Stress And Anxiety - Modern Methods To Dissipate Them So You Can Relax

More than ever, scientific surveys are confirming the primary responsibility played by stress in causing and aggravating several psychological and somatic afflictions. In the June 6, 1983 issue of Time Magazine, the cover story called stress "The Epidemic of the Eighties." It also said that stress is a prominent health problem. And it is doubtless that our world has become even more complex and stressful over the last two decades since that article was written.

A lot of surveys show that most adults have the impression of being subject to a great deal of stress. Authorities in the field estimate that around 75 to 90 percent of the visits to primary care doctors are related to stress.

Most adults report their stress is primarily due to their job. Stress levels have also increased in children and the elderly population for reasons including: Peer pressures that often push people to everything from smoking to drug and alcohol abuse; the wearing away of religion and family values; growing crime rates; threats to personal safety; and last but not least social isolation and loneliness.

Stress contributes to conditions such as diabetes, ulcers, low back and neck pain, high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks. This is due to the augmented sympathetic nervous system activity as well as the release of cortisol, adrenaline, and other hormones. Chronic stress is co-morbid with impaired immune system resistance. Stress can be responsible for anxiety, depression, and its numerous impacts on the body's organs.
"Stress" is defined as follows by the American Heritage Dictionary:
"To subject to physical or mental pressure, tension, or strain"

The same dictionary defines "tension" as follows:
"Mental, emotional, or nervous strain"

The word "anxiety" is defined as follows:
"A state of uneasiness and apprehension, as about future uncertainties"

And the following definition is given for "depression":
"The condition of feeling sad or despondent"

"Clinical depression" is defined as follows:
"A psychiatric disorder characterized by an inability to concentrate, insomnia, loss of appetite, anhedonia, feelings of extreme sadness, guilt, helplessness and hopelessness, and thoughts of death."

One thing is for sure, our mind is the major source of our experience of stress, anxiety and depression. In other words, what we think about, and our attitudes and the way we view our experiences create what we feel. That way, if we can manage to change our thoughts, attitudes, and points of view, we can eliminate our feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression and replace them with a better state of being.

Since the beginning of time, people have looked for methods that would allow them to eliminate stress. The pharmaceutical industry seems to have a pill for everything. And to that end the industry has produced a wide array of anxiolytics from Valium to Xanax. If you choose to use drugs for relief, please make sure that you are aware of the side-effects by reading the fine print, which commonly are, among others, addiction and dependency. Unfortunately, these types of drugs attempt to cure the symptoms, rather than the cause. So as soon as one stops ingesting them, the symptoms can come back.

A better method to eliminate tension, stress, anxiety, and depression is to treat the root cause, which as I wrote previously, is most often our thought processes. There is good news. The heart of hypnosis is relaxing. The AMA recognized hypnosis in 1958 as an effective way to cure stress and stress related symptoms. But unlike pills, there are absolutely no undesirable side effects.

Hypnosis is the Alpha level of consciousness. It's the daydream like temporary psychological state which we experience as we are about to fall asleep at night. And we experience it again when we awaken in the morning. There are lots of different ways that we can guide ourselves into this condition of tranquility, from progressive relaxation to visual imagery to listening to hypnosis CD's.

When we enter the hypnotic state, we can interact with our unconscious mind, which is the seat of our emotions. And it becomes easier to accept new points of view and ideas which will help us to eliminate anxiety, or even prevent anxiety from occurring in the first place.

NLP, which is a modern form of hypnotherapy, has various really good methods for releasing stress. Maybe the technique that works best is called the "swish" pattern - or the "flash" pattern. After using this technique, your unconscious will automatically use bad, stress producing mental pictures, to create relaxing mental pictures. Put differently, what usually makes you feel stress will now make you feel more relaxed!

TO SUM THINGS UP
Tension, stress, anxiety, and depression can be activated by our thoughts. So if we change our attitude and the way we feel about our situation and our experiences, we can eliminate these feelings at the root. Hypnosis and NLP are natural tools that allow us to change our attitude and point of view to easily eliminate the source of our negative feelings.

Alan B. Densky is an NGH certified hypnotherapist. He offers a complete line of stress elimination NLP CDs, and advanced stress elimination CDs through his Neuro-VISION hypnotism website. You can visit his self hypnosis blog, and download a free MP3.