Stress, The Silent Killer
Stress is making you unhappy and slowly killing you. Current medical research demonstrates that 90-95% of all our illnesses and symptoms–physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and behavioral–are strongly related to decisions being made by that two-pound powerhouse between your ears, the human biocomputer, your brain. Stress decisions!
We are all experientially familiar with the concept, and the condition, of feeling stressed. We’ve all felt it, and we use the word in everyday conversation: “I was so stressed,” “You’re stressing me out,” “Don’t stress about it,” and so on. But most people don’t realize that stress is not something that happens to us. The fact is, stress is simply the highly maladaptive way our nervous systems react to the challenges in our lives–the stressors.
When stress is acute and severe, we experience it as a pounding heart, shortness of breath, and tense muscles– classic symptoms of the fight or flight response. However, the stress that most of us deal with on a daily basis is often milder and more persistent, a slow drip of toxic stress chemicals seeping into our bloodstream. In time, this chronic stress leads to . . .
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. . . a range of debilitating problems, such as chronic illness, fatigue, depression, and a general sense of dysfunction. Stress: the silent enemy we’ve grown accustomed to, wreaking havoc on our bodies and minds without our even realizing it–sometimes not until it’s too late.
For over 50 years, Dr. Miller has specialized in helping people release harmful stress and harness its potential energy for healing and optimal performance. Many studies, both in the lab in the clinic demonstrate clearly that stress is a significant factor in most diseases, as well as in depression, suicide, and addiction. Stress can undermine us psychologically and cause us to underperform in—and even fail at—relationships, work goals, and other important life challenges. With a bit of practice, you can learn to tame stress and use its energy to achieve your goals.
When we attack stress as if it is an enemy to beat down or chase away with pain pills, drugs, alcohol, and other addictive behaviors, we are merely hiding the symptoms of stress from ourselves. Meanwhile, the true source of the imbalance and the stress can become worse!
The secret to dealing successfully with stress is to realize:
Stress is the behavioral reaction of an ancient part of the brain, the limbic system, inappropriately reacting to our relatively minor social and psychological problems as if they are life or death threats from which we must instantly escape. Unless we have learned to accept challenging situations with relaxation and wisdom, the fight-or-flight stress response kicks in.
In our human existence hundreds of thousands of years ago, stress evolved as one part of a two-phase process. The other part of the process was, (and still is,) relaxation. Life or death confrontations were rare, occurring perhaps just a few times a month, and they were over within seconds or minutes. The chemicals dumped into our brains and bloodstream during such moments created the fight-or-flight response. If we survived the confrontation, there was plenty of time to relax; the parasympathetic response–the rest and digest time–would wash the toxic products of stress from our system.
Instead of the occasional saber-toothed tiger attacks and landslides that our nervous systems could handle well and recover from our current world bombards us night and day with frightening headlines, ringing cellphones, emails, text messages, angry bosses, demanding clients and customers–endless demands with far too few opportunities and little time to fully relax and recover.
It is crucially important to understand that when we are in a stressed state–which for many people is nearly always–one of the effects is that the higher levels of the mind are inhibited. We cannot think, reason, and respond creatively and wisely because the monkey mind, shuts off the prefrontal cortex of the brain to block our being distracted from the imagined “emergency.” This inhibition is most unfortunate because this is the part of our mind that otherwise could develop a wise, creative, inspired strategy to deal with the sourceof the stress. The behavior that is appropriate if a lion is chasing you, when nature wants you focused purely on escaping, is exactly the wrong behavior in our world of today. Nowadays we need to focus on the source of the stress with all of our intellect, creativity, wisdom, and inspiration.
The most effective method for harnessing the energy of stress that would otherwise create disease and dysfunction is to practice and learn to enter the state of deep relaxation, dismiss the physical tension and mental anxiety of stress, and then call upon the creativity and wisdom of our higher mind and engage and resolve any challenges. Amazingly, our culture does not teach us this skill, possibly because advertising and social media depend on our being anxious and stressed to sell us products and candidates and the idea of success, and to keep us working to be ever more “productive.”
One of the central features of all of Dr. Miller’s products is his world- famous stress reduction imagery, as this offers the most rapid access to healing, change, and transformation.
Additional Information on Stress
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