Modern life is stressful. When it comes to stress and your health, it is believed by many experts that more than 90% of all health problems today are a result from stress. This is because stress can compromise the immune system making one vulnerable to a host of illnesses from minor problems like the flu to even cancer. And managing stress is a skill a lot of people just do not have. A lot of people turn to alcohol and drugs to manage stress which ultimately can just add to the problem. So, what can we do to manage and alleviate stress so we can stay healthy?
In this article from Dr. Mercola, he shares a simple tool called EFT(Emotional Freedom Technique) which has shown to be effective for many things from managing stress, overcoming addictions, and weigh tloss to name a few:
“The connections between stress and physical health are being explored at greater frequency these days. For example, recent news items have reported the links between emotional distress and physical pain,1 chronic inflammation2 and even stillbirths.3
In fact, pregnant women who experience significant stress in the months prior to, or during pregnancy are more likely to deliver stillborn babies. The risk is heightened with each stressful event, such as moving, losing a job, or the death of a friend or family member.
Previous studies have linked stress to lowered immune system function; increased blood pressure and cholesterol levels; altered brain chemistry, blood sugar levels and hormonal balance. It has also been found to increase the rate at which tumors grow.4
In a poll, work was identified as the number one source of stress in people’s lives.
Clearly, it is not possible or even recommended to eliminate stress entirely. However you can work to provide your body with tools to compensate for the bioelectrical short-circuiting that can cause serious disruption in many of your body’s important systems.
By using techniques such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), you can reprogram your body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life. Exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, and meditation are also important “release valves” that can help you manage your stress.
How Stress Causes Disease
When you’re stressed, your body releases stress hormones like cortisol, which prepare your body to fight or flee the stressful event. Your heart rate increases, your lungs take in more oxygen, your blood flow increases and parts of your immune system become temporarily suppressed, which reduces your inflammatory response to pathogens and other foreign invaders.
When stress becomes chronic, however, your immune system becomes less sensitive to cortisol, and since inflammation is partly regulated by this hormone, this decreased sensitivity heightens the inflammatory response and allows inflammation to get out of control.
This is in large part how stress “predisposes” you to getting sick in the first place. And, in the event you do get sick, emotional stressors can make your symptoms worse. Because inflammation plays a role in most diseases, including cardiovascular disease, asthma and autoimmune disorders, this model suggests why stress impacts them as well.
Links Explored Between Physical and Emotional Pain Relief
According to two recent studies from the Association for Psychological Science, physical pain may be a natural mechanism to help you regulate your emotions. This concept was explored by investigating a phenomenon known as “pain offset relief,” in which you experience the emotion of relief when the physical pain is removed.
In the first study,5 the researchers recorded participants’ emotions via electrodes in response to loud noises delivered either alone or seconds after receiving a low- or high-intensity electric shock. After pain offset, participants showed increased positive emotions and decreased negative emotions. The greater the pain (i.e. intensity of the shock), the greater the increase in positive emotions once the pain stopped. According to the authors, these findings shed light on the emotional nature of pain offset relief.
However, while the authors speculated that this might help us understand why some people seek relief through self-injurious behavior, a second study6 refuted the idea that those who harm themselves in an effort to experience relief do so because they experience greater levels of relief once the pain is removed than others. According to the featured article:7
“Surprisingly, healthy individuals displayed pain offset relief levels that were comparable to those of individuals with a history of self-harm, and there was no correlation between pain offset relief and self-harm frequency. These results do not support the hypothesis that heightened pain offset relief is a risk factor for future self-injury. Instead… the biggest risk factors for nonsuicidal self-injury may concern how some people overcome the instinctive barriers that keep most people from inflicting self-harm.”
Dwelling on Stressful Events Can Increase Inflammation in Your Body
Related research presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Miami, Florida, found that ruminating on a stressful incident can increase your levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation in your body.8 It was the first study to directly measure this effect.
To do so, they asked 34 healthy young women to give a speech about her candidacy for a job in front of two stone-faced interviewers wearing white lab coats. Afterward, half the group was asked to contemplate their performance while the other half were asked to think about neutral things like going to the grocery store. Blood samples were drawn from each participant, showing that the C-reactive protein levels were significantly higher in those who kept ruminating on their speech. According to Medical News Today:9
“For these participants, the levels of the inflammatory marker continued to rise for at least one hour after the speech. During the same time period, the marker returned to starting levels in the subjects who had been asked to focus on other thoughts.
The C-reactive protein is primarily produced by the liver as part of the immune system’s initial inflammatory response. It rises in response to traumas, injuries or infections in the body, [lead author, Peggy] Zoccola explained. C-reative protein is widely used as a clinical marker to determine if a patient has an infection, but also if he or she may be at risk for disease later in life. ‘More and more, chronic inflammation is being associated with various disorders and conditions,’ Zoccola said. ‘The immune system plays an important role in various cardiovascular disorders such as heart disease, as well as cancer, dementia and autoimmune diseases.'”
The article continues to share why EFT is the best method to manage stress and provides a video demonstration on exactly how to perform EFT on yourself to resolve to relieve stress and anxiety. You can read the rest on Dr Mercola’s website by clicking the link below:
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