Stress Management: New Age Solutions
With the hectic pace of life today, most people experience
stress on a daily basis. The debilitating effects of stress are
such that corporations provide employees with free stress
management programs, an increasing number of people are seeking
treatment for an anxiety disorder, and medications are being
dispensed for people who experience an anxiety attack. In this
age, new therapies for stress relief are being developed, such
as hypnosis and self-hypnosis.
There are those who believe that Americans aren't actually
experiencing more stress, but rather that we just can't handle
it as well as our forefathers. While it's true that the rate of
anxiety attack and anxiety disorder is increasing, there's also
scientific evidence that there are a greater number of stressors
today than there were in years past.
About 20 years ago, a study was performed to gauge how stress
had increased in the prior 100 years. In a nutshell, the study
found:
* You have over one thousand times the number of stressors each
day that your great grandfather had.
* You experience over 300,000 individual stressors daily that
your body processes unconsciously.
* Only ten percent of those stressors are psychological or
social; the rest are physical, chemical, and electromagnetic.
* There are 500,000 synthetic chemicals in our environment that
didn't even exist 100 years ago. They permeate our food supply,
water and the air inside and outside our homes.
* There are over 200,000 electromagnetic frequencies in our
environment that didn't exist in nature 100 years ago.
Combining stressors like chemical pesticides, electromagnetic
smog, impossibly busy schedules, a demanding job, family
obligations, and accelerating change creates a cascade of
physiological responses that will lead to disease if not
properly removed or discharged.
Stress relief is crucial, but it doesn't have to take the form
of pharmaceuticals to ameliorate anxiety disorder and anxiety
attack. New Age stress management techniques can lessen anxiety
and provide stress relief. The first step in utilizing New Age
stress management techniques is to have a thorough understanding
of why our minds naturally cling to old ways of dealing with
stress.
When you encounter situations or people that threaten or
challenge you, you experience stress. When you experience
stress, a change occurs in your brain chemistry that favors
quick thinking over rationality. This same response dampens what
you feel within your body. Although this fight or flight
mechanism served our ancestors well when they were living in the
wild, today it can cause serious health disorders and disease.
When you're stressed, you move unconsciously and continuously
into a state of readiness (for the "attack" that never happens)
that prevents you from noticing the stress and strain you are
under. Your conscious mind denies the effects of stress and
relies on the powerful subconscious mind to defend against the
onslaught of imagined physical harm. As a result, your mind
sabotages any real progress toward deep and skillful relaxation,
as this seems dangerous to a mind under perceived threat.
Ironically, you find yourself fighting against your own
self-defense mechanism. And there's no way to win the battle
until you retrain yourself to respond differently to those
things that cause an anxiety attack or anxiety disorder.
Retraining yourself does not require a change in external
circumstances. It simply means that you must alter how the
external situation affects your inner world of thoughts and
feelings, since these directly affect your physical body and
health.
This is where stress management new age solutions come into
play. In this age, new stress relief techniques can alleviate
the harmful effects of stress through relearning a new response
to stress triggers.