Chapter 1: What’s your stress number?
Stress is everywhere you look: It’s in the little things that get under your skin like traffic jams, difficult
customers, long lines, rude remarks, bad drivers, and noisy neighbors. It’s in the bigger things that drag
you down like rising prices, unemployment, angry bosses, and even foreign wars. And then there are
those life-changing events like accidents, illness, and going through a divorce or breakup. These are just
a few of the stressful influences that leave us feeling sad, anxious, frustrated, frightened, overwhelmed,
depressed, lonely or just plain lousy.
HOW DO WE MANAGE THIS EVER INCREASING STRESS LOAD?
Typically we “manage” our stress by overspending, overeating, smoking, drinking and even becoming
dependent on prescription and over-the-counter drugs like pain killers and sleeping pills. Also known as
“counter –productive coping,” this way of handling stress only leads to bigger problems: Maxed out
credit cards, obesity, lung cancer and alcoholism – which only adds fuel to the fire.
Experts estimate that between 75 to 90% of all doctors visits are for stress-related conditions. These
conditions include: migraine or tension headaches, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia,
chronic fatigue, asthma, allergies, rashes, anxiety, depression, insomnia and back pain. These are all
examples of health problems that can be caused or made worse by stress.
“PRESCRIPTIVE SOLUTIONS” DON’T GET TO THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM
Despite the explosion in stress-related disease, most doctors don’t really want to know about your
stress. Why? There are actually lots of reasons but the main reason is time. Your doctor has on average,
about 8 minutes to diagnose your problem and provide you with a solution. When you come in with a
condition that might be stress-related, your doctor will usually prescribe a pill that reduces the
symptoms of the problem. You go away happy with something that can treat the symptoms of your
stress-related health concern and he or she moves on to the next patient.
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Wait! Not so fast. The solution you are holding in your hand comes with an array of side effects, and
possibly some dangers for long-term use. These side effects can include: drowsiness, weight gain,
agitation, low libido, lethargy, and – in rare cases – increased risk of suicide or death. Even common
over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen are under fire now, not only for the short-term side effects
(like heartburn) but for the long term problems they hold in terms of increasing your risk of heart-
disease and hearing loss.
Besides some pretty scary side effects, there’s another big problem with a pharmacological approach to
managing stress. When you take a sleeping pill, a pain pill, an anti-anxiety drug like Xanax or Valium – for
a stress related condition - you’re not addressing the source of the problem. By eliminating or reducing
the annoying symptoms like sleeplessness, pain, nervousness and low mood, you make it easier to cope
with the results of your stress without addressing the reasons FOR your stress. As long as your stress
continues, chances are, the health problem will too. The medications you are taking simply make it
easier for you to deal with your stress. They don’t make the stress go away.
This permits you to leave your doctor’s office with a prescription that, in effect, allows you to pretend as
if you had no stress. This is doubly unfortunate because by making you essentially blind to the problem,
it also allows you to postpone seeking out a permanent solution. Without the annoying symptoms of
stress there’s no motivation for changing the behaviors or altering the situations that lead to those
symptoms. So as a result, your body continues to take a beating while you carefully cover up all the
evidence of a crime you are committing against yourself by not addressing the source of the problem.
If you want to get to the root of your stress the first thing you have to do is face it, head on. No more
sweeping it under the rug and covering it up with medications that only treat the symptoms and not the
problem itself. But before making any changes in your medications or treatment, you will want to
consult your doctor first. After that, there is something that you can do to address this problem right
now.
FINDING YOUR STRESS NUMBER
You need to start monitoring your stress. In order to lower your stress you first need to determine what
exactly is causing you stress and where it’s coming from. That’s why I developed this stress number
system for easily gauging your level of stress at any point throughout your day. You can take your stress
number right now. Here’s how it works: It’s based on a scale of zero to ten. Zero represents the
complete absence of tension (no anxious feelings in the gut or tension in the body) and 10 is a full blown
panic attack.
So what’s your stress number now? As you start to track this more and more, you will get better and
better at pinpointing exactly where you are at any given moment. But just make your best guess for the
present moment. (Most people during the normal course of a day fall somewhere between a 2 and 7.)
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Now that you have a number in mind, let’s see if you can lower it. After you read the instructions below,
look at your watch and/or notice the time. Before the second hand goes around twice, I predict you are
going to significantly lower your level of stress and by so doing, self -regulate your nervous-system.
Here’s how.
HOW TO SELF-REGULATE YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM
Take a minute to reflect on the following instructions before beginning.
• Breathe in deeply while counting to four.
• Hold that breath in to a count of four.
• Then breathe out to a count of six.
• Repeat this cycle three times.
Reread these instructions until you have them memorized. Close your eyes if you wish before
beginning.
What is your stress number now?
If your second number is lower than your first, then you’ve just done something that Western science
once thought was impossible. You’ve self-regulated your autonomic nervous system.
ABOUT THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM
Up until recently, Western scientists believed you couldn’t self-regulate your autonomic nervous system.
Then in the mid 1960s a group of meditators met with Dr. Herbert Benson at his lab at Harvard
University to see if they could control certain autonomic functions of the body. Benson hooked them up
to biofeedback devices that showed these meditators could lower their heart rate, blood pressure, raise
their skin temperature and even slow their brainwaves, on command, simply by meditating. This
research led to a ground-breaking book called THE RELAXATION RESPONSE which taught people how to
use mind/body methods for lowering stress. With the help of these meditators, Benson had discovered
the antidote to the fight or flight response.
THE FIGHT OR FLIGHT RESPONSE
When you learn about stress, the first thing you often hear about is the fight or flight response. This
response explains why our hearts beat faster, our pupils dilate, our blood vessels constrict, our mouth
dries up and our muscles become tense whenever we experience stress. These fast-acting physiological
changes were designed to help our prehistoric ancestors fight an attacker or flee to safety. In our
modern, relatively safe world, this primitive response to stress doesn’t work: Our stressors consist
mostly of psychological threats to our well-being like a rude remark, someone cutting ahead of you in
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line or an unkind criticism from your boss. None of these stressors could do any real damage but we
react to them as if they could – almost like the caveman would react to a lion or a tiger.
In all of these modern-day situations you’re basically stuck: You can’t fight and you can’t flee. Instead,
this response is needlessly calling up all this energy and tension, for which there is no outlet and no
purpose. This puts a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on the body that eventually shows up in the form
of pain or disease.
THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF TOO MUCH STRESS
STRESS-RELATED DISEASES
Think about that word disease for a moment and break it down
Ulcers*
into two syllables. DIS-EASE. It’s a synonym for the word stress!
Depression
And when you look at the changes that take place during fight Insomnia
or flight, it becomes painfully obvious that there’s a connection Allergies
between what the stress response does to the body and the list Digestive Tract Disorders
of stress-related diseases to which it can lead. Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Colitis
The fight or flight response raises our blood pressure, causes Infertility
our hearts to beat faster, shuts down the immune system, turns Chronic Pain
off the digestive system and stops the reproductive system. Is it Migraine Headaches
Recurrent Colds
any wonder then, that high blood pressure, heart disease,
Hypertension
immune system disorders, infertility and digestive tract Heart Disease
disorders are the most common types of stress related Sudden Cardiac Death
concerns? And is it any wonder that chronic activation of this Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
high-octane response can lead to these health concerns? Fibromyalgia
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
*Ulcers used to be solely attributed to
TRIGGERING STRESS HORMONES stress but now they are believed to be
caused by the helicobacter pylori
bacterium. Yet most people (80%) have
Dr. Martin Samuels is head of the Neuro-Cardiology Department this bacterium in their gut all the time.
at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, Still, only a small percentage of these
where he studies the relationship between THINKING and EVER develop ulcers. Stress experts
suggest that maybe stress makes the
heart-disease. “The autonomic nervous system uses the gut more vulnerable to the bacteria and
hormone adrenaline, a neurotransmitter, or chemical that’s why the ulcer develops.
messenger, to send signals to various parts of the body to
activate the fight-or-flight response,” Dr. Samuels explains in an interview in Scientific American. “This
chemical is toxic in large amounts; it damages internal organs such as the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.
It is believed that almost all sudden deaths are caused by damage to the heart.”
Another neurotransmitter related to the stress response is cortisol. Cortisol is the stress hormone that
makes you feel tense, irritable and edgy. If you ever wake up feeling anxious, that’s cortisol doing a
number on you. It rises and falls throughout the day. It’s typically highest in the morning and lowest at
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night. But it can rise and fall throughout the day for various reasons such as when you are late for work
and get stuck in a traffic jam. It can also rise when you drink caffeinated beverages such as coffee, tea or
cola. Your cortisol levels can even rise by simply thinking of something stressful. But thinking of
something relaxing can bring them back down, too.
Much of the degenerative disease we suffer from today (like cancer, diabetes and heart disease) may, in
part, be the result of our organs being bathed in high levels of stress hormones 24/7. Even after a minor
stressful episode, it usually takes about 45 minutes for your stress hormones to return back to normal.
But if one stressful event follows another, more stress hormones are dumped into your bloodstream on
top of the ones that were already there.
STRESS IS CUMULATIVE
Now you see why it’s so important to monitor your stress levels throughout your day. As you can see,
much of our stress is cumulative and yet when we feel overwhelmed, angry or upset we tend to point to
just ONE event as the cause. Often times, it’s a cascading series of events, the beginning of which we
hardly notice that can eventually lead to our unraveling. But as these events build, one on top of the
other, so do the stress hormone levels in your body. It’s these accumulating stress hormone levels that
occur over time that make you sick, NOT one-off events.
So the bad news is, stress can make you sick, it can sneak up on you in terms of it being cumulative, and
we often cope with it in ways that makes our stress even worse. The good news is, once you apply
awareness to the situation, you can change how you experience stress AND, more importantly, how
much stress you experience. First by simply becoming aware of your stress, you can begin to take
control of it, perhaps by simply walking away from or avoiding a stressful situation when your stress
number climbs too high. Next, and this is key, you must learn simple relaxation techniques, like the
breathing technique we demonstrated previously, that allow you to self-regulate the nervous system. In
the next chapter we’ll show you 10 more techniques that will help you accomplish this objective in just
minutes.
