Nervousness, restlessness, agitation, insecurity.  These are all symptoms of anxiety. 

One of my sons constantly jiggles one part of his body, usually his leg.  He shakes the table when we eat and used to irritate whoever slept in the same room with him because the bed would go creak, creak, creak all night long.

Another symptom of anxiety is grinding or gritting your teeth.  A surprising number of people have TMJ problems because they keep their stress in their jaw.  The TMJ (temporalmandibular joint) is the joint that hinges your bottom jaw to your skull bone.

I knew a lady who had lived through a tremendous amount of trauma and stress in her life.  In her efforts to control her stress, she clenched her jaw so tightly for so long that she actually shattered the bones in her TMJ joint.

After years of pain, suffereing, surgery and repair, she finally had to hve the whole joint replaced with an artificial one.  But you know what?  The pain didn’t go away.  Because the source of the stress was still there. 

The medical system had just been trying to heal the symptoms, not eliminate the cause!

Have you ever been depressed?  Depression is characterized by being overcome with events and giving up, with feelings of no control and hopelessness.

One of the ways that I used to cope was to try and control things.  Ask any member of my family and they will tell you that I was a control freak.  In my mind, I wasn’t controlling - I was protecting them.  That used to be possible when my children were smaller but as they started to grow up, I realized that I couldn’t control them any more.   I saw my children making choices, that according to my value system, were harmful to them.  And I could do absolutely nothing about it.  That was time of major depression for me, probably the worst I have ever experienced.

We had a seriously handicapped child that died at the age of seven.  As a family, we never dealt with his death properly and nine years later, several of our children were having serious problems.  In an effort to help, we called a grief counselor in to meet with the whole family.

One of the things he had each of us do was to draw a picture of how we saw our family.  I drew my husband and my five children in the back yard, with me watching them.  To my horror, I drew myself with no arms!  Talk about an expression of no control and feeling hopeless!  I get emotional just thinking about it.

In this short little story, can you pick up the number of different ways that unrelieved stress brought on depression?   Do any of you identify?

In the last few blogs, I have talked about how stress can break down our body.  As a Western society, we’ve been conditioned to believe that our body is separate from our mind and that there is nothing we can do to get better.

But Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of “Biology of Belief”  believes differently.  He states: “The problem, however, lies in most people’s inability to grasp the power of thought, since, as a society, we are part of a belief system which creates dependency on external assistance.  You can change your life today or tomorrow, and you can change your physiology in one minute.  But that requires the ability to manipulate yourself - and the unshakeable belief that you CAN manipulate yourself.”

I know that what Dr. Lipton says is true - from my own experience.  It is possible to reduce your pain, improve your health or change your life in any way that you want to.  Of all the courses I took and the different energy modalities I studied in my eight year search, the one that I found to be the most effective and the most powerful was Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT.

It restored my health, and more important, it taught me why I got sick in the first place and how to prevent it from ever happening again.  In the three years that I have worked as a Stress Relief Coach, EFT has been my primary tool because it is so effective on so many different problems. 

If you are having a physical problem and are not satisfied with the results you are getting, I encourage you to look into EFT.  You can find more information on my website: www.SherylStanton.com

Physical Exhaustion is what started me on my own healing quest.  There had been an incredible amount of stress in my life, but I thought that I was handling things very well - until one day my body just shut down.

I couldn’t do anything!  I wasn’t in any pain.  I was just so exhausted taht it was almost too much effort to even breathe.  I alternated between my bed and the couch for three months!  Read the rest of this entry �

95% of headaches are one of two kinds: Migraine or Muscle tension.

1.  Migraine Headaches - Have you ever had a migraine headache? 

Listen to the description of the common personality characteristics of people who get migraines and see if you recognize any in yourself.  Common personality characteristics of migraine sufferers are: they are perfectionists, overachievers, people pleasers, have lots of deadlines or have suppressed negative emotions.  These sound like foundations for unrelieved stress, don’t they?

2.  Muscle Tension Headaches - in the neck, shoulders, over the head.  Emotional stress is the most common cause of muscle tension headaches.  You’ve probably heard the expression “carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders”.  That is where many people keep their stress.

I’m going to use myself as an example of someone who did this.   I used to work part time as a nurse in the evenings or nights when my children were little.  My husband was a university student and shift-work meant that we didn’t have to have as many babysitters. 

At the end of one shift, I was at the nurse’s station when a Chinese nurse ran her fingers through my hair, scratching my scalp.  It is a good thing that I was at the desk because I literally fell into the chair.  It was such an incredible stress reliever - stress that I wasn’t even aware that I had.  To this day, one of my most favorite things in the world is to have a scalp massage.

I used to get constant headaches, starting at my shoulders and going up my neck and over the back of my head.  I would also get nagging, toothache-like pains at the base of my skull, where the muscle had knotted up under the skull bone.  I used to go to the chiropractor trying to relieve the pain. Often the pain would be back before I had even got home!

