Changes in eating habits can happen in two ways.  One way is to eat more and the other is to stop eating.

1.  Stress Eating:  I am a stress eater.  Under stress, you never crave vegetables or healthy foods.  It is comfort foods you want: sweet, salty, greasy, rich.

When I was going though my greatest stress, there were a couple of times when there was nothing sweet to eat in the house.  I can remember melting some butter, putting brown sugar and flour in it and standing over the stove, eating it right out of the pot! - and slavering as I was doing it! 

Another time, I got a phone call to say that my nineteen year old son had just become a father.  I had no idea that his ex girlfriend was pregnant.  I hung up the phone and went straight to the fridge.  My automatic response was to seek comfort through food.  Anyone identify with that?

What happens to stress eaters?  They gain weight - which lowers their self-esteem and increases their stress even more!

This is the reason why diets don’t work.  You can take the weight off, but unless you have resolved the underlying issue that caused you to put the weight on in the first place, it will come right back on; usually with interest!

2.  Anorexia:  Some people stop eating when they are stressed (sometimes I wish that I had that problem). 

What are the consequences of not eating?  Increased fatigue, decreased resistance to disease, malnutrition, and, unless corrected in time,  death!  Anorexia is a serious problem, especially among young women.

Drugs (prescription or illegal) are taken for the same reason as alcohol.  They are an attempt to decrease anxiety and stress.  Without finding and eliminating the cause of the stress, escaping with drugs doesn’t work.  The problems that are causing the stress are still there.  However, taking drugs usually just adds another set of problems, more stress and a decreased ability to solve them.

I want to include smoking here.  What happens when people try to quit smoking? 

Read the rest of this entry »

>le drink in an effort to relax and reduce their stress.  They feel better - temporarily. 

It’s interesting that we actually have a term for when it is socially acceptable to start drinking.  It is called “Happy Hour”.  That is usually after work, where overstressed and unhappy, unfulfilled workers can go to have a drink and forget their problems.

Of course, “Happy Hour” can be different times for different people.  Both of my parents died, from what I believe to be alcohol-related illnesses.  Their “Happy Hour” started at 3:00 and continued until they went to bed.

Unfortunately, all the alcohol consumption does is mask the stess.  It does’t solve the problem that caused the stress in the first place.  It just adds many other, often more severe problems that just increase the stress load.

Just as a side note, I am told that after an Alcolholic’s Anonymous meeting that many of the people are smoking.  In a effort to stop drinking, they just change the addiction to something more socially acceptable - but they are still just trying to control the symptom of the stress instead of resolving the problem that is causing the stress!

Stress can cause changes in sleeping patterns in two ways.  You can either have insomnia or you can sleep too long.

1.  Insomnia   I had and occasionally still have insomnia.  With insomnia, you can either have trouble falling asleep or you can wake up in the middle of the night.  In the dark of the night is when the fears and anxieties creep in to plague and torment you.

I never had trouble falling asleep but I would often wake up in the middle of the night.  If I did wake up, my mind would turn on and flit from thing to thing - usually from problem to problem.     I would toss and turn and plan things to the ‘nth degree. 

I have learned to channel this.  If I wake up after a few hours sleep, that means that my initial sleepiness is gone and I won’t get back to sleep.  So, I usually get up, go into the office and start writing.  My mind is refreshed and alert, the house is quiet and I can concentrate completely on what I’m doing.

The problem with this, though, is that the day comes, with all of its demands and requirements.  If your life and time is flexible, then it doesn’t matter.  You can go to bed when you’re tired.  If it is not flexible; if you have a family to take care of or a job to go to, then you are starting your day tired.  This usually means that you don’t have the energy to cope or function properly.

2.  Sleep Too Long.  This is another way that unrelieved stress can hurt your body.  One of my clients escapes through sleep.  She will often sleep ten to fifteen hours a day.  When you are asleep you don’t have to face the problems.   It doesn’t make the problems go away.  They are there waiting when you wake up - usually with interest.

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.