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.

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What is stress?

Stress (roughly the opposite of relaxation) is a medical term for a wide range of strong external stimuli, both physiological and psychological, which can cause a physiological response called the general adaptation syndrome, first described in 1936 by Hans Selye in the journal Nature.
An emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical health which can be characterized by increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, muscular tension, irritability and depression. Stress does not cause migraine but can be a migraine "trigger".
A condition in which the organism is subjected to unfavourable or unfamiliar environmental conditions, resulting in some alteration in normal physical functioning. Short-term stress can often be overcome. Long-term stress can reduce resistance to disease and parasites, inhibit self-healing processes, and reduce life-span.