Stress is a state of mental or emotional tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances. Stress turns on the fight or flight response. It moves all the body’s resources to self-preservation and shuts down all functions not necessary to immediate survival including the immune system.

You don’t need to deal with your cold while you are running from a lion. This is necessary when you are being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. When your life is in danger, you need all available resources focused on survival. But what happens when the body is in a constant state of fight or flight?

Our mind is programmed to evaluate everything it takes in for danger. It naturally has what is known as a negative bias and its automatic default is always to protect itself. This was necessary when everything in your primitive environment was threatening and possibly deadly.

In our modern lives we rarely find ourselves in life-or-death situations, but our mind still retains its programming along with its negative survival bias. Our modern stresses consist of things like financial pressures, relationships, work, and traffic.

One could argue that today’s stressors are more dangerous than those of our ancestors. Providing you escaped the saber-toothed tiger and you got away, the stress was over, your body calmed down and you went back to life as usual. Today’s stressors are with us twenty-four-seven. They never let up and whether we realize it or not, our bodies are always in some level of fight or flight.

The chemical response to stress (fight or flight) is exactly the same as the chemical response to addictive drugs. We also know that the chemicals that we release (dopamine and cortisol) eventually become addictive themselves. So, in a way we become addicted to your own thoughts and fears. In fact, we reach a point where our body actually needs the stress to release the chemicals. This could be why we find ourselves in one bad relationship after another or a string of bad jobs and never reaching our potential.

Science has proven the link between stress and illness, and you literally can think yourself sick. The range of health problems attributed to stress include just about everything from simple headaches to auto-immune diseases. Remember that in fight or flight, the body doesn’t need an immune response, so it shuts the immune system down. When we are constantly living in stress, we are living with our immune system shut down. Just like a computer with no virus protection, it is only a matter of time until its systems are infected.

Every year there are more and more studies pointing to the relationship between stress and chronic illnesses such as:

•          Psoriasis

•          Rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

•          Systemic lupus

•          Crohn’s disease.

•          Celiac disease.

•          Ulcerative colitis.

•          Graves’ disease.

•          Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.

•          Addison’s disease.

The good news is that while you can’t always control your environment, you can learn how to control and even eliminate the stress that is keeping you in a constant state of fight or flight.

Toxic thoughts create toxic chemicals and tonic thoughts create tonic chemicals. Our thoughts can make us sick, or they can heal us. Science backs this up. We know that the body is capable of regenerating every organ in our bodies given the right environment. This simply means that the first step to living a healthy life is controlling or eliminating stress.

Studies also show that hypnosis is effective in learning what drives our reaction to stressful situations and in reprogramming our responses when we find ourselves in situations we can’t control. There are also studies that support the use of meditation in releasing stress and improving health. Positive thoughts create positive outcomes; you can change the state of your health.