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.

You’re probably very busy a lot of the time and so even though you really want to lower your stress levels you can’t, especially during the day.

Here’s a method called MESICS “Free Release Breathing”.  It is a wonderful stress busting practice that’s easy to do, yet powerful. You will get results-fast.

You can do it pretty much anywhere and it doesn’t take long. And the more you do it, the more you will strengthen your “stress fighting muscle”.

MESICS Free Release Breathing is an important part of many of the advanced stress solution methods in our Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack.  You can also use it as a standalone practice.

Here’s how.

Read the brief instructions below over once. Get a clear picture of the practice, then return right here and do it.

Take three Free Release Breaths as follows:

1. On your “in breath”-breathe in through your nose into your diaphragm * (see footnote)
2. On your “out breath”-breathe from your diaphragm out through your mouth. Just completely let go.
3. Don’t walk your breath out-just let it go completely “hhhaaaa”
4. On the out breath sigh if you are not in public- “hhhaaa”.
5. If you are in public-do it quietly or silently
6. Then tune yourself briefly to the calm, clear state at the end of your out breath. Rest there for about 7 seconds. Do not follow your thoughts.
7. Then repeat twice more.
8. Each time LET GO of any stressful thoughts that you’re distracted by and identified with.
9. As you practice and train, try to maintain your connection to the calm state at the end of your out breath for as long as possible
10. This will give you a taste of the “Stress Free State”

“Free Release Breathing” is so powerful because it promotes the activation of what’s called the “parasympathetic” component of your Involuntary Nervous System. Forget the strange words and think of it this way. When this part of your nervous system is in charge, your Stress Faucet turns off and stress chemicals stop leaking into your body.

That’s good, very good. It will ease your stress and your stress-hormone driven, anxiety and depression.

Again, at the end of your out breath, you will feel at ease, calm and clear. Tune yourself to this experience. Train, train, train with this method. Once you are familiar with it, you can use one or a few MESICS Free Release Breaths to reconnect to this calm, relaxed state of mind.

Then, when you’re in a stressful situation, you will be more resilient.

With repeated use, you will be able to find this relaxed state of mind more quickly and you will be able to stay connected to it longer and longer.

Use the MESICS Free Release Breathing practice regularly. If you like what it does for you, then you’ll LOVE what the Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack will do for you. It will not only give you fast stress relief but it will also put you in the driver’s seat and greatly enhance the quality of your life.

Typically your mind will distract you and pull you into anxious concerns about the past or future or into some random train of worrisome thought. Stress often follows as a result.

Mindfulness involves bringing your attention into the present moment, so you can be aware and notice what’s going on here and now. By learning to be in the present moment more of the time, you’ll not only reduce your stress but you will also connect to deeper levels of who you are.

When you’re mindful of what you are thinking you can stand free of your thoughts, instead of becoming possessed and defined by them. If you train to be mindful, you’ll pull the plug on stress and its consequences, including anxiety, depression, panic, self-doubt, and serious a variety of serious health problems.

It’s your thoughts that drive your stress. Your mind is always thinking automatically and discursively. It wanders without any clear purpose from one subject to another, often times darting back and forth toward concerns that leave you worried and anxious.  If you learn how to be mindful you’ll learn how to control your thinking and your emotional reactions to what you’re thinking.

Most of the time, you don’t intentionally think your thoughts-they just happen.  And most of the time, you just follow them. And if you are not attentive or mindful to where your mind is and to where it’s taking you-you’ll wind up in a negative flow of thought that leaves you starring in one or another stressful movie.

Mindfulness is Paying Attention and Noticing

Imagine a person in a train station, a person who can’t resist getting on every train that pulls into the station. Day in and day out she gets on trains all day long, trains that take her to places she didn’t plan on going to, places that she then has to make her way back from.

If she was mindful, she could pay attention and not get on the wrong trains. Or she could notice that she was on a train heading off to a place she didn’t want to go, and then get off as soon as possible. Mindfulness is paying attention and noticing.

Stay Off That Train

Every day, endless “trains of thought” pull into your mind. And like the person in our illustration, you get on them and ride them to wherever they take you.  And they usually take you for rides and to destinations that are stressful.

