What is stress?
Chemically, stress is a condition that your body enters as the result of your brain
telling it to prepare to run or fight. The brain causes the adrenal glands to send a rush of two hormones
(adrenaline and noradrenaline) to the muscles in preparation for them to respond to a fear or a threat.
The brain protects the body by telling the noradrenaline to redirect blood flow from lower priority areas of your
body (like skin or your abdomen) to the muscles to give you a “power boost.”
At the same time, the brain is also telling the adrenaline to speed up your breathing to take in more oxygen to
feed the work being done on the muscles with the noradrenaline.
Unfortunately, when you can’t make a decision about how to react. These two hormones rush
around madly waiting for you to decide what you want them to do. Until then, the only choice
they have is to cause vomiting, make you tremble, panic or maybe even pass out.
Causes of Stress
What’s causing your stress?
A slow buildup of everyday annoyances: a dead car battery, traffic jam, a tight schedule with seemingly
insurmountable problems, bills to pay, a boss to please, a colicky baby to pacify...
Juggling many roles is a major cause of stress.
It can be positive and negative life changes, from the joy of a wedding to the loss of a spouse.
Inner inner conflict can be a cause. Anger with your boss actually may be old anger against
a parent bubbling to the surface. If you can recognize a pattern from the past, this can be an instant stress
reliever. Take some time, even just 30 seconds to write down your feelings.
Try to Relax!
We can’t control other people and situations, but we can control how we respond to people and events.
We must regain control.
When was the last time you actually relaxed? Can you remember what it was like? Were you calm and collected?
Was your breathing normal? Did you feel that way without any outside stimulants like drugs?
The good news is that you can restore that same feeling at will.
Just as the our body chemicals jump to attention with stress, other chemicals go to work
when we relax, creating a feeling of contentment.
While relaxing, actions taken by people and external events are still important but not necessarily personal.
You can discern that no one is launching a direct attack upon you or yours.
Everything you do is a matter of choice. You choose to be angry, happy or indifferent. You make a conscious
choice to take action or not to take action.
Do you remember tormenting your neighbor's cat as a child? You had the upper hand until kitty fought back.
You run away and likely forget all about it until the next time. It took
a few lessons, but soon you understood if you tormented the cat, the cat would fight back. So you stopped.
That was a conscious action taken to prevent being hurt. It was a survival strategy just like fight or flight,
except that this was behavior modification instead of an automatic response.
As you grew older, the behavior for survival changed but the bottom line is that you probably used a dozen
behaviors without even thinking about it every day of the week. But you may have overlooked the behavior to relax.
If relaxation is just another behavior, then that means it’s a learned response, which means that you can
change the behavior.
Train Your Brain
Your brain already knows what to do subconsciously, but you need to
teach it how to do it consciously. In order to do that, you need an understanding of how your mind works.
Everything you have ever encountered or done in your entire lifetime is permanently recorded in your subconscious mind.
Your subconscious doesn’t rationalize; it doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t know truth from falsehood. It merely
acts upon whatever information is stored within.
There are four states of consciousness, but we will discuss just two:
- Beta – this is our waking state
- Alpha – first step to the subconscious
The Alpha state is where you are relaxed, the normal machinations
of your conscious mind are just a little distant and you feel warm and comfortable.
Alpha level is where you can do the best work for yourself on a subconscious level. This is also a state of
meditation, and the level you work with using self-hypnosis.
You are actually in this state every single day at least two times - those
fleeting moments just before you drift off to sleep and just as you awaken.
Your conscious mind has the ability to reason out a good course of action. However, it needs the cooperation of
the subconscious and will send its energy out to implement the decision.
Conscious vs. Subconscious
No matter what you consciously do to instruct the subconscious mind, there is no way to permanently override
what it has been programmed to do.
For example, if a very young child is told by a parent, teacher, elder sibling or other authority figures:
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Why can’t you be more like Billy?”
“Why are you so stupid?”
“You will never amount to anything!”
This child will often be a failure in life since his conscious mind is not developed enough
to block this type of information. Therefore, it becomes a fact in his subconscious mind.
As he/she grows to adulthood, his subconscious will apply everything it has learned.
Remember, it doesn't decide right or wrong, good or bad, it is merely a computer that stores data.
The subconscious will force the conscious to act in exactly the same manner that was programmed as a child.
It's important to understand that there are certain “tapes” in your
subconscious mind that will not be changed. What you can do is create “new” responses.
NEXT: Stress relief through self hypnosis
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