Excerpt
“Things in life are not good or bad, it is what you think they are.”
William Shakespeare



I focus on the topic of stress because I believe that it is at the core of most of your issues and diseases. If you can limit stress in your life through understanding, you will see a major reduction in other negatives. According to Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, stress is “a state of bodily or mental tension, resulting from factors that tend to alter existent equilibrium.”
So, what determines that state? If you stand ten people in a room and have the walls fall down around them, all ten are apt to give you a varied version of the same experience. Some will feel stressed and act frenzied, while others will be disturbed that it occurred and ponder on the reason it happened. Yet, others will look at those around them who are upset and frenzied and ask them, “What’s the big deal?”
Stress is the result of a person’s interpretation of a situation, be it their environmental surroundings, emotional reactions or the demands and changes in the body.
It is virtually impossible to eliminate exposure to every situation that has potential to cause you stress, but you can work on avoiding them to the best of your abilities. And, at those times when you can not avoid it and you are exposed to stress, you can change how you respond to the situation, therefore minimizing or actually neutralizing the impact it may have had on your emotional, spiritual or physical well being.
Stress is an ongoing and never-ending part of your life, but it does not have to become your way of life! Just think about it; if you clean up your environment and make it as stress-free as possible, while you shift your way of thinking toward those unavoidable stressors, you can enjoy a more happy and healthy lifestyle.
How unfortunate that so many people put the nurturing of their bodies, their minds and their spirits at the last of their list of priorities. Cleaning up the environment, be it a physical, emotional or mental clean up, is something many people just do not consider important. They are focused on the demands of day to day living, while ignoring the vital messages that their bodies are giving. A few years ago I owned and operated a stress management center and I found the amount of people who would stand at the door and laugh, stating that they needed stress management, but do nothing about it to be staggering. We were constantly having to educate from square one.
The point that they were missing was that stress puts a real demand on their bodies every day; and how they deal with this stress will determine how effectively they perform their daily tasks; be those tasks emotional, physical or spiritual. The effects that stress can have on your total being is definitely not a joke to be laughed at and the sooner people recognize this, the sooner we will all enjoy a healthier and more stable lifestyle.
Something that creates stress is called a “stressor”. It can be of a mental-emotional nature, a physical-biochemical nature or an environmental- biological nature. Your exposure to some or all of these stressors is common and sometimes unavoidable. Because of this, it is up to you ,the individual, to interpret these stressors in a manner that will give you an opportunity to respond in a minimizing or neutralizing way; thus avoiding any negative impact they could potentially have on you.
You have an automatic biological response to stress that has been with mankind since his beginning. It is most commonly referred to as your fight or flight response. All creatures possess the fight or fight response and there has always been a viable purpose for it through history. It has proven to be a lifesaver in more than one occasion.
Sometimes the responses your body had to stress by way of the flight or fight syndrome go unrecognized as such. The best known responses are the shifting and changing of the normal functioning of your respiratory system, cardiovascular system, metabolic system and your hormone levels. You could also experience changes in your enzymes, GI functioning and urinary system. Although these shifts and changes were important back when man was fleeing from predators when fighting for survival, today these very same alterations in your body that are induced by stressors can hurt you instead of help you.
It is unfortunate, but your body can not differentiate between a harmful and a non-harmful stressor, therefore it is up to your mind to do the differentiating and then trigger the response of your body. This is where the problem appears. Too many people today are not recognizing a stressor and therefore do not direct their body in the proper response. This ignorance is causing them to unwittingly be destroyed by the very same bodily functions that were intended to save their life!
Although many stressors are real, there are just as many (if not more) that are perceived.
When your body senses a stressor (real or perceived) it will respond automatically by preparing and mobilizing for a physical conflict or a sudden retreat from that stressor or situation. Your hormones will surge and your nervous system prepares for either the fight or the flight. Your heart rate increases and your breathing speeds up; which allows more oxygen into your body. Your muscles are made ready for action and your blood pressure surges as your blood rushes to them. When your body’s metabolic rate shifts into high gear in this manner, you are experiencing Oxidative Stress.
When Oxidative Stress occurs, your digestion is temporarily placed on hold and your blood clotting mechanisms are activated to allow your body to focus on the task at hand. Now, in a real physical threat this would be wonderful! But what if the threat is not physical? What if the threat is something with an emotional base such as traffic jams or conflicts at work or arguments with your loved ones, etc.? It is important that you understand how life threatening a steady and constant exposure to this type of stress can be or, at the very least, the years it can take from your life.
Prolonged and repeated emotional-mental stress can produce the same physical responses as physical stress and can contribute to one or more of the following: cardiovascular disease, gastro-intestinal dysfunction, immune deficiency, reproductive difficulty, sleep and memory loss and premature aging. And this is just to name a few!
But here is the good news; you are in control!
By this I mean that you have the power to determine how stressed out you will allow yourself to be in any given situation. Let me repeat that. YOU have the power to a determine how stress out you will allow yourself to be in any given situation.
When you take control and determine not to allow a particular stressor to affect you, your heart rate and breathing will slow down, your blood pressure will lower, your muscles will relax and the metabolism of your body will normalize. So, why aren’t people just taking it easy and de-stressing? That is a good question.
One of the main reasons, in my opinion, is that many people simply are not aware of the stressors in their lives or possibly are aware that they are there, but are not fully knowledgeable of the harmful effects these stressors can potentially have. I have listed a few here. See how many you perceived as genuinely hazardous to your health.

1] Cigarette smoke, including second hand smoke.
2] Excess fat intake
3] Excessive stress
4] Radiation and certain medications
5] Synthetic food additives
6] Asbestos and similar materials
7] Environmental pollutants in the air, food and water
8] Household cleansers
9] Pesticides
10] Charcoal smoke/barbecues
11] Plastics
12] Excessive exercise
13] Caffeine
14] Loud music
15] Telephones
16] Commuting to work

Stress is a common denominator in many illnesses; from something as simple as a headache to a more serious disease (dis-ease) such as heart disease. When we study the physiological changes that are created during a stressful situation, it is easy to see the link between your mind, stress and the illness.
Let’s take a moment to look at your heart’s response to various situation. It will pound when you experience anxiety, it will skip a beat when you are fearful and it sinks when you are disappointed.
Everyone is aware, intuitively, of the relationship between the emotional stress of your body and the functioning of your heart. Although, from what I have learned, there is still some controversy amongst doctors as to the role mental stress plays on heart disease, I feel the evidence that your mind plays a role in the development of heart disease is growing. One possible reason for this deduction is that depressed or overly stressed people seem to be more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors such as smoking. (Did you know that smoking appears to be more prevalent with women?) Another reason is that depression or stress stimulates the sympathetic nerves, which in turn can increase your heart rate which causes your blood vessels to constrict and your blood pressure to elevate.
Your speech behavioral pattern is a strong indication of whether or not you are experiencing excessive stress and hostility. Below are a few questions for you to ask yourself to help you determine if you are displaying excessive stress through hostility.