Stress is a part of everyday life. Without it we would never get off the couch, never worry about our work efforts, what our kids are up to, never put out the fire or avoid the car that veers into our lane!

The degree of stress that we encounter on a constant basis in modern society, however, has reached epidemic proportions.

“Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.”
~Richard Carlson

I love the quote above, because we often do fall into the trap of stressing out and just generally driving ourselves crazy.

But it’s important to remember that stress triggers the “fight-or-flight” response. The surge of adrenaline and the slowing down of other basic functions provides us with the instant energy we need to run from a predator or battle an attacker.

This survival response comes with side effects though. Over time, that extra energy and alertness comes with altered hormone levels, heightened blood sugar, depleted nutrients and lowered neurotransmitters.

Over time, our bodies adapt to invoke that same response with smaller and smaller triggers.

“Fight or flight” is the normal operating mode for many of us, rather than the true emergency survival mechanism it was meant to be. We rarely work off that energy, take restorative actions or release ourselves from that state of mind.

Chronic stress affects every bodily system. It suppresses the immune system, slows metabolism and cell regeneration, makes airways reactive and creates muscle tension. It is estimated that 90% of doctor visits can be traced back to stress.

Stress can be linked to weight gain, heart disease and depression. It increases the risk of diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and osteoporosis.

Stress impairs cognitive function over time, reducing creativity, memory and problem-solving skills.

Headaches, sexual dysfunction, irritability, problems sleeping and addictive behaviors are often stress-related.

The degree of stress we experience on a daily basis might be a cultural norm but personal priorities, personal choices and our purposeful reactions to stress can limit the negative health effects of stress.

Pick a few of these suggestions below to reduce stress in your life and promote health and healing in your body.

1.    Spiritual Triathlon. This is my personal method for keeping my focus throughout the day. Every morning when I wake up I spend 5 minutes saying all that I am grateful for, 5 minutes in prayer and 5 minutes reading my Bible or something inspirational.

2.    Schedule relaxation. Write it down in your planner and stick to it. Make time at least once a week to do something you love–something that refreshes you. Maybe that’s a game of tennis, spending an hour alone with a good book or taking a yoga class.

3.    Pour yourself a cup. Many varieties of hot tea have calming effects on the body and can help lower blood pressure. Try green or black tea or herbal teas with chamomile.

4.    Take a deep breath. Try deep breathing for a few minutes every day. Tighten and release muscles. Hum to release nitric oxide and improve blood pressure.

5.    Just say “No.” I promise it’s ok! Don’t spread yourself too thin or you won’t be able to give 100% of your efforts to any of the tasks you attempt. Your value does not depend upon how much you do for others at the expense of your own time, relationships and health.

“Men, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live.” ~Margaret Fuller

6.    Expel excess adrenaline. Before, during and after stressful situations, walk briskly for 5 minutes, run up a flight of stairs, do backward pushups on your chair, or do 5 minutes of deep breathing. A short burst of physical activity can expel anxiety and give you clarity and calm.

7.    Ask yourself why. The next time you’re racing around trying to accomplish too many things in too short a time, ask yourself why you’re doing it, who it really serves, what belief its based on, whether this feeling is really what you want, whether this is a value or principle you want to base your life on.

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.”
~Corrie Ten Boom

8.    Nix the caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. Don’t add to nervous energy with stimulants and don’t mask stress with alcohol. The long-term effects compound the negative effects of stress.

9.    Exercise regularly. Regular exercise helps expel built-up tension, stress hormones and clears the mind. Exercise helps to release endorphins, the brain’s natural feel-good chemicals. I recommend Burst Training for the most health benefits.

10.    Sleep. Staying up late to get more done robs you of your total productivity. It dulls your mind, increases stress, promotes weight gain and contributes to mood swings.

11.    Use your senses. Find colors that soothe you, wear fabrics that please you. Take a scented bath, play music you love. Paint, get a massage, or take a walk in the woods.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the number of moments that take our breath away.”
~Hilary Cooper

12.    Connect with others. Making time for social connection is very important and restorative. Social connection is what makes us a part of something larger than ourselves and our worries. It gives us perspective.

13.    Serve someone else. Related to connecting with others, try volunteering at a soup kitchen, making meals for parents with a newborn baby or helping with home repairs for an elderly neighbor. Remind yourself that it’s not always all about you.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
~Wayne Dwyer

14.    Be prepared. You can combat alarmist or catastrophic thinking by being prepared. Keep a change of clothes in the car, create an emergency fund for car repairs, have an alternative proposal in mind at work.

15.    Make a vision board. Write down your goals and post them on a board where it can be seen every day. What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to become? Print out pictures to visually remind yourself of what is most important to you.

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” ~Rumi

16.    Share responsibility. Delegating really is an important skill. Instead of complaining about how much you have to accomplish, teach your kids to cook, share the credit with a co-worker, or work out sports shuttling with another parent.

Call me anything. Call me a bad name. Challenge my intelligence. Question my choices. But, do not call me typical. Why? Take away someone’s uniqueness and you remove their very reason for living. Their life is forever “insignificant” and without “value.”

The foundation of psychological science is based on the work of Dr. Abraham Maslow. He discovered that the “typical” person is similar to a rodent in a cage – simply scurrying around the best it can to meet basic needs.

The lowest, primitive, rodent-like value system runs the polar opposite of the higher value systems God designed us to seek as the dominant, human life-forms on the planet.

Maslow’s Value Scale

*Lower values (scurrying for needs): Food, water, clothes, housing, security, protection, preservation

*Higher values (seeking and fulfilling a purpose): Self-actualization and significance

Lesser life forms – mice, rats, flies – are not very politically correct. They simply seek to meet needs at all costs. Today, we live in a world where typically people rush from place to place to simply, like a lower life-form, meet needs. Because this value system is incongruent with the one God created you to have, you must become stressed, frustrated, depressed, anxious, and exhibit poor health. It’s a law.

In fact, 60% of the U.S. and growing report being depressed and anxious or as Thoreau put it, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” 33% of adults are medicated and an ever booming part of the children in our country are now being medicated for this as well. This, in addition to other types of addictions (alcohol and drugs) and our penchant to do anything we can to distract our minds from our misery (cell phones, internet, pornography, T.V., iPod), “We have become comfortably numb.”

In my 7 years of being a doctor and consultant, I have never met a depressed, sick, medicated, addicted person who lived their life according to Maslow’s higher values. Seeking purpose and significance equals good mental and physical health- also a law!

Ironically, seeking lower values or simply looking to meet needs often ends up stopping you from ever meeting those needs. Truly, the best way to achieve in life is be on a mission towards higher values. Your needs get met, and then some.

Do not be typical. Look for more on this at our Stress, Time, and Energy Workshop – coming soon!

“Do not worry about what you will eat, or what you will drink, or what you will wear. …seek ye first the Kingdom and all it’s righteousness and all these (needs) will be given to you…..and then some!

Do you know that chemical imbalance is not a primary problem, but a secondary problem?

That’s right if you have mental or emotional issues, unless you’ve suffered a head injury, it’s a side effect of other trauma.

THESE TRAUMAS CAN BE:

• Poor lifestyle
• Continual stress, anxiety, and fear
• Neurological distress syndrome
• Leaky gut syndrome
• Inadequate vitamin, mineral, and enzyme consumption
• An imbalance in fatty acids

For most people -all of these traumas are a continual reality of their life.

Thankfully, there is a natural way to recover as SSRIs (Anti-depressants like Luvox, Effexor, Prozac, Paxil Wellbutrin, etc. etc.) are some of the most, if not the most, dangerous medications people can purchase today.

Exercise is consistently found to be as or more effective than depression and antipsychotic medications. Therefore, a lack of exercise can cause depression and psychotic episodes.

Other benefits of exercise: Builds the systems that surround

• attention
• motivation
• confidence
• self-esteem

Decreases Blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Increases your ability to bring in and utilize oxygen, the body’s most important nutrient.

Many of you may already do some kind of exercise, but we are learning that much of what we thought about exercise in the past has turned out to be wrong. Dr. James will be sharing the most cutting edge information on exercise physiology and showing you how to apply it in 20 minute workouts that will quickly get you in the best shape of your life. This class will be on this Thursday.

This is an important opportunity for all. Please make sure to reach out to people you know who suffer or you would just like to see happier.

Dedicate this 1 hour of your time and encourage others to do so. It’s sure to bring a much greater return than reality T.V.

The U.S. has the highest rate of mental illness (anxiety disorders and depression), with over a quarter of the population suffering versus as little as 4.7 percent in other countries.i Most of these countries who suffer with only a fraction of as much mental illness have living situations and quality of life far, far below that of the U.S.

Learning how to manage your life and reprogram how you look at stress-inducing circumstances will put a major dent in this devastating emotional crisis.

The Journal of Circulation reported in May 2004 that people with normal blood pressure and with higher scores on an assessment of their anger traits (with its resulting negative stress and anxiety) are nearly three times more likely to have a heart attack. Even those whose anger is moderate face a significant risk of illness and death from coronary heart disease. In other words, even if you’re healthy and routinely test in the normal blood pressure range, if you’ve got an anger management problem, you put yourself at high risk of not only emotional explosion, but also valve explosion.

Man was built to survive. In order to do this, he has within him an anger or stress mechanism. This mechanism stimulates your fight or flight. If you are under attack, your body releases stress hormones designed to focus maximum energy on the tissues needed for battle and takes energy away from the ones that aren’t. That way, if you are attacked by a dog or a Yankees fan, you can fight or run.

If, however, you get angry or excited and don’t use that adrenaline for physical activity or continually allow yourself to become overstimulated, the stress hormones will cause damage to your arteries and glands. Excessive amounts of stress hormones in the body can damage the lining of the heart’s vessels as well as clog the veins and arteries.

Where Does Anger Come From?

Hint: it’s not from your wife’s Aunt Maude or that incompetent kid at the Wendy’s drive-thru. Take a look at these different anger “inspirations” and responses.

• Low Self Esteem
• The Immature Emotional Response
• Value Judging
• Unfinished business

Stress management doesn’t work. If you’re stressed, that’s hard to manage. Maximized Living a calls it “peace management.” Don’t look to fight stress; instead build and manage peace so as to overcome and/or prevent stress.

You attain peace through better managing your life. Life management includes getting control of your time, gaining new perspectives on life, and building strong relationships. Peace is not something you find when your latest crisis is over. In a stressful life, what usually follows stress is the next stress. When you manage your life better, stress is more likely to be followed by peace.

Creating peace and strong relationships does not begin by changing everyone and every circumstance surrounding you. Switching locations, jobs, or spouses is typically not the answer. While the grass always seems greener (in this case, more peaceful) in someone else’s yard, occupation, or relationship, once you get over there, over there becomes over here. As the adage says, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Peace of mind and better associations start (and end) with you. When you change, the atmosphere around you changes.

Recognizing that you must be transformed for your life to be transformed is not cause for despair. While it’s easy to blame outside influences for your anxiety and stress, that philosophy is self-defeating since it implies that there’s nothing you can do about it. You end up handing power over to the things going on around you instead of acknowledging what’s going on inside of you, where the real power is. (Remember, you’re not controlled by your genes or fated for anxiety, depression, and stress-you control them.)

If you’re not signed up for the Extreme Makeover Challenge yet it’s not too late! You missed the kickoff (which was awesome!), but you can still join in for week 2! Talk to Danielle… Right Now!

i Norman D. Ford, Health Report

Years ago there was a news story about a man coming home to a burning house. As he arrived, he was informed that his wife and baby were inside. Firemen and police forbade him to go back in, due to the inferno.  In agony, he pulled away from them, rushed inside and made his way up to the second floor where his wife was crying for help. He grabbed her hand then raced to the nursery to save their darling daughter. The husband picked up the blanketed bundle and rushed outside, smoke billowing into the night sky behind them.

In the safety behind the fire trucks, the father opened the blanket, expecting to look into the eyes of his little girl. Instead, he saw a plastic doll from the nursery. Through the smoke and stress, he had misjudged, made the wrong decision, and lost his precious treasure.

If there are wrong decisions being made about your health, misjudgments about the right treatments, and dysfunctional types of drugs and care, then lives are lost. Like the story above, you have fought to preserve your life or your precious family’s life only to end up with something else.

When you do things well, it really is like being saved or saving someone else from a burning building. If, as a result of making the right moves with your lifestyle, you live a year longer – while not as dramatic – is not that as good as being rescued? The results are the same – more time on earth, with your family, and serving God the best you can.

Right now, there is someone you need and who needs you, someone you love and who loves you. While many, many things keep us busy – jobs, carpools, school work, house maintenance, etc., if you do not work to preserve your life, it is all gone in a puff a smoke.

If you want to save lives and be saved, follow these simple lifeguarding steps.

LIFEGUARDING 101

1) Spine: the housing point of the central nervous system, the command center of the entire body that controls all functions and healing. See a chiropractor regularly.

2) Toxicity: chemicals and poisons rule the day. Between the medications and processed foods, we can simply end up poisoned. Reducing and / or eliminating toxins will preserve and add value to life. Dr. J will be speaking at Earth Fare in West Ashley on toxicity this month!

3) Nutrients: not dieting, but taking in the necessary amounts of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins in order to sustain life. Educate yourself on a regular basis on nutrition. It is an ever progressing field.

4) Movement: You and your family were created for motion. Intentionally being active as a team will create positive, constructive time in your life, and save your life. Learn the power of surge training and put exercises into your time management schedule.

5) Rest / Stress: The average person gets more than 365 less hours of sleep per year than they need. Similar to the effects of stress, it will hurt you, reduce immunity, cause pain, and disease. Have a maximum time to allow yourself to stay awake before heading to bed. By developing your spiritual life through committing control to God, you have less responsibility and less stress.These are some of the very simple steps of maximized living. It is a safe, sane, healthy alternative to what the world is offering for health care. You will not only save yourself, but those you know.