If you are like most people, stress is making you unhappy and slowly killing you. Seriously! 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.
We are all 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 you. Stress is something your brain does with what happens to you.
You have the power to change this reaction and harness the energy of stress. Dr. Miller’s Mind-Tools give you a way to reliably reduce harmful stress and harness its energy to create the future you want. After all, motivation, joy, and winning are all associated with stress . . . the good kind. The secret sauce is deep relaxation, achieved in the Healing State, which is the direct antidote to stress.
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 toa range of debilitating problems, such as organ disease, cardiovascular disorders, susceptibility to infection, chronic illness, fatigue, depression, and a general sense of dysfunction. To escape, the monkey mind creates avoidance, alcohol and tranquilizer use, addiction, automobile accidents, relationship failures, etc. etc.. 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.
Much of Dr. Miller’s work has been helping people release harmful stress and harness its potential energy for healing, optimal performance, and happiness. 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 while we develop emotional and chemical dependency!
The secret to dealing successfully with stress is to realize:
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- 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 will kick in. (ADD LIMBIC GRAPHIC)
- Hundreds of thousands of years ago, stress evolved in humans as one part of a two-phase process. The other part of the process was, and still is, relaxation. Life-or-death situations–a saber-toothed tiger attack, say, or a landslide–were rare, occurring perhaps just a couple of 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.
- (shutterstock_1901327)Instead of the occasional high-stress moments that our nervous systems could handle well and recover from quickly, 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. ( shutterstock_9820807)
- It is crucially important to understand that when we are in a stressed state–which for many people is nearly always–one of the things the limbic system does is to inhibit the higher brain centers. We cannot think, reason, and respond creatively and wisely because the monkey mind, shuts off the prefrontal cortex of the brain to block distractions from the imagined “emergency.” The inhibition of the prefrontal cortex is counter-productive because this is the part of our mind that otherwise could develop a wise, creative, inspired strategy to deal with the source of 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 for the world of today. Nowadays, we need to focus on the stressor with all of our intellect, creativity, wisdom, and inspiration. (shutterstock_28676986)
- The most effective method for harnessing the energy of stress that would otherwise create disease and dysfunction is
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- 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.(shutterstock_124826)
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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.
Listen to a sample of Letting Go of Stress, the most famous of all stress reducing Guided Imagery meditation recordings.
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