I almost never get headaches any more and I haven’t been to a chiropractor for years.  I’ve learned better ways of releasing stress.  The most effective way I’ve found is Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT.  To learn more about EFT, I invite you to visit my website at www.SherylStanton.com

>????????utomatic part of the stress response is to dump glucose into the blood stream.  This gives your body the extra energy it needs to fight or to run away.  Glucose needs insulin to release the energy locked inside it.  This creates an increased demand on the pancrease to produce more insulin.

So, if a person is in a constant state of stress, they can wear out their pancreas and become diabetic.

Stress can also make diabetes worse.  My husband is a type 2 diabetic and I have noticed that when he is under stress that his diabetes gets worse.

The main organ for the body’s defense system is the Thymus gland, found right in the center of your chest.  Did you know that Cortisol, the major hormone that is released when you are stressed, can shrink the size of the Thymus gland by 50% in 24 hours.

Experiments have been done where they have taken healthy adult parents, with a normal immune system blood count of 12,000 and shown them very high stress pictures of children being killed and mangled.  Then 3 to 5 minutes later, the immune system blood count was taken again and was found to have dropped from 12,000 to 600!  The emotionally traumatized parents virtually had no immune system left!  These experiments demonstrate how closely related immune system diseases are to negative emotional stress.

I want to share part of an article called “Mind Over Matter” in Shared Vision Magazine, written by Olga Sheean.  She interviewed Dr. Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist from Stanford University and author of the book “Biology of Belief”.

Quoting Olga Sheen: “For generations now, we have been led to believe that our health is determined by our genes.  Cellular biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton believes otherwise.  ‘Cancer does not run in families’ he maintains, ‘because there is no cancer gene.  Cells become cancerous only when they are told by the mind to do so.’

He says that individuals have the ability to control their own well-being and to reprogram their cells by changing their beliefs.

‘Once we realize that we are already infected with every organism in the arsenal of virulent diseases’ says Lipton, ‘we can begin to understand that it is only when we create a favorable environment for them that they can take over our system.’

Yeast, for example, exists in everyone, yet only a small percentage of the population suffers yeast infections. You cannot get rid of the yeast, says Lipton, without killing off all other life in your body.  So when someone gets a yeast infection, it stands to reason that something has changed - either the yeast or the individual.  Since the yeast is ever present, the infection can only be due to some environmental change which, in turn, is the consequence of mental attitude.’

The body’s immune system is triggered by our mental attitudes, becoming strengthened or exhausted, depending on the mental message it receives.  Therefore, Lipton maintains, AIDS can be brought into existence by the mind, and not necessarily as a result of contracting the virus.  And it can, similarly, he says, be cured with a thought.

Disease in the body tells you that your mind is not in harmony with nature and that some aspect of your mental attitude needs to change.”

This blog discusses another way that unrelieved stress can hurt your body. 

In the last blog, we talked about how stress will cause the heart to beat faster, which causes increased blood pressure.  The continued pounding blood pressure will start to cause minor tears in the muscular walls of the arteries. 

As this happens, the body seals the tear by creating a cholesterol plug.  This can build up to create hardening of the arteries, which is what arteriosclerosis is.  This can also lead to possible heart attack or stroke.

Dr. Peter Hanson, in his book, “The Joys of Stress” said: “Cholesterol can increase by 40% within seconds from fear.”

Makes you want to start using ways to reduce your stress levels before reaching the stage where you have a heart attack or stroke, doesn’t it? 

The best way that I know to reduce stress is EFT.  If you want to know more about EFT, I invite you to visit my website at www.SherylStanton.com.

There are many ways that unrelieved stress can hurt your body.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time on them.  My purpose is just to make you aware of what is happening to you when you have unrelieved stress in your life. 

 The mind cannot tell the difference between physical danger and emotional stress and will react the same way.  If your mind perceives that you are in danger, it will immediately release stress hormones into your blood stream that instantly cause many physical changes.  It is preparing your body to run or fight.

If you are in physical danger this is a good thing because it can save your life.  When the danger is over, the stress hormones are eliminated from your system and you body gets back to normal.  The problem with emotional stress, especially unrelieved stress, is that the stress hormones are not eliminated.  What was meant to save your life in the short term, can kill you if left in your body long term! Read the rest of this entry �

In the previous blog, we talked about how stressful triggers are created.  Today, we will discuss what happens when our body goes into stress. 

You have probably heard about the “fight or flight” stress response.  Basically, your body is instantly prepared to either fight or to run away to save your life .  If you are in physical danger, this is a good thing.  You need to react instantly in order to save your life!  However, our minds cannot tell the difference between physical danger and emotional upsets and will respond the same way.  It will respond as if our lives are in danger! Read the rest of this entry �