Did you know that left on its own, your mind will worry and dwell on the negative? That’s just the way it is. And the more emotional baggage you’re carrying and the more tough times you’re facing-the more negative your thought flow will be and the more stress will drop in your lap as a result.

You Do Not Have a Mind and a Body

Mindbody Science made a breathtaking discovery, a discovery that is still not commonly known or understood by most people, including medical physicians. The discovery is this: Your mind and body are not two separate things, they are an interdependent unit-your “mindbody”.

This discovery renders obsolete the view that our health is a “Body-Only” affair, a view still held by most health care providers. What you think and feel manifests in every cell in your body. And what’s going on in your body affects what you think and feel. That’s the mindbody connection.

The mindbody connection accounts for why stress is the #1 health and quality of life problem in the entire developed world. Here’s the problem: Stress is not just about feeling tired and frazzled and burnt out. It’s about toxic stress hormones that get released into your body in error.

Your body is hard wired for a survival response known as the Fight or Flight Response. When it’s triggered it releases hormones that prepare you to fight or flee life threatening danger. The problem is that your mind triggers this response in error. A part of your brain can’t tell the difference between your fears and worries and actual life threatening danger.

As stress hormones seep into your blood and tissues and linger there over long periods, you become at risk for anxiety, panic, depression and heart disease, cancer and diabetes, among other health problems.

You Can Train for Mindfulness to Manage Stress

Recall that your mind is always moving, you’re always thinking. The problem is that you get distracted by and identified with what you’re thinking and your thoughts and feelings get out of control and begin to define your reality. That triggers your Fight or Flight Response, which unfortunately triggers more worry and so a vicious cycle of stress and stress hormones.

When you develop mindfulness, you’ll notice that you’re following your thoughts and stop, thereby shortcutting the Fight or Flight Response before it releases stress hormones into your system.

Sitting cross-legged in meditation is not the only way or the most effective way to develop mindfulness. MESICS Training is a great way for westerners to develop strong and stable mindfulness. 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^TM translates western medical science discoveries and eastern meditative and healing wisdom into actionable knowledge and combines that knowledge with powerful tools and expert support-so people can cultivate mindfulness, gain control of their lives and live long and well.

Most women don’t understand menopause or the real cause of their menopause problems. Too often, women think of menopause as a medical condition that carries with it stress, hot flashes, anxiety, depression and other difficulties. That’s not the case.

Menopause doesn’t naturally cause these problems at all. Hormone imbalance does. And hormone imbalance doesn’t come along with menopause automatically. Women were terribly misinformed about this when told by their doctors that they needed Hormone Replacement Therapy, a fictional cure for a fictional medical condition that studies revealed caused heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Women undergoing menopause who are not in hormone imbalance are free from the problems that plague women who are.

Depleted adrenal glands drive most hormone imbalance for menopausal women. But before we consider this, let’s get the menopause story straight.

If you’re a women near or in menopause-you should know this.

Perimenopause and Menopause

Perimenopause is the transitional time preceding “official” menopause. It begins around 7 years before your last period. You’re “officially” in menopause when you haven’t menstruated for one full year.

Menopause is not a single event or something that occurs suddenly. As noted, it’s a process that begins before your last period, a process that can continue for years after it. Perimenopause and menopause involve complex mindbody changes, changes driven by hormones.

Hormonal changes in menopause take place in your liver, fat cells, adrenals, pancreas, thyroid, hypothalamus and your ovaries. The physical events of menopause are initiated by your Involuntary Nervous System, by your hypothalamus and your pituitary gland, the master gland for your endocrine system.

Three things happen to your body during perimenopause

1. Your body’s production of the hormones estrogen and progesterone declines

2. You stop producing eggs

3. Your menstrual activity decreases and then stops

These perimenopause changes do indeed trigger hormonal imbalance. But this period of hormone imbalance is designed to be short-lived. And it’s actually a signal to your body to balance your hormone system through other means.

With other words, women are not hard wired to have chronic hot flashes and other menopause problems.

The Key Issue: Your Adrenal System

While other things can contribute to hormone imbalance, adrenal exhaustion is the primary cause. Consider this: When perimenopause changes throw Far Eastern women into hormone imbalance, their adrenal glands respond to restore hormone balance.  Their adrenals function like a back-up system that kicks in when perimenopause changes trigger their temporary hormone imbalance.

But, because of exhaustion, the adrenals of Western women cannot perform properly to restore their hormone balance. And so they stay stuck in a chronic state of hormone imbalance and suffer the consequences.

This not only causes hot flashes and other difficulties, but it also it sets the stage risky health problems, including heart disease. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women.

Your Adrenal Glands

Your adrenals are round 3 inch or so glands that sit atop your kidneys. They produce a large number of hormones that have a critical impact on menopause, including aldosterone, DHEA, estrogen, progesterone and pregnenelone.

Your adrenal function can become depleted and create adrenal insufficiency, burnout or exhaustions, serious problems not easily relieved. Most physicians fail to recognize adrenal depletion in women undergoing menopause despite that fact that research demonstrates that 99% of menopausal women have impaired adrenal function.

And so the real problem for 99% of Western women is that their adrenal glands fail to produce enough estrogens, progesterone and other necessary hormones in the right balance and quantities to avoid the problems that occur when their ovaries stop producing these hormones.

Stress Depletes Your Adrenals

A woman’s adrenal glands become exhausted from years of wear and tear caused by the chronic release of stress hormones. When you are chronically stressed, your adrenals are working overtime and they never get a proper rest. And so they become exhausted and lose their ability to function.

Keep these  summary points in mind as a guide:

• Your perimenopause and menopause problems are driven by hormone imbalance

• It’s very likely that your adrenal system, designed to restore hormone balance, fails to do its job properly-because it’s exhausted.

• As a result, your hormone system is chronically imbalanced

• Hormone balance is the normal condition for women

• Your hot flashes and other problems are driven by an extreme condition- hormone imbalance

• You don’t need drugs, including hormones. You need to learn how to restore your adrenals and rebalance your hormonal system, so you can return to hormone balance.

Get Busy Restoring Your Adrenal Glands.

Eat healthy, exercise and get quality sleep and rest. And learn how to turn your stress hormone faucet off and flush stress hormones out of your system.

Download “The Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets” on this page, while it’s still Free- it tell you what to do and why and show you.

The book will give you a deeper understanding of the dangers of stress and stress hormones along with some techniques and exercises you can start using right away to restore your adrenals and get back into hormone balance.

You’ll feel a lot better when you do.

One reason this is the case is the false views western women download about what midlife and menopause are really all about. But that’s changing, thankfully. These false views have led to a counterproductive “mindset”, an outlook that has burdened western women with misinformation and false assumptions.

Menopause has long been shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. But it’s now understood as a natural part of aging. It’s the gateway to the second half of a woman’s life, a time when a woman can actually be free from worry about pregnancy and free from menstrual periods.

Most importantly, midlife is a time inner change, not just bodily change. It’s actually a time of change involving deepening and discovery. But Western culture fails to offer women a clear, accurate mindset that could serve as a map for understanding and negotiating these inner changes, changes that come naturally at midlife.

Far Eastern women expect and believe that the second half of their lives will be rich and rewarding and their culture supports those expectations and beliefs. Not so in the West.

Midlife involves powerful inner change. It’s not just about your body. But in the West “inner change” is barely recognized and understood. And the focus and often times the obsession is on looking young.

Our culture’s biases and misconceptions about women, and about aging, leave most women with the wrong outlook, one that that views aging as decline, a view that makes growing older a burden.

The idea that life is all downhill after midlife and menopause is like a cultural virus that infects many women’s minds. It’s a bogus and harmful idea. In truth, midlife opens up new possibilities for powerful growth within a woman’s personality, possibilities informed by her soul, by her deeper inner life.  Midlife awakens the soul to make a grab for the steering wheel.

If you don’t buy into the false negative views about menopause and midlife, and if you can recognize and honor your soul, then the second half of your life can be a powerful adventure. It can be an adventure filled with discovery, meaning and satisfaction.

But only if you recognize midlife and menopause for what they truly are. Instead of making the mistake of viewing menopause as a medical problem and midlife as an indication that you’re already half dead.

“Body-Only” assumptions about menopause are like flat earth theory-in error and obsolete. Unfortunately, the medical and drug industries remain committed to the idea that a woman’s menopause is a body-only medical condition. This view grants them power, control and profit.

Well if menopause isn’t a medical condition, then why do so many women think it is? Why is this wrong view so widespread in the media and in the medical community? There’s a few important reasons why, reasons you should know about. Let’s consider some of them.

One is that hormone imbalance in menopause can trigger problems that can be easily be placed in the wrong context to look like symptoms of a medical condition. For example, problems such as hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain, loss of sexual desire, vaginal dryness, moodiness, stress, depression-among others. But these are not typically indications of a medical condition.

They’re problems that get triggered by a natural stage of woman’s life. Hormone changes are a natural part of a woman’s aging. But for most Western women-these hormone changes create long-term hormone imbalance, whereas they don’t for Far Eastern women.

And stress and a chronic flow of stress hormones are the main reasons why Western women fail to regain their hormone balance. Not only does this lead to great discomfort, but it also puts Western women at risk for heart disease. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the West.

Did you know that while menopause is a natural part of aging and an important life stage, long-term hormone imbalance is NOT. Nor are the hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain and other menopause problems that travel with continuing hormone imbalance.

Long-term hormone imbalance is the culprit that drives menopause problems. Women can empower themselves considerably if they learn how to regain hormone balance and how to revision their obsolete ideas about midlife, menopause and about what the second half of life is really all about.

Grab the “Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets” while it’s still free. It will give you the real skinny on stress hormones as well as some tools to help restore your hormone balance. You’ll feel the difference.

Well you’re not alone. Work has lost its soul for many people, including those in high paying jobs. Work without soul is work that lacks a loving connection to life. It’s work that involves little if any meaningful connection to other people.

The great Russian writer Dostoevsky explained why work without soul can be so distressing and demoralizing. He put it this way: “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence.”

The shifting patterns of work brought on by globalization and outsourcing have left many people struggling with feeling overworked, underpaid and undervalued in meaningless jobs. As a result, many people are suffering from a combination of stress, anxiety and depression.

Unfortunately studies show that workplace stress can make your mind miserable and your body ill. It drives many serious problems, more so than any other life stressor, including money, marriage or family problems.

Levels Never Seen Before

Job stress is now at levels never seen before. Men and women are working longer and harder for less money and with less job security and less “job say so” than ever before.

Many people think that outsourcing to countries like India has left American and western European workers cheated while benefiting Indian workers tremendously. But a closer look tells a different story.

Indians working long hours answering telephone calls from America and Europe now show signs of chronic job stress: heart disease, insomnia, musculoskeletal pain and injury, depression and serious family problems.

Stress Hormones are the Culprit: People Just Wear Out

If your work places great demands on you, but offers you little or no control over when and how you do it, then find another job. Because “high demand, low control” work is the worst.

Any kind of ongoing job stress can wear you down and make you ill. But research shows that a high demand, low control work situation can flood your system with stress hormones every day.

What You Need to Do

You can help yourself tremendously if you learn how to do two things relating to stress hormones: 1) prevent them from leaking into your system on a regular basis and 2) flush them from your blood and tissues so they don’t linger and cause harm.

If you learn how to do these two things, you won’t have to be dependent on medications with side effects that take the joy out of your life. With the right “know how” and support, you can learn how to do it easily. Once you feel good and in control again, you can find ways to bring soul back into your work life.

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle
that goes on inside people.  He said, ‘My son, the battle is
between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.

One is Evil.  It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed
arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false
pride,superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity,
humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth,
compassion and faith.’

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his
grandfather: ‘Which wolf wins?’

The old Cherokee simply replied,
‘The one you feed.’

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?

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 6 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

• 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

The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack will be available soon. To reserve your Pack now write me at drjim@MesicsTraining.com with the words “Reserve Pack” in the subject line.

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

Would you believe that doctors and hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America? Only cancer and heart disease take more lives annually (and stress drives both).

How can this be? Aren’t doctors the ones to call and aren’t hospitals the places to go when we’re ill? Perhaps so-but as medical research indicates-we do so at considerable risk.

Dr. Barbara Starfield of the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health published her research findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), findings that show clearly that America’s health care system can be dangerous to our health. Here’s how dangerous: 12,000 people die annually from unnecessary surgery; 27,000 people from hospital errors; 80,000 from hospital infections, and 106,000 people from drug side-effects. This sad state of affairs costs the American taxpayer $77 billion annually.

Drug Side Effects Are A Scandal

You’ve seen the TV ads right, for drugs for make believe diseases like “erectile dysfunction”. At the end of the ad there’s sweet music in the background while someone tells you if you have an erection for more than four hours go to your nearest hospital. More seriously, listen to the side effect warning for drugs that include liver failure, heart failure and stroke, among others. Well these “side effects” as they are euphemistically called-actually happen. And they do kill people in significant numbers.

The drug side-effect deaths are especially scandalous because drug companies throw a ton of money around to gain influence over doctors, universities and even the FDA. They do this to make even more money selling Americans drugs, dangerous drugs they often don’t really need.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the drug review process does not ensure that harmful medications won’t be approved for public consumption. The approval review for new drugs cannot be trusted when the reviewers are being paid by the companies making the drugs. These same companies spend billions of dollars marketing and promoting their drugs to physicians, physicians who too often fall prey to the marketing hype or to the financial rewards they get from a company for prescribing its drugs.

Greed and Manipulative Marketing

The drug company Pfizer, for example, was forced to pay $425 million plus in 2004 to settle unfair marketing charges. Pfizer marketed the drug Neurontin, by, among other things, flying medical doctors to high end resorts and paying other physicians to ghostwrite articles hyping the drug.

Even more worrisome is that Dr. Starfield cautions us that her findings are very conservative because they involve numbers from “in hospital” patients only. Moreover, her figures are “death only” statistics; they don’t include a tally of people who’ve been harmed or disabled, in or out of the hospital, while under medical care.

Protect Yourself-Take Action

The good news is that you can take steps to protect yourself from becoming a health care statistic. First you need to stop thinking of your physician as Yoda-as some all knowing being whose advice you can passively follow. Many physicians are outraged at what’s going on in medical care today, and they are in the front lines to change things. Such physicians welcome patients willing to actively inform themselves. The internet offers good sources to gather information about our medical concerns. A useful one is the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section at http://caphis.mlanet.org/consumer/.

Many hospital deaths typically result from errors of commission, things that should not have been done but were done; or errors of omission, things that should have been done but weren’t done. Hospital workers are typically overworked and so prone to make errors.

Make Sure You Have an Advocate When You Move Into the “Sick Care System”

It’s a good idea to have a friend or family member serve as your advocate while you’re in a hospital, an advocate who stays with you and protects you against errors by asking firm questions and settling for nothing less than good answers. You and your advocate should also work to make sure you get in and out of a hospital as quickly as possible. The best way to avoid hospital based infections, infections that are especially strong and dangerous, is to get out of a hospital quickly.

The fact is that we don’t have a health care system-we have a sick care system. We get tested and treated only after we’re ill. The system does little to help us prevent illnesses before they happen. And very often we get too much very expensive testing and potentially dangerous treatment, including drug treatment.

You should know why you’re being tested and for what, and you should understand the reasons and risks for any treatment prescribed to you.

Here’s Your Best Protection

Your best protection against doctor and hospital errors is to stay healthy. Don’t imagine your doctor will be able to help you at all times, and don’t follow her like a sheep. Be active in safeguarding your health. You probably won’t live long and well unless you do.

Most importantly, you need to learn how to get free from stress.

As the World Health Organization declared, stress is the #1 health problem in the entire developed world. Stress hormones put you at great risk. They drive heart disease, including sudden death and stroke, as well as cancer, diabetes and other serious illnesses. Stress hormones also trigger anxiety and depression. Because your doctor gets most of her information from drug company reps, there’s a good chance you’ll get drugged for stress related problems including anxiety and depression. Most physicians were not trained in the mindbody science needed to understand and relieve stress. Job stress can be especially dangerous.

Research also shows that you’ll stay much healthier if you walk for 20-30 minutes at least 4 times a week. It’s also important to avoid eating too many refined carbohydrate foods loaded with chemicals to enhance taste and extend shelf life. Ditto high saturated fat meats filled with growth hormones, antibiotics and fillers.

One of the most important predictors of health and well-being, and so of minimizing doctor and hospital based risks to our health, is to be happy doing what we truly want and love to do. Make the effort to avoid settling for less.