Living Stress Free
By Tony Pipoaro

Is stress affecting your life? Are you finding little to be happy about? Has your productivity in important endeavors decreased? Have relationships been negatively affected? Does your life feel out of control? Do you feel helpless or hopeless? If you answered yes to any of these, you are not alone. The present economic, political, and international situation has many people feeling stressed out. Nearly one-half of all American adults are prescribed antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication and it is now estimated that stress is responsible for 86-95% of all diseases. Stress is so pervasive that most people don’t even know when they’re stressed, or accept it as a normal part of living in a fast-paced, demanding world. Stress is not normal. Stress is a physiological reaction to threat and you have the power to take control. But you must understand stress, or more appropriately the stress response, so that you can take the appropriate actions.

The stress response, also known as the fight-or-flight reflex, developed as a way for our early ancestors to survive their hostile environment. When threat is experienced, chemicals (hormones) are released into the bloodstream to combat the source of the threat. Today, rarely do we face physical threat. Most of our stress occurs because of unrealized expectations or difficulty dealing with our unpredictable, ever-changing world. This is known as psycho-social stress. The same chemicals are released into our bloodstream whether the threat is physical or psycho-social. While the fight-or-flight reflex alerts us to imminent danger and helps us survive adversity, the hormones released into our bloodstream do not easily dissipate and they accumulate in our bodies over time. The accumulation of these chemicals is toxic and as hazardous to our health or life as the threat itself.

If you’ve lived with unresolved stress for sometime, not only do you need to keep more stress hormones from entering your bloodstream, you must also remove as many of the accumulated toxins from your body as possible and keep them from accumulating in the future. Because stress affects our physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being, our actions must deal with each of these parts of our existence.

Fortunately, the actions we need to take are simple. Approximately 90% of the stress hormones are eliminated through slow, deep, rhythmical breathing. That’s why exercise is such a good stress reliever. Our early ancestors were forced to exercise by either physically confronting the threat or fleeing from it. A good-paced walk that elevates your heart rate and gets you breathing deeply is a great exercise. But you may not be able to exercise or take a walk when you get stressed out and that is exactly when you need to do it. Since breathing becomes shallow, fast, and erratic when we get stressed, learning to breathe properly is a necessary part of any stress treatment program. I refer to stress relief breathing as the Breath of Life, and teach it to all my clients who then use it every time they experience stress.

Most Americans are in a dehydrated condition as a result of stress, insufficient water consumption, and drinking too much caffeine, which is a diuretic that pulls water out of the body’s cells. In fact, many illnesses are related to dehydration stress. At least sixty-four ounces of water, sipped daily every fifteen minutes or so, will keep stress hormones from accumulating in the body and fight dehydration stress. If you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated.

Water, exercise, and stress-relief breathing techniques help eliminate much of the accumulating toxins in your body. However, you must also alter your physical, emotional, and psychological responses to stress. As science proves, the subconscious mind does not know the difference between a real event (dangerous or otherwise) and one that is vividly imagined. So just thinking about stressful situations can cause as much harm as stress itself. I use a variety of techniques to help individuals stop the destructive stress cycle, including NLP, the Attitude Adjustment Routine, Imagery Training, the Recall and Rewrite Protocol, Meditation, and Suggestive Relaxation Therapy. All of these are simple yet powerful tools in the fight against stress.

Emotions are energy. The accumulation of stress not only affects your mental and emotional health, it causes the blockage of energy in your body. This blocked energy collects in muscles, joints, and organs. Blocked energy also triggers the stress response without you having to experience stress. The pain activates the release of more destructive hormones and also gets you thinking about the source of your stress or its consequences, which triggers the release of even more destructive hormones. That is why disease is so prevalent in people who experience severe or continuous unresolved stress. Stretching, the Breath of Life, Relaxation Therapy, Acupuncture, Acupressure, Massage, Reiki, Ascension Reiki, Reflexology, and other body work methods that assist the release of blocked energy are also necessary in the treatment of stress-related issues.

A structured plan, using exercise, increased water consumption, the Breath of Life, belief and thought altering techniques, and energy release modalities will help eliminate accumulated toxic hormones resulting from long-term unresolved stress and keep those hormones flowing out of your body. In no time you will again be happy, healthy, and productive. However, you must choose to eliminate the destructive effects of stress from your life. It’s your choice. It’s your life.

There is much more to know about stress, other environmental stressors, their effects on your health, and tactics to combat their destructive effects, but not sufficient space to address here. If you would like to know more, visit: www.golden-light-healing.com

Tony Pipoaro at www.golden-light-healing.com. You can also reach him at 336.347.7267 or at tonypipoaro@yahoo.com. Tony is an internationally recognized author, lecturer, and award winning researcher. He has traveled all over the US, Western Europe, and Australia educating people about stress and providing them with the knowledge and tools to eliminate its destructive effects on their health and life. He has Masters degrees in Education and Kinesiology, a Ph.D. in Sport Psychology, is a practitioner of Reiki and Ascension Reiki, and has training in Trauma Release Therapy, Brain Gym, Counseling, and Human Development.