tools and expert support and training—so you can put that knowledge to work to protect your health and live your life with gusto as an adventure beyond stress and conditioned limits.

The first stop on your road to Unshakable Certainty is to connect to the Stress Free State and become familiar with it so you can find it when you need to. It will give you powerful relief from stress, worry, depression, insomnia and more. And it will give you the foundation for Unshakable Certainty.

We’ve developed a “Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack” with 7 proven and powerful techniques and exercises with crystal clear, step by step guided instructions on how to use them. (The Pack includes practices largely unknown in the west) They will connect you with the Stress Free State. The Pack will also

• Connect you with the foundation of Unshakable Certainty
• Lead you into emotional clarity and peace, even in the middle of turmoil
• Leave you less stressed, less anxious and less depressed
• Give you more relaxed self-assurance
• Lower your toxic stress hormone levels
• Increase your anti-aging and well-being hormone levels
• Strengthen your heart and immune systems
• Let you sleep more like you used to
• Leave you more happy and more satisfied

Our passion is putting knowledge and tools in people’s hands that will make their lives better, longer, deeper and more enjoyable.

Unshakable Certainty changes everything for the better.

If you want the Pack at no risk to you, and if you want to learn the art and science of developing Unshakable Certainty, then contact me now at DrManganiello@comcast.net.

Did you know that in the 1920′s heart disease accounted for only 10% of deaths a year in America, but today heart disease is America’s #1 killer? I’ll tell you what’s responsible for this increase just up ahead. But first let me tell you why you should care.

Heart disease sneaks up on people, it doesn’t knock first-it just breaks down the door. People don’t see it coming and, at first, they actually have trouble believing that it has happened to them. You don’t want to be one of these people, right?

OK so let me ask you two questions here:

1. Do you want to avoid dying before your time or spending your life stuck in the misery and limitations of a serious health problem that won’t go away?

2. Do you want to enjoy a long, well-lived life, one where you can get your fair share of happiness and satisfaction?

If you answered yes to both, then I want to give you the real skinny on your heart health.

Here’s What You Need to Know

What I am going to tell you now will explain what is behind the rise in heart disease and what exactly you need to know and do to prevent heart problems.

Psychological and medical science has pulled back the curtain on what’s driving so much heart disease and heart attacks, including “sudden death”.

Here’s what’s standing there: STRESS.

We now know that stress drives a good deal of heart disease, heart attacks and what’s called “sudden death.” Sudden death is just that. With no warning, the heart dies. So unexpected, so devastating and so final.

Now what you need to know about stress is that it is not just feeling tired, wired and on edge. Stress is about the release of dangerous chemicals into your body, chemicals that put your heart at serious risk.

Let me explain.

Your Fight or Flight Response is Obsolete

You have a hard-wired mechanism built into your body. It’s called the “Fight or Flight Response.” This mechanism prepares you to fight or flee from life threatening danger by releasing chemicals or stress hormones into your blood.

Unfortunately your “Fight or Flight Response” was designed for a time that is no more. It was well-suited to a simpler time, a time when life was much less chaotic and hectic. When your ancestors were in life threatening danger, their Stress Faucet would turn on releasing hormones to prepare them to fight or run like hell. If they survived, their Stress Faucet would soon close.

But yours doesn’t. Here’s why.

The pace and style of life today leaves you prone to a lot of stress, stress at work, stress at home, stress in your relationships, and stress in your financial life. As a consequence, what we call your “Stress Faucet” gets turned on too frequently and it stays on too long.

And this often happens in error, triggered by your psychological fears and worries that a part of your brain misinterprets. Then stress chemicals seep into your blood and heart tissues and linger there. This causes strain and damage to your heart and can even “kill” it.

Two Senior National Institute of Health Scientists, Drs. Chrousos and Gold, put it this way:

“In our modern society, 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. Stress leads to serious health problems.”

Stress is clearly linked with the leading causes of death today with heart disease being first among them. For example, a Report focused on 409 heart attack patients found that over half of the patients had their heart attack following a very recent stressful event. (Journ Invas Cardiol, 2006; 18:376-81)

The research is clear and strong on stress and heart disease, but vested interests prevent the knowledge from being commonly known.

Uninformed and Misinformed-Don’t be Fooled

And so a majority of people are either uninformed or more often misinformed about what really threatens their heart. But I am working here to give you an accurate statement of the problem so you can move toward some real solutions.

To give you a feel for how much the public is misinformed, the idea that high cholesterol is the prime driver of heart disease is false. Dr George Mann a highly respected science researcher calls this idea “the worst fraud perpetrated on the American public” (Dr. Paul Rosch, preeminent medical scientist, American Institute of Stress, June 2007)

Unfortunately, too often the media distorts information so as not to incur the wrath of the deep pocket vested interests which pay them a ton of money. You will see a nightly array of drug company ads for cholesterol drugs this week, but you’ll hear nothing of the prize awarded to Dr. Uffe Ravnskov .

Dr. Ravnskov won the prestigious 2007 LEO Prize for his research and criticisms of the alleged and advertised relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, especially as a basis for prescribing expensive and often dangerous medications. (http://www.leohusswalinprize.org/?type=static&id=4&mo=4)

The fact is that stress raises cholesterol levels more than fatty foods. Moreover, consider this: Dr. Will Castelli, the director of the Framingham Heart Study, in a 26 year follow up, found that 50% of people who developed coronary heart disease had below average cholesterol levels.

The Real Details

You need the details on the real risks to your heart. Let me give some important ones.

Most people don’t understand what stress is and what it does to threaten their heart and their lives. They think that all they need to do is eat well, exercise, not smoke or keep their cholesterol levels in check to keep their heart healthy and alive. Now doing these things is important.

But as we’ve seen, people who do them still develop heart disease and die from heart failure, sometimes very suddenly. Here’s a picture of what happens.

Most of the cardiac arrests that lead to sudden death occur when the electrical impulses in a heart go into an irregular heart rhythm known as arrhythmia. The troubled heart rhythm can become very fast or very chaotic or both.

Either can cause your heart to abruptly stop beating. And death can suddenly follow, without any warning. Actually, would you believe that the first warning sign for half of the people who die of heart disease in the United States is just that-i.e. death. It’s true.

The picture is getting clearer: Most Coronary Heart Disease risk factors are psychological and stress driven, not genetic or body-only. Sudden death can happen even if your heart is healthy. In the United States, 350,000 Americans die yearly of sudden death, many with no prior heart problems whatsoever.

What happens? In a worst case scenario, stress hormones can cause a person’s heart to die. A stream of stress hormones paralyze the heart muscle and prevent blood from reaching areas that must have it to stay alive. (Journal Int Med; 2007; 261, 245-254)

And the secretion of a stress hormone (called noradrenaline) at the nerve endings of the heart muscle can cause heart attack even in people with low cholesterol, healthy arteries and no blood clots. (American Institute of Stress February 2008)

And we now also know that anxiety and depression-two stress hormone driven problems-can also increase risk for heart attacks and sudden death.

Here’s How to Protect Your Heart and Your Life

And so in a nutshell-it’s clear that stress and stress chemicals present a major threat to the health of your heart and so the quality of your life.

And so now let’s turn to the important questions, what do you need to do and how exactly do you do it?

The two main things you need to do to protect your heart

1. keep your Stress Faucet from getting turned on by mistake,

2. flush stress hormones from your blood and heart connected tissues

That’s it.

And consider this: When you stop the unnecessary release of stress hormones into your system and flush them out of your blood and tissues you will not only safeguard the health of your heart, but you will also feel a whole lot better and vastly improve the quality of your life.

That’s what you want, right?

OK here’s what you need to do to get this done.

You need to learn how to strengthen what we call your “Stress Fighting Muscle”. Once you do, you can carry a heavier stress load without your Stress Faucet getting turned on by mistake. And you will be able to short circuit the unnecessary release of stress hormones into your blood and heart tissues.

In addition, you need to develop your capacity to be in what we call the Stress Free State. The Stress Free State is a condition of calm, relaxed awareness.

When you enter the Stress Free State, your stress reactions will decrease as will your stress levels. Stress hormones will flush out of your system rather than seeping into the tissues in or near your heart.

Now the good news even gets better. Once you strengthen your Stress Fighting Muscle and develop your capacity to enter into the Stress Free State, not only will your heart be safer, but you will live a whole lot better and longer.

Put This to Work in Your Daily Life-Picture This

You can take these skills into your life circumstances and put them to work every day.

Picture your daily life when you will be able to stay calm, relaxed and centered while stress rolls off of you like rain on a just oiled piece of wood. You’ll feel like someone who has just gone from a coach seat on a crowded airplane into a first class seat with plenty of room to feel comfortable and be at your best.

So here’s my invitation to you.

Would you like to learn how to strengthen your Stress Fighting Muscle and learn how to get into and operate from the Stress Free State?

Well, we can show you how. That’s what we do.

We’d be happy to show you how in the most recent edition of our Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets.

How about you? Do any of the following describe you in menopause?

