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STRESS MANAGEMENT
Everybody hears about stress today. Perhaps you
have occasionally said you “feel stressed.”
What does that mean? What exactly is stress?
My favorite definintion of stress is:
anytime we're not in full control of a situation. Most people who say they
feel stressed recognize that a positive
emotional state has become disrupted and now feels
out of balance—they were happy earlier, now they’re
sad or angry or afraid. Psychological stress is
often described as feeling pressured, tense, or
uptight, as though something inside is about to explode. In fact,
this is a fairly accurate representation of what’s
happening. This inner tension must be released
somewhere, somehow, at some time. The instigator of this stressful response may be
something as mild as having a disagreement with a spouse or co-worker, or as
intense as barely surviving a terrorist attack or natural disaster. Each gives you a
feeling of not being in control. When this feeling continues for long periods of time,
the results can be disastrous to your mental and physical health.
In our society
today, rather than fighting a duel with a person
who offends you, or wrestling saber-tooth tigers(great
tension relievers when you survive,) your unreleased
tension and accompanying changes in your body
may: 1) cause your blood pressure to rise (hypertension;)
2) cause your intestines to convulse in abnormal
patterns of spasms and paralysis(irritable bowel
syndrome;) 3) depress your immune
system, making you susceptible to any number of
illnesses such as cancer, arthritis, lupus, MS,
etc; 4) raise the fats((triglycerides) in your
blood; 5) disrupt your normal sleep patterns;
6) cause tension headaches or migraines; etc.
Nearly 60% of doctor visits in the U.S.
today are for stress-related illnesses. Recent estimates indicate
that 50% of American adults and a significant number
of children take some form of prescribed anti-anxiety
medication. This practice is insane, and far better
methods exist for dealing with stress and anxiety.
All right, how do you avoid stress, or what can
you do about it? First, let’s tweak the
definition a bit. Is stress something that happens
“out there,” such as when your car
payment becomes overdue, or your spouse disagrees
with you about something really important, or
you lose your job? No. These are stressful situations.
Psychological stress is what happens inside you.
You can’t control what happens out there.
You can control what happens in here--
inside yourself. How you react
to what happens (car payment, lost job, etc) is
what causes mental or physical tension. How
you react is the factor that impairs the stability
of your bodily functions.
Why do you react in a particular way in any given
situation? Far too many people respond, “I
don’t know, I just do.” You can predict
that these people will suffer the
ill effects of stress—high blood pressure,
digestive disorders, ulcers, strokes, drug or
alcohol addictions, heart attacks etc. “I
don’t know, I just do.” Nonsense!
How we react to stressful situations is a learned
behavior. Somebody taught you to react that way.
A newborn has no innate reaction to
losing a job or missing a car payment. Or an argument
over what channel to watch on TV. The answer to why you react
in a particular way to any given situation is:
you learned that reaction sometime in your past
and your subconscious mind(the reservoir of memory
and emotion) directs you to react the same way
now. You’ll continue to react that way until
you reprogram your subconscious
mind. You probably learned your reactions
from watching your parents, or a sibling, or friend.
Or maybe you learned through trial and error what
worked at an earlier age. At age five you probably
cried when somebody shouted at you. If crying
gained what you wanted then, you may cry now because
it worked way back then.
Until the age of about 6 years, the subconscious
mind is open and receptive to new information
because children are learning from and protected
by parents, in preparation for going out into
the world on their own. Is it a coincidence that
youngsters are sent to school around age six?
Sometime around age six, a fairly impenetrable
barrier forms around the subconscious mind. This
barrier is known as the critical factor,
and its job is to analyze and judge all new information
that attempts to get into the subconscious. If
the new information doesn’t agree with what’s
already stored inside(our core values and beliefs,)
the critical factor refuses to let it in.
So what does this have to do with stress? If you currently react
to a stressful situation in a way that’s
harmful to you, it’s most likely because
that pattern was imbedded in your subconscious
mind sometime before age 6. If you don’t
get what you want, do you react
as a mature adult or like a five year old? In
many instances, only acceptable adult
behavior is visible on the surface, while inside,
your 5-year-old subconscious is crying and screaming
and stamping her feet—. As a result of this unreleased tension,
epinephrine and nor-epinephrine flood your bloodstream,
you can’t sleep, your heart races wildly,
blood pressure rises off the charts, your immune
system becomes depressed, or your intestinal tract
convulses in erratic bouts of spasm and paralysis.
Hello!!! This is a wake up call.
Why do so many people drink or take tranquilizers
today to reduce their feelings of stress? It is actually amazing
that more people don’t do it. A five year old doesn’t
have the emotional or intellectual capacity to deal with
the complex problems facing adults. A human
brain isn’t close to being fully developed
at age five, and yet our subconscious minds were
effectively sealed off somewhere between age five
and six. New information is allowed in ONLY if
it agrees with what’s already inside. Pretty
limiting, huh? What if one of your core beliefs
(with the understanding of a 5 year old) says
you are not worthy of love? Or you’re a
bad person? That you are stupid, or lazy, or worthless?
Might such beliefs limit how you behave today,
or what you accomplish in life? Is there a way
to add new information that will serve us better
as adults?
We have found only two consistently effective methods
—Hypnotherapy and Anxiety Relief Techniques™.
HYPNOTHERAPY
The medically accepted definition
of hypnosis is: The process of bypassing the
critical factor of the conscious mind so the subconscious
mind becomes receptive to positive, helpful thoughts
or behaviors. Using hypnotism to effect positive
change for someone is called hypnotherapy.
Hypnotherapy can help you achieve many things
you’ve wanted but were unable to do on your
own. Conscious decisions are rarely enough to
change longstanding behavior. “I’ve
tried a million times to stop smoking, lose weight,
reduce my stress, stop procrastinating, find a better
job, improve my self-confidence, etc.” Of course it didn’t
work. You made a conscious decision to change a
behavior that your subconscious mind controls.
That’s like trying to paint a wall with
a hammer. You’ve been using the wrong tool.
Established habits and behaviors are imbedded
where? Right--in the subconscious mind.
For example, you may overeat to feed a feeling of emptiness
when you’re lonely, perhaps learned when your mother gave
you a bottle and left you alone at nap time. Or
you overeat when you’re upset—maybe
you hurt your knee at age 3 and received a cookie
to stop your crying. Smoking cigarettes may feed
a four-year-old’s subconscious desire to
be all grown up, or to feel accepted by your peers--perhaps
your 8 year old sibling wouldn’t play with
you? Physically addictive substances such as alcohol,
drugs, and tobacco are even harder to give up
with conscious effort. It becomes vital to enlist
the help of the subconscious mind to discover
and remove the real reasons these drugs
were desired in the first place. Changing your subconscious
thoughts and feelings can remove that desire. If you
have no desire for something, how difficult is it to give it up? When someone
truly wants to eliminate a habit, our techniques are
almost 100% effective. The way you react to
stress is a habit—a habitual, learned behavior.
Do you sincerely want to eliminate the
effects of stress in your life? Hypnotherapy and Anxiety Relief Techniques
can easily help you do so. And unlike tranquilizers,
mood elevators, alcohol, tobacco, or anti-depressant
medications, they are not addicting, nor
do they carry undesirable side effects. The only
known side effects are: 1) They lessen feelings of anxiety,
2) make you feel better about yourself, and 3) increase your self
confidence and self-esteem. Pretty cool, huh!
Permit me to digress briefly to illustrate
how our most common bad habits work. Nobody likes
to feel bad-- Right? Destructive habits become
deeply rooted because they seem to help
avoid unpleasant feelings like anxiety, anger,
or frustration. That is, they momentarily distract
us from feeling bad, but they don’t make
the feeling go away. They can’t take it
away. For example, when you experience anxiety
about an upcoming medical exam, overdue tax bill,
business meeting, lost job, etc, you may feel
that you need a cigarette, or drink,
or chocolate chip cookie. Performing the ritual
of the habit (smoking the cigarette, etc) temporarily
distracts you from the bad feeling, so you probably
feel better for awhile. When the fix
doesn’t remove the anxiety, however, not
only does that bad feeling return full strength,
you also feel frustrated that your solution
didn’t work. Worse off now than you were,
you try another cigarette, drink, etc, to distract
yourself yet again from the bad feelings. My favorite
definition of insanity is: doing the same
thing over and over, each time expecting a different
result. After several cycles of trying something
that clearly does not work, most people finally
give up and stop trying altogether. They
shut down. This is called depression. Now you’re
in an absolutely terrible situation because you
feel anxiety, plus frustration, plus depression,
all at once. When you use an addictive
substance to distract yourself from your real
issues, you’re guaranteed to wind up feeling
anxious, depressed, frustrated, AND physically
hooked on the substance, if it hasn’t killed
you meanwhile.
How do you break this insane cycle? First, learn
why it started and how it works, as you’re
doing right now by reading this material. If you
had really understood at age 15 or 20 how strongly
alcohol or tobacco become addictive and what they
do to your body and mind, would you have chosen
to use them? Of course not. If you understood
years ago how to deal with stress in a positive
way, would you live today on tranquilizers or
alcohol, or suffer from things like insomnia,
high blood pressure, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome,
etc? No way. But you didn’t know, so now
you must learn how to remove bad habits from your
life.
The most effective removal techniques deal directly
with the subconscious mind and the body’s
energy system, both of which enable the human
body to repair itself. Hypnotherapy works by removing
the original desire for the habit from
your subconscious mind. It removes the reason
why you need to smoke or drink or suffer
violent outbursts of anger, etc by dealing directly
with the bad feelings. Remember, feelings—emotions--reside
in your subconscious mind. The anxiety that wells
up into consciousness when you think about your
lost job or tax bill is connected to a similar anxiety you felt years
ago, before you began your habit. A professional therapist can help you
discover the true reason for that anxiety,
and show you how to view it as a capable adult
rather than as a helpless 5 year old child. It’s
often like magic to watch these anxieties and
fears disappear.
Anxiety Relief Techniques™
Anxiety Relief Techniques™ is a revolutionary method
of removing the anxiety that makes us feel bad in the first place.
Since anxiety is ultimately responsible for our fears, phobias,
bad habits, unwanted behaviors, and how we deal with stress, ART
works wonders with these issues. To explain briefly, your energy system
is what gives you life. This is the system being measured, for instance,
when you undergo an EEG or MRI. Dr Roger Callahan, a brilliant psychologist, discovered
more than 20 years ago that traumatic events cause a disruption in our
circulating energy system. Some are big, some small. He further
demonstrated that the disruption generates negative emotions of
anxiety, fear, frustration, etc. It is NOT the traumatic event that
makes us feel bad, but rather it is the disturbed energy flow.
Stressful events are also traumas that disrupt the energy system.
Once the disruption is restored, you can discover new and effective
coping strategies from the perspective of an adult. This approach rapidly
reduces or eliminates most psychological stress.
Anxiety Relief Techniques™ (ART) and similar energy-psychology methods offer the fastest
and most reliable results available anywhere today
for relieving stress, anxiety, fear, frustration,
and other troublesome emotions. In combination with specific imagery, ART activates known
access points to the limbic system of the brain. Proper activation rapidly diminishes the hyper-arousal state
associated with fear and anxiety. This approach literally unhooks fear and
anxiety from an otherwise stressful event, memory, or situation.
There is no need
to continue suffering the effects of stress. Our
slogan has become When Nothing Else Works because
our methods succeed after nearly everything else
has been tried and failed. You can regain power
over your stress, your life, and your health.
Tel: 512-5131 (Dr Charlie)
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Copyright © 2005-7 by ANXIETY RELIEF SPECIALISTS & HYPNOTHERAPY INSTITUTE. All rights reserved.