Healthy Stress Management Eases the Pain of Change

Understanding ourselves, how we are hardwired to react to stress, helps to respond to stress with conscious healthy approaches that truly release the effects from our systems.

Change is stressful whether it is thrust upon us or self imposed. Anything that causes us to adapt is stressful. One reason for this is our biology. Our brain and nervous system do not know the difference between real and imagined and they respond to psychological stress with the same neural activation and cascade of chemistry as they do to physical threats. Essentially we are both hardwired and conditioned to react to stress and psychological threats in the same way we do a life threatening trauma. This is one factor in creating inner states that run on autopilot and get in the way of change, ease and success in our lives. In addition, the ways we learn, create associations, store memories and encode patterns also serve to create filters that we see the world through that have the effect of creating stressful responses and limiting our ability to be open to new possibilities/probabilities.

We all have patterns that took root in our brains and nervous systems unconsciously. The science of mind body medicine and psychology has shown us that unless we actively intervene in our inner world with methods that restore balance, healing and the capacity for letting go, we are often stuck with patterns that are typically very old, not very functional in present day life and that block successful change.

We need to develop inner pathways that allow us to really let go, surrender and forgive in order to be free to create our lives rather than react to them. Even without major trauma in one’s life there is usually some aspect of our inner landscape that needs to be re-calibrated for true emotional freedom and effective living.

We don’t come with a factory installed program for releasing old patterns that do not serve us. We can desire to move beyond old blocks, we can wish it, proclaim it, utter affirmations until we are hoarse, blue and 92, but unless we move from concept to an new inner experience–a deeply held inner felt sense that embodies the essence of our desired change– we have neither created a mind-body bridge for new information to travel over, nor a new inner blueprint for our psyche to use to bring us to the success, joy or peace and freedom we so desperately crave.

Techniques that can facilitate the release of stress, old memories, patterns and beliefs as well as install new inner experience and thus perceptions are those that are most helpful. Some of those methods are: guided imagery, visualization, deep relaxation/meditation, energy work and EFT. Each of these tools has a different function or purpose and targets a specific facet of stress and change.