• You are having trouble with hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain, anxiety, depression or other problems-but you don’t want to take risky medications

• You are feeling a lot of stress and anxiety-but you don’t know what to do about it

• Your family or friends tell you that you’re more moody and grumpy than you used to be

• You are having problems with sex

• You’re feeling bummed out and your life feel all downhill from here

• You just don’t feel well a lot of the time

You Are Not Alone

If one or more of these statements describes you, you’re not alone. Millions of women suffer problems with menopause and midlife-unnecessarily. Yes that’s right, unnecessarily. Here’s why.

Most women are badly misinformed. And so they don’t know what menopause and midlife really are and what they can do about them. But fortunately all that is beginning to change.

Would you like to know about these changes? They are already making a big difference in how some women go through menopause and in how they live the second half of their life.

Are You Stuck in the “Old Menopause Mindset?”

If you’re like most women, you operate out of an “Old Menopause Mindset”, an outlook that views menopause as a medical condition that comes with “aging and decline”. This Old Mindset rests on misinformation and wrongheaded ideas.

Most women develop an Old Menopause Mindset because of what they are told by

• physicians,
• by men who head drug companies,
• by their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts,
• by the media, and
• by their society and culture.

Unfortunately, the information that you have been told, that your mother was told and that your grandmother was told—is simply incorrect. Nevertheless, these incorrect ideas still define what many women believe and expect, and so what they experience. Our beliefs and expectations often define our reality.

Consider this: In primitive cultures, if a witch doctor puts a curse on someone by telling them: “You will die in 48 hours”, there’s a very good chance the cursed person will die within 48 hours.

Why did she die?

Because her “mind was set” on the witch doctor being all powerful and his curse being deadly. Her beliefs and expectations killed her.

What’s Behind the Old Menopause Mindset?

Many things are behind the Old Menopause Mindset, including money and power. John R. Lee, M.D, now deceased, was an international authority on menopause and women’s health. He put it this way:

“Menopause as a disease has been largely fabricated by physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.”

Over a decade ago, Dr. Lee published his views that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was dangerous. He saw it as a serious health threat to women’s health. Dr. Lee’s ideas were not taken seriously at first, and, unfortunately, his views proved to be correct.

A National Institute of Health’s Women’s Health Initiative Study confirmed Dr. Lee’s and a few other doctor’s worst fears. The study’s results were shocking. They showed that women on hormone replacement therapy for menopause were at increased risk for heart disease, cancer and stroke.

“Voodoo Menopause”

Since so many women have now stopped hormone replacement therapy, breast cancer rates have dropped remarkably. For years, millions of women were led to believe that menopause was a medical condition requiring “medication”. This is a kind of Voodoo Menopause that affected both doctors and women. Keep in mind that most medical physicians get their information from drug company reps, not from independent research. And that drug companies spend upwards of $15 billion a year marketing to physicians.

Sound scary? Well it is. Medications can be a godsend when properly prescribed by well-informed medical professionals. But when the bean counters in drug companies view women as customers, then women are intentionally misled for profit.

And the problem is not limited to hormone replacement drugs. Tranquilizers and risky antidepressant medications are routinely prescribed for menopause problems too.

Consider this: Not long ago medical physicians regarded a woman’s hot flashes as a sign that she was emotionally unstable. That’s ridiculous. Do you think you have hot flashes because there is something wrong with you? Let’s hope you don’t. If you do, that’s the Old Menopause Mindset shovel hitting you in the head.

I will tell you what hot flashes actually are. And I will tell you how you can decrease the number of hot flashes you have and possibly eliminate them all together.

But for now, back to the “Old Menopause Mindset” that you probably have downloaded, the one the pharmaceutical companies want you to adopt.

Old Menopause Mindset Ideas

Here’s some Old Mindset ideas you need to watch out for. These ideas are false.

• False: Menopause is a medical condition that requires medication or “hormone therapy”

Women have suffered and died as a result of this now discredited idea. You can control your hot flashes, insomnia, depression, weight gain, moodiness etc, without risky drugs

• False: Hot flashes, insomnia, depression, weight gain, moodiness etc, are a natural part of menopause

• False: Life is all downhill after menopause and midlife

• False: Midlife is a bridge into decline and old age

Note: Aware women become elders—not elderly, and midlife is a bridge to a deeper life, a life that can be well-lived, loved and understood

• False: Old age is a wasteland of wrinkles, illness and irrelevancy

So if a women believes all these false Old Menopause ideas, what do you think her menopause, midlife and second half of life will be like?

Again, take a moment and ask yourself: What is your mindset about menopause?

The New Menopause Mindset

The good news is that the “New Menopause Mindset” shows us how to safely prevent and remedy menopause troubles. But there’s a problem.

Because although the “the Old Menopause Mindset” is dead wrong—it’s deeply ingrained in the minds of most women. And special interests who profit from the Old Mindset would like to keep it that way.

But why should your menopause be difficult and even dangerous—when it doesn’t have to be. Not if you have a New Menopause Mindset. Here’s some of what the New Menopause Mindset truths are all about.

• True: You don’t need to risk your heart and well-being to reduce or eliminate menopause problems such as hot flashes

• True: Many Far Eastern women have no hot flashes, no depression, no insomnia, no weight gain, no etc.

Because they are not caught in what we call the Menopause Vicious Cycle™, (MVC) a vicious cycle of hormone imbalance triggered and maintained by stress.

• True: The Menopause Vicious Cycle not only makes you feel miserable with menopause problems but it also puts your heart at risk. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women.

• True: You can learn how to avoid getting caught in the Menopause Vicious Cycle and you can learn how to stop it

• True: Midlife is a profound stage of your life

Midlife brings forth your deepest possibilities, and you can learn to recognize, honor and realize them.

• True: It’s not that you have grown too old to have children, rather, it’s that you’ve entered a stage of life where you’ve grown beyond having children

• True: The second half of your life is meant to be the best

So Why Should You Stay Stuck in False and Dangerous Views About Menopause and Midlife?

Consider this: You can learn safe and powerful ways to

• get relief from your menopause problems, including hot flashes, depression, low energy and mood changes
• create and maintain hormone balance
• avoid and stop the Menopause Vicious Cycle
• protect your heart and dodge the heart disease bullet
• write a great screenplay for the second half of your life and live it with gusto

And you can separate yourself from the women who are misled by lies, misinformation and by the wrongheaded views of a culture obsessed with youth and the things keep women stuck at the surface of life.

Women are growing weary of a culture that is blind to many of the things that really makes life worth living for a woman, including the wisdom and well-being that only come to her with age.

Age is something to be honored, not disrespected. That’s why the ancient Roman’s called anyone under 50 “junior”. The second half of your life is not only NOT downhill-but it is actually wired in to be the deeper, better and more enjoyable half of your life.

Do these ideas sound a chord in you? Are you interested in learning more about the New Menopause Mindset so you can go through menopause safely and move into the second half of your life as an adventure?

If yes, then keep a look out for my new book. It will be ready soon and really open things up for you. It’s called “The New Menopause Mindset: How to Avoid the Mistakes Most Women Make”.

Listen, well informed women go through menopause a whole lot better than misinformed women. I want you to be among them. Because then you will live a longer and more fulfilling life.

If you’d like information sooner, write me at wandastevens@comcast.net

Why Workplace Stress is a Killer

If you ask yourself: “Why should I care about Job Stress?”, then more than 10 years of science research will give you the answer.

You need to care about Job Stress because it puts you at serious risk for the following:

• sudden death,
• heart attacks,
• cardiovascular disease,
• cancer,
• strokes,
• diabetes,
• anxiety and depression and
• painful family problems.

Studies show that chronic Job Stress can not only raise your blood pressure, double your risk of dying suddenly, or of dying slowly from heart disease or diabetes, but it can also make you psychologically miserable and destroy your marriage while having a devastating impact on your children.

The Nature of Work is Changing

Consider this: Job Stress is now the single greatest source of stress for American, European and Asian adults. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tell us why:

“The nature of work is changing at whirlwind speed…. now more than ever before, Job Stress poses a threat to the health of workers and, in turn, to the health of organizations. Job Stress is now the single greatest threat to employee health.”

The Epidemic is Worldwide…and Growing Worse

Add to this the fact that financial stress that is often the flip side of Job Stress and it becomes a scourge. That’s one reason why a United Nations Report called Job Stress the Epidemic of our time.

The World Health Organization agreed, calling Job Stress “A World Wide Epidemic” and Stress the “#1 Health Problem in the Industrialized World”.  According to Dr. Paul Rosch preeminent medical scientist and president of the American Institute of Stress, Job Stress has gotten so bad we’re running out of warning labels and phrases to put on it.

There’s some good news in realizing all this. Because you can’t solve a problem until you know what that problem is. Makes sense right? Well we now know what Job Stress is and what it does.  And recent research has clarified the important mechanisms through which Job Stress damages both mind and body.

And so if you want to avoid becoming another Job Stress “heart attack” statistic, or “stroke” victim, or “diabetes” patient, you can-if you learn how.  Keep in mind that no one expects these problems to happen to them-but they slam into people with chronic work stress every day.

Can You Dodge the Job Stress Bullet?

If you learn how to deal with your Job Stress, you will avoid becoming a Job Stress statistic, victim or casualty, and you will live a whole lot better and longer. You will also avoid the kind of relationship and marriage problems that lead to conflict, separation and divorce. And your children won’t lead lives of wounded failure, as do many children in families drowning in Job Stress driven anger, anxiety, tension, depression, and indifference.

You want that right? So let’s take a look at what you need to know and do to save yourself and your family a lot of aggravation, damage and suffering.

Is Your “Stress Faucet” Leaking?

Think of it this way, your workplace stress truns on what we call your “Stress Faucet”, a faucet that then leaks toxic stress chemicals into your body, chemicals are also known as stress hormones.

This brings us to your core problem. These stress chemicals or hormones seep into your blood and tissues, where they linger and harm your mind and body. What makes this especially dangerous is that all this happens under the radar.  That means you don’t really see it- until the damage is done.

The problem is that you are hard wired to release stress hormones through what’s known as the”Fight or Flight Response”. But this hormone release is meant to happen only in the face of life threatening danger and then only for short periods of time. In fact, your hard wiring was designed for a much simpler time, a time that is long gone.

Today the complexity of your work life leaves you prone to fear, worry, anger, frustration, and confusion. And unfortunately a part of your brain mistakes these feelings for life threatening danger and turns on your Stress Faucet by mistake.  Keep in mind that work and money represent survival so frequent worries about them can cause chronic fight or flight alarm.

Here’s the Question You Need to Ask Yourself

Now only you can turn your Stress Faucet off and wash stress hormones out of your system. You might ask yourself: “Just how important is it that I learn how to do this?”  First consider that the payoff is immediate. That is you will feel a whole lot better, have more energy and more confidence right away.

And while you ponder the question, consider what world class scientists have said about stress and stress hormones,  as follows:

“The prolonged release of stress hormones can impair our immune system and leave us open to invasions of cancer cells and dangerous infections.”

-Dr. Bruce McEwen, Former Director of Rockefeller University’s Neuroendocrine Laboratory

“In our modern society, stress…hormones continue to wash through the system in high levels, never leaving. Stress leads to serious health problems”

-Drs. Chrousos and Gold, Senior National Institute of Health Scientists

“The long-term activation of the stress-response system – and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones – can disrupt almost all your body’s processes, increasing your risk of obesity, insomnia, digestive problems, heart disease, depression, memory impairment, physical illnesses and other complications.”

- Mayo Clinic Staff

“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

Do You Want a Great Map to Guide You?

So assuming that you realize how important it is to turn your Stress Faucet off and wash stress chemicals out of your system, the next question is simple: Do you know how to do it? If not, then don’t worry.

You will know how by the time you finish reading my new book, it’s called:

“The Job Stress Epidemic is a Killer
What You Need to Know and Do About It Now”

The book is more than 100 pages of material not commonly available. Here’s what you’ll find in it:

• A crystal clear summary of the latest research findings from the best Job Stress researchers in the world

• A brief and easy to take Job Stress Test-to get a read on your workplace stress

• Several of the most powerful Job Stress busting methods you’ll find anywhere, each clearly explained so you can use them right away

• A step by step explanation of how to shut your stress faucet off and wash toxic stress chemicals out of your blood and tissues

• A powerful method that targets exactly the Job Stress mechanism responsible for damaging your heart and putting your life and family at risk

In addition, “The Job Stress Epidemic is a Killer: What You Need to Know and Do About It Now” will open your eyes to the deepest and most fundamental driver of Job Stress, one that you may want consider very carefully.

Work Without Soul

And just what is the deepest driver of Job Stress? It’s that work life has lost “soul”-for millions of men and women. When work loses soul, it means that work no longer provides a meaningful and loving connection to life and to other people. Consider this:

“When work loses soul, people work harder and longer for fewer rewards at joyless jobs, jobs they have little say about, authority in or control over.”

The financial crisis, globalization, layoffs, downsizing, economic and political pressures, among other forces, have radically altered working life around the globe.

This is not some surface problem that will soon go away. Job Stress is a killer. It ruins lives. It ruins families.

“The Job Stress Epidemic is a Killer: What You Need to Know and Do About It Now” will give you the real skinny and the tools to regain control of your work life.

CLICK HERE to buy the book now. You will feel more calm, more relaxed and more positive. And you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re protecting your health and your family.

If after reading the book and using the tools, you’re not convinced that you’ve gotten many times more value than what you’ve paid, then just let us know. We’ll refund your purchase price-no questions asked.

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