Managing Your Response To Stress

One thing that really irks anyone under stress is somebody else telling them that they are over-reacting, that the particular stressor doesn’t bother them, therefore why should it bother you.

The answer is as unique as individual life footprints.

Each of us has been exposed to stressful conditions in our lives. The sounds, smells, feelings, emotions etc experienced throughout that stressful period can become imprinted in the brain, without you realizing it.

Many of these sensory items are not even conscious to us at the time. But our brain picks up everything....and holds on to that association until that stressor re-enters your life again at a later date. Your brain recognizes that this sound or smell is associated with stress, and triggers adrenalin based stress response. For someone else, who has not developed an association of that sensory item with a previous stressful situation, no stress response is triggered.

I am extremely irritated by irregular noise – someone breathing in my ear, chewing in my ear, radio ads, music beats when I am trying to concentrate. Yet I am quite happy with a constant sound, however loud. The latter may drