Stress: It's Not Just In Your Head (Using EFT to Combat Stress)

By Dr. Mercola

Anxiety over a project at work… a marital spat… financial trouble… health problems… the list of potential stressors is endless, but wherever your stress is coming from, it likely starts in your head.

An inkling of worry might soon grow into an avalanche of anxiety. It might keep you up at night, your mind racing with potential “what ifs” and worst-case scenarios. Worse still, if the problem is ongoing, your stressed-out state may become your new normal -- extra stress hormones, inflammation, and all.

While beneficial if you’re actually in imminent danger, that heightened state of stress – the one that makes your survival more likely in the event of an attack, for instance – is damaging over time.

The thoughts in your head are only the beginning or, perhaps more aptly, are the wheels that set the harmful mechanism known as chronic stress into motion – and, once spinning, it’s very easy to spiral out of control. As reported in Science News:

“Stress research gained traction with a master stroke of health science called the Whitehall Study, in which British researchers showed that stressed workers were suffering ill effects.

Scientists have since described how a stressed brain triggers rampant hormone release, which leads to imbalanced immunity and long-term physical wear and tear.

Those effects take a toll quite apart from the anxiety and other psychological challenges that stressed individuals deal with day to day.”

Stress: It’s Not Just in Your Head

You know the saying “when it rains, it pours”? This is a good description of chronic stress in your body, because it makes virtually everything harder. The term psychological stress is, in fact, misleading, because no stress is solely psychological… it’s not all in your head.

Let’s say you lose your job or are struggling from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from abuse you suffered as a child. Excess stress hormones are released, including cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Your stress response becomes imbalanced; it’s not shutting off.

Your immune system suffers as a result, and epigenetic changes are rapidly occurring. The stress is triggering systemic low-grade inflammation, and suddenly your blood pressure is up, your asthma is flaring, and you keep getting colds.

That cut on your leg just doesn’t seem to want to heal, and your skin is a mess. You’re having trouble sleeping and, on an emotional level, you feel like you’re nearing burnout.

Stress is very much like a snowball rolling down a mountain, gaining momentum, gaining speed and growing until suddenly it crashes. That crash, unfortunately, is often at the expense of your health.

Stress Increases Heart Attack Risk by 21-Fold

Police officers clearly face amplified stress on the job, and researchers found they were 21 times more likely to die of a heart attack during an altercation than during routine activities.2 This isn’t entirely surprising until you compare it to heart-attack risk during physical training, which increased only seven fold.

The difference in physical exertion between the two circumstances likely doesn’t account for the increased risk… it’s the level of stress being experienced that sends heart attack risk through the roof.

More heart attacks and other cardiovascular events also occur on Mondays than any other day of the week.3 This “Monday cardiac phenomenon” has been recognized for some time, and has long been believed to be related to work stress.

During moments of high stress, your body releases hormones such as norepinephrine, which the researchers believe can cause the dispersal of bacterial biofilms from the walls of your arteries.4 This dispersal can allow plaque deposits to suddenly break loose, thereby triggering a heart attack.

Stress contributes to heart disease in other ways as well. Besides norepinephrine, your body also releases other stress hormones that prepare your body to either fight or flee. One such stress hormone is cortisol.

When stress becomes chronic, your immune system becomes increasingly desensitized 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.5 Chronic inflammation is a hallmark not only of heart disease but many chronic diseases.

Continue Reading for info on using EFT





See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

The Essential Guide to Happiness at Work

I'm not sure why Rashida Jones is writing this, except for her role in the sitcom, "The Office," but it's pretty good.

There are four components:

1. Sharpen your mind
2. Optimize your space
3. Upgrade your tools
4. Master your relationships

There are videos as well, and it seems pretty practical and upbeat. Here's a segment from the site (Wired.Com).

One thing does help. I try to remind myself that happiness is not the endgame. If your happiness depends on selling your company, snagging one perfect job, finishing the design for your perfect living room, you’ll never actually achieve it. And now that work and life have merged together, it’s doubly important to remember that you deserve to be happy all the time. Luckily, there are techniques and tools that can help you achieve this total world domination—or at least a smooth day at the office.


This is a online magazine from Wired. Com.

Anyway, I thought I'd pass it along.

The Essential Guide to Happiness at Work



See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Habits Create Your Life. How to Break The Ones You Don't Want.

From Martha Beck:

If you have a self-destructive pattern in your life, say an addiction or a repetitive thought or procrastination or having the same argument over and over again with the same person.


The important thing is to step back and say, I am going to give myself a space of time to work on this habit.


It’s not something that you can go cold turkey on, generally. So it’s almost like waging some sort of campaign where you gradually are going to defeat this pattern or change it to a different pattern.


And the first thing you want to do is to alter one thing in the course of your habitual patterns.


So for example, there’s a therapist who tells couples who argue a lot – you can have this argument, you can have this argument about money again, you can have it any time you want.


But every time you have it from now on you have to be wearing hats. And so when a couple will start, have an argument and they’ll have to go put on these hats.


The disruption of the pattern breaks some of the sequencing in the neural patterns that have become associated with this havoc and right there you get a disruption that causes a little bit of daylight to come into the habit so that it starts to break up right there.


The second thing I want people to do is if you have a habit and you smoke a cigarette again, or you overeat again, what you want to do is don’t beat up on yourself because it happened again.


Instead, stop and mentally review everything that was happening that led up to the habitual pattern.


There’s a point where you sort of go on auto pilot and that’s where you want to find out where that happened and what triggered it and it will always be something.


It’s almost always some stressor, right? Fatigue, fear, scary news story, bad traffic – anything.


So what you want to do then is after the habit has already taken place you go back to the thing that triggered it and you calm yourself retroactively.

You say to the person stuck in traffic, you know what, a cigarette really isn’t going to help this as much as turning on the radio and singing your favorite song.


Not cruelly, very kindly say, no, no, no, next time we are going to think about other alternatives.


And the next time it happens and it will happen again, you will find that you catch yourself a little bit sooner.


Then there will come a time when you are actually in the middle of your pattern and you are aware right then, oh my goodness, I am doing it again, but you are not quite able to stop the pattern yet.


Shortly after that there will come a point where you’d go in to the pattern and your consciousness breaks through and says, I am not going here. I am not going here again, that’s all that is to it.


So by breaking up the pattern with doing one new thing and then by addressing the triggers each and every time the pattern takes place you can gradually completely overcome your negative destructive habits.



Watch Video.



About Martha Beck:
Martha Beck, Ph.D., is a writer and life coach who specializes in helping people design satisfying and meaningful life experiences. She holds a bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies and master's and Ph.D. degrees in sociology, all from Harvard University. She has published academic books and articles on a variety of social science and business topics.

Her non-academic books include the New York Times bestsellers “Expecting Adam” and “Leaving the Saints,” as well as “Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” and her newest book, “Steering by Starlight.” Dr. Beck has also been a contributing editor for many popular magazines, including Real Simple and Redbook, and is currently a columnist for O, the Oprah Magazine.



See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.

Managing Millennials and Other Human Beings

Recently, I was wandering around the produce section at my local Walmart Superstore. An African American male, about 50 years old, was talking to a couple of the young men working for him. They clearly had a lot of produce to put out and it looked like they might be busy for a while. I couldn't hear his instructions, but at the end I heard him say: Thank you, guys. I really appreciate you.


It took me by surprise. I think I had a few stereotypes going for one thing. Men of that age seem to use the, "Do it because I said so" management technique or "You get a paycheck. Why should I have to tell you that you do a good job?" I have battled those types of managers in my workshops on feedback and coaching. I get push-back to my suggestion that you should give positive feedback to ensure a repeat performance. This suggestion has often met with the response that it seems too hokey or it's pampering the employee. I finally had a stroke of brilliance after being so agitated with this common response, that fashioned a comeback: Well, if that's your reasoning, then why don't you dock their pay when they aren't doing it right and ask them to figure out on their own what they did wrong?


With four generations in one workplace today, we see the parenting style of these generations influencing the response to all authority figures, including management. For instance, Baby Boomers are known for extreme loyalty and team (family) is everything. They like collaboration and group work and will work until the job is done whether there is monetary reward or not (workaholism being the extreme outcome to this type of worker).

The Gen X'ers were raised without a lot of parental oversight. Therefore, they like to work alone. They also don't want management weighing in on their performance as it's seen as judgmental or micro-managing. Authority only really interfered in their childhoods when they had done something wrong (latchkey kids created by two working parents and higher divorce rates).

Finally, the Millennials: they had parents who not only said that they were the most important thing in their lives, but the ONLY thing in their lives. They received lots of attention and lots of praise. Therefore, they expect similar responses from their management.

You don't have to like modifying your management style to accommodate your employees' generation...but this approach does happens to work, should that be of interest. If you are saying to yourself as you read this that this advice is nonsense or only coddles those without a good work ethic, that's really YOUR generational filter talking. We all have one. We tend to think the people born before us are techno-phobes and the people born after us are moving too fast and have bad work ethic. But OUR generation has struck just the right balance.


Uh huh.


I don't know if my produce manager had any formal training or he was just following his instincts. Either way, I was impressed by his kindness and his sincerity and I bet his employees remember him long after they stop working there. What else is there to accepting a management job in the end? Isn't the goal to make those people better employees than they were when you found them? The rest of the job is usually riddled with complications and people problems and customer service escalations. The only "gold" is leaving a little of your value system with someone who is coming up the ranks. If your value system is "Speak Not Unless Someone Screws Up," then I guess your legacy is going to be one of cover-ups and deleted emails and anxiety when you are present. Why? Because perfection isn't possible. The expectation of perfection always creates a culture of deception. Humans simply can't maintain such an unrealistic standard.


Here's my advice. Tell someone, "Thank you, John...I appreciate you..." tomorrow at work. I dare ya. But I bet you will get at least a smile if you do.



See Stephanie's site Work Stress Solutions for more information like this.