Stress and Disease

In any given moment there are viruses and bacteria around us but, not everyone catches the flu. Being exposed to the same environment doesn’t create the same medical problems. For example, not every person that lives in the Valley is asthmatic. The prognosis of the same disease is different between people. Some people recover from chronic or life threatening disease. The same treatment that proves effective for one patient with a particular disease fails with the second patient. In some cases, a placebo has the same effect as the drugs.

We are not biomechanical machines. We are more than the sum of our body parts. Every person is a combination of body and mind and has his or her own perception of the world. Feelings manifest in our body and can create wellness instead of disease. This can be accomplished in three stages.

What is your gut feeling? Do you have a good vibe about that? Feelings have vibrations. There are good feelings and bad feelings. They help us to understand our body’s rhythms and needs.

Stress is a response to situations that cause feelings of tension, pressure, or negative emotions such as anxiety and anger. This response includes physiological changes in the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems – such as an increased heart rate, hyperventilation and muscle tension.(1)

Stress is an unpleasant state of emotional and physiological arousal that people experience in situations they perceive as dangerous or threatening to their well-being. The word stress means different things to different people. Experiencing stress over time creates changes in the body that manifest as disease. Some people develop headaches, or high blood pressure, or digestion problems or heart attack.

Do we create our own disease? Yes we do! Our feelings create our state of mind and our physical body. Are you ready to look into it and create your place of wellness?
I would like to introduce to you a three-step wellness system to overcome disease.

Step One: Become Aware.
Step Two: Change it around
Step Three: Maintain Wellness.

Step One: Become Aware.
Identify your pain on the physical level (Where is it in your body? What is the quality of your pain? (Is it sharp? dull? pressure? numbness?). Recognize and name the feeling you attach to this pain. Now that you notice the feeling in your body, in what situations do you feel it? Learn your behavior patterns. Look into your beliefs and fears.

Step Two: Change it around. Once you become aware of the feeling and behavior patterns, don’t react automatically. Create a different perspective. Allow yourself to act with a purpose.

Step Three: Maintain Wellness. Learn how to retain this sense of clam, sustain your sharpened awareness, and keep your spirit up.

I believe that you have the ability to create your health. You are the only one who has the power and authority to determine what is going on in you. Use it.

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1. A more detailed, illustrated explanation of the nervous system can be found at “Neuroscience for Kids” which is s maintained by Eric H. Chudler, Ph.D.