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 Mental emotional stress has been linked to almost every disease known to mankind has been linked back to mental emotional stress. Stress is just not good for our bodies or our immune systems. By combining the tools from this mental emotional stress article and then using some of the tools that we learned in our chemical stress article where we talked a little bit about nutrition and then we take some of the tools from the physical stress article where we learned about some of the benefits of movement and exercise. When we combine these three it’s by far the most powerful.
Our brains cannot distinguish the difference between what we vividly imagine or think about, or what’s really going on in our physical reality. It can’t distinguish the difference. And they’ve actually done this with athletes. Trainers will have athletes shut their eyes and connect them up to sophisticated biofeedback equipment and have them think about their events in their minds eye. Sure enough their sweat gland activity increased, their heart rate increased and every muscle fired in the exact sequence as if they were actually physically running their event. They did it in their minds eyes only and had the exact same neurological effect. Our brains can’t distinguish the difference between our thoughts and our reality – our external physical reality. This can be a double edged sword where most of the time our thoughts are projected somewhere into the future on things that haven’t even occurred, or rehashing past events. Either way, if we’re not here and now, and our brain is chattering a mile a minute, the result is it elicits a stress response, secretes stress hormones which in turn increase your risks of cancers, heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and the list goes on and on.
Let’s look at what we can do to gain some insight on how to get control over some of these thoughts and how to guide them in a safe and effective manner, so we can actually release and balance our mental emotional well being.
Balancing Strategies
The first thing is to have some awareness over your thoughts. A lot of people will go through the day and they are not even aware that their mind is going a mile a minute and is focused on and getting stressed from things that haven’t occurred yet or things that happened 20 years go.
Awareness
So the first exercise that I have my patients do is just to have some awareness of where the thoughts are and kind of listen in on the internal dialogue. If it’s something that you don’t really like or doesn’t really make you feel good just hit the stop button. I tell them to hit the stop button, and then hit play on a new set of thoughts, a new set of internal dialogues that feel a little bit better than the previous ones. So it’s actually a pretty simple exercise and most people really have a lot of fun with it. You don’t have to become obsessed with your thoughts, but just have some awareness of where they’re at.
Breathing
A second strategy is becoming aware of our respiratory rate. And a lot of times when we have people wired up to this biofeedback equipment, we see that their respiratory cycles are very short, very shallow, and very rapid and their heart rate is pounding away and everything is completely out of balance. The stress hormones are being secreted by the bucket load and what we want to do is have them just first become aware of their breath. Breathing helps us out of that stress mode and gets us into a more natural rhythm of breathing and still turns off that stress response. It’s a real simple thing that we can do.
The “As If” State
Remember we said the brain can’t distinguish the difference between our thoughts and our external reality. Even though your thoughts have not manifested yet in your life, if you can see it in your mind’s eye, you brain will actually start secreting chemicals that are consistent with that joyous state. You can do it in areas of your relationship, of your family of your job, your career; your finances. You can actually play the as if game and basically you can just say, “wouldn’t be nice if” and you just kind of talk about it and think about it, and kind of conjure up a picture in your mind’s eye and what will happen is is your brain will actually start secreting healthier chemicals just by your change in thought. So it’s a very powerful exercise I have people do.
Gratitude is a powerful “As If” state. As soon as we change into that mode, instantaneously the brain waves relax, the heart rate slows down, blood pressure drops, tension automatically dissipates from the body. The arteries around the heart relax open. It’s the amazing power of gratitude, so let’s keep that in mind when we do some of these exercises. When we choose, when we hit the stop button on those thoughts that are not conducive to our health and wellness, and hit play on the thoughts that are more in line with gratitude.
Resources to help and guide
- A Wild Divine – you go to http://www.wilddivine.com/ is a little home unit you plug right into your personal computer and it’ll actually walk you through how to do some of these exercises that I’m talking about and it’ll give you feedback from your body when you actually drop into the states that we’re talking about.
- Heart Math Solution, www.healthmathsolution.com and the tool that they have is called a freeze framer, and the it’s the same idea, you stick your finger into a little sensor and as you drop yourself into a state of gratitude where you slow down your breathing and start dissipating that tension, it will start dinging and give you feedback and saying good job all those healthy changes are happening.
- Stress Eraser: www.stresseraser.com and it’s actually a portable unit that does even require a computer. You just slide your finger in and it gives you instantaneous feedback as to where your stress levels are, and as soon as you start doing some of these strategies that we just went over, you’ll actually see your body dissipate stress and it’ll actually give you feedback as well. So those are just little simplistic biofeedback tools that you can use.
- “Count Your Blessing” by Dr. John Demartini and it’s all about the healing power of gratitude; an excellent book.
- “Breakthrough Experience” by Dr. John Demartini, which is again excellent to go along with this mental emotional workshop that we’re doing.
- “Loving What Is” by Byron Katie
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