De-stress Your Life

Your in-box has 200 or 1,000 messages in it. Information continues to enter your life in a seemingly constant and endless flow. News blasts at you from everywhere, the bank lobby, the gas station pump, and your car radio. Every business wants you to visit them on FaceBook and Twitter.

The constant barrage of information and the fast pace of communication seems to have sped up time and made stress a pervasive part of our days and lives. The stress that we all feel is our bodies signaling us that something is not right. We ignore the signals and hope they will go away. Every day we wake up and launch into our busy lives ignoring the causes of the mounting stress. Eventually, our bodies surrender and we develop a cold, an aching muscle, a headache, or other symptoms that are warning us to slow down and rest.

“You can’t control what happens to you but you can control your response to what happens to you”, or a number of variations, is a statement we hear often. Stress results from the things that happen to us that we feel we have no control over. The Institute of HeartMath (www.heartmath.org) in “Transforming Stress” by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman offers a solution that engages your heart and synchronizes the internal rhythms of your body. They offer a way to transform your stress into increased energy and new insight into your automatic stress responses.

Here is one of Heartmath’s way to change your response to the things that are happening. Maybe by changing your response you will change the result. Give it a try right now.

1. Focus your attention in the area of your heart. If your mind wanders, just keep shifting your attention back to the area of your heart.

2. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out through the area of your heart. This will help your respiration and heart rhythms to synchronize. Breathe slowly and gently in through your heart and slowly and easily out through your heart. Do this until your breathing feels smooth and balanced.

3. As you continue to breathe, recall a positive feeling, a time when you felt good inside, and try to re-experience it. This could be a feeling of appreciation or care toward a special person or a pet, a place you enjoy or an activity that was fun.

4. Sustain the positive feeling by continuing to focus on your heart and breathing in a natural rhythm.

This new breathing rhythm changes the heart’s rhythm, which in turn has a powerful soothing effect on the brain and the entire body. Using this simple technique, which only takes a minute with some practice, you will be able to: