Stress - Escape your Energy TrapsStress is your experience of your body’s fight or flight response to stimuli whether internal (feelings, perceptions, beliefs) or external (temperature, sound, aggression) and is cause of 80% or more of today’s illnesses. When your carrying capacity, the load you can comfortably bear without straining your energy reserves, is exceeded, your body’s physical and mental alarm bells go off activating the stress response, experienced as an instantaneous surge in:
Know your Energy Traps The Stressor is the stimulus that provokes in you a stress response. Stressors are external to you. The source of stressor can be job or workplace related, family, interpersonal or environmental. Identifying the stressor and determining whether it is within or outside of your control or influence is the first step to effective stress management. Your Reaction to the Stressor is another source of stress. How you interpret and react to the stressor has a big impact on how your body’s responds physiologically to the situation and your experience of it both physically and mentally. For example, it is your perception of the nature and extent of threat that determines the body’s hormonal response. Your Body’s Conditioned Response to the Stressor – Your habits of response affect or condition your body’s physiology over time. Unmanaged stress goes to the part of you that is most vulnerable, eventually showing up in your physical body as dis-ease.
Life coaching An intelligent response to counteracting the stress response is to learn and cultivate the Relaxation Response. Relaxation Response Relaxation is what you are. Tension is what you think you should be. Chinese Proverb It is simply not possible to be both relaxed and tense at the same time. Learning simple relaxation techniques whether for high performance, stress reduction and pain management is based on the concept of the mind-body connection - whatever helps the body relax also relaxes the mind and vice versa and enhances your overall capacity and resilience. The relaxation response reduces the effects of stress on the body and mind, allows rebalancing and healing, improves general bodily functions and gives rise to an enhanced ability to focus and sense of wellbeing.
The relaxation response, first seen as a deep sigh, is known to:
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Thich Nhat Hanh
Stress Management Strategies that Empower Cultivating the relaxation response as a conscious response to stressors and stressful situations is a Self-care practice. As a practice it empowers the individual to awaken to what deeply matters to them, manage stress, navigate challenging situations and take responsibility for lifestyle and behaviour choices, reclaiming trapped energy and restoring balance to improve their health, performance and satisfaction. No, my soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches. Its eyes wide open to far-off things, listening at the shores of the great silence. Antonio Machado
Self-care practices
Massage, yoga, going for walks in nature, taking time to appreciate, wonder and enjoy are all relaxation and renewal strategies. Physical training that balances stress and recovery, isometric exercises and progressive muscle relaxation are simple and effective way to relax the body. 
Mindfulness training creates awareness and cultivates inner calm, peace and a quiet resilience. Mindfulness meditation practice trains the mind and helps the practitioner gain control over unconscious, automatic reactions and habitual patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour and helps them transcend contradictions and fears and integrate their experiences for more empowered action.
Energy Healing practices like
Therapeutic Touch,
Reiki
and
Zenith Omega
offer knowledge, exercises and techniques for self healing, relaxation and renewal.
Learn about the latest research on Therapeutic Touch for stress management and pain relief.
Life coaching
Embodied Wisdom – Your Body Loves You! Awareness is the greatest agent of change. Eckhart Tolle You can get stressed by a million different things; all of which act as your system’s information up-setters and distorters. When you are healthy and relaxed, life energy flows freely and unobstructed, through you. The idea of rebalancing the system after a stressful incident is based on an understanding that the system has a blueprint for optimum functioning and that when you deeply relax and centre yourself, you get out of our own way and let the body’s natural instinct for health and healing take over to re-establish balance and flow within its current capacity. Your body, mind and spirit are one – an open, complex and multi-dimensional system. Energy vitalizes the body, nourishes the soul, opens the heart and lifts the spirit. As you learn to listen to your body, you will become increasingly aware of your feelings as a personal feedback system and your body’s primary mode of communications. By tuning in and listening attentively to what your body is experiencing you engage in the process that can help you avoid the pain and suffering that results from not heeding the early warning signs you failed to notice.
One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing life is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is. Norman Vincent Peale
By Julia von Flotow February 15, 2011
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