In previous blogs, we’ve briefly mentioned how unrelieved stress hurts your body and your emotions.  My purpose in writing these is not to go into great detail but just to make you aware of the many ways that stress does negatively affect us.  Some topics we will revisit in much greater detail.

For the next couple of blogs, I want to show how unrelieved stress can hurt your productivity.  Productivity basically means how much you are able to get done in a day.

Not all stress is bad and in many cases, some stress can get us to do more.  For example, I always find that I get more done if I have a deadline or time that the project needs to be done.  If there is no deadline, there is no stress and no real incentive to do the work.  That is why I will often give myself deadlines to complete a book or project.

However, when you get overstressed or have a lot of stress for a long time, your body’s energy is being used up just trying to combat all of the toxic stress hormones in your system.  Stress can be physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting.  Your ability to concentrate and focus decreases.

In that situation, it is very common to find that the amount of work that gets done is less.  To make matters worse, the work that is done is usually of poorer quality too.

There was a time in my life when I was so stressed that my mind shut down.  I had five small children, all born within six years.  One was seriously handicapped.  My husband didn’t have a job so we had no money to live on.   I thought I was functioning well but obviously I was not.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table one day and suddenly I blanked out.  I have no idea how long it was for.  I think only a few minutes.   When I became aware again, I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was, what month it was or even what year it was.  It was one of the most frightening moments of my life.  I had to phone a friend and ask them.

That is an extreme example and thankfully, it was very short.  I never experienced that again.  But how many of us will go through the day and looking back, realized that we have accomplished nothing?  When we try to account for our time we really can’t.  This could very well be a symptom of having unrelieved stress.

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.

Where does low self-esteem come from?  We certainly aren’t born with it.

  This is my grandson Rhylan, on the day of his third birthday. You can see he is trying to        hold up three fingers.  Children of that age are full of confidence. 

  One day, my daughter Shauna, Rhylan’s mother was in the car with her husband, Shawn,  Rhylan and their 18 month old daughter, Kendrah.  Rhylan made some rude noise (he burped, I think) and started to laugh, saying “I’m funny”.

Shawn replied, “You’re not funny”. 

Rylan:  “Yes, I am, I’m funny”. 

Shawn:  “No, you’re not funny”. 

Rylan: (with much more emphasis in his voice) “Listen to me, Shawn, I’m funny!”

Shauna was laughing hysterically, but silently, in the front seat.  After all, she couldn’t approve because Rhylan’s response to his father wasn’t really appropriate.  But he was standing up for himself.  That is an example of good self esteem.

But it doesn’t last.  Several studies have been done on self-esteem.  The results of the studies show that by the time children reach Junior High School, 69% of boys and only 50% of girls still feel good about themselves.  By High School, that has changed to 51% of boys and 24% of the girls.  And among adult women, only 1 in 5 women feel good about themselves.

I will go into greater detail on where low self-esteem comes from in the next blog.

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