Stress Control: Techniques fo... Health Article

Stress Control: Techniques for preventing and easing stress

Glance at the 10 leading causes of death in America, and you won't find the word "stress" anywhere. Yet many well-respected studies link stress to heart disease and stroke — 2 of the top 10 killers. Heart disease alone was responsible for more than one in three deaths in 2002. Stress may also influence cancer and chronic lower respiratory diseases, which rank as numbers 2 and 4, respectively, in the top 10.

Stress has implications for many other ailments as well. Depression and anxiety, which afflict millions of Americans, can be caused or exacerbated by stress. Stress also triggers flare-ups of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and gastrointestinal problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome. And illness is just the tip of the iceberg. Stress affects you emotionally as well, marring the joy you draw from life and loved ones.

What is stress? For one thing, it's not all bad. Your perception of a real or imagined threat can spark the stress response, a physiological cascade that prepares the body to fight or flee. That swift reflex was encoded in you for survival and can save you from injury or worse. It's a rush of hormones that spurs you to jump out of the path of a speeding car, flee from a menacing wild animal, or quickly douse a small fire. Stress has another positive side as well. Researchers have found that as stress or anxiety increases, so do performance and efficiency — at least initially. At a certain point, though, rising stress becomes detrimental, and performance and efficiency tumble.

Trouble usually brews when the stress response is evoked repeatedly, causing unnecessary wear and tear on the body for less than momentous reasons. In a world bursting with situations that can elicit the stress response — traffic jams, layoffs, illness, and money woes — it's not surprising that many people experience stress frequently. Certainly, no one can completely avoid stressful situations. Yet it's entirely possible for each of us to influence how these situations affect us.

This special report draws on expertise from the renowned Mind/Body Medical Institute and its Harvard Medical School staff. Reading it will help you identify triggers for stress in your own life and understand ways in which the stress response affects your body. Applying the techniques in these pages can help you neutralize its damaging effects. This report provides a variety of tools you can use to accomplish that task. Your job is to decide which tools fit you best and to start wielding them. (Of course, before you use any of the techniques described in this report to treat a health condition, you should consult with your doctor.)

As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day. It took much longer to raise the scaffolding that supports the negative cycles of stress in your life, too. Learning to dismantle it will also take time. Yet your efforts can reward you richly with better health, greater peace of mind, and a smoother, more joyful course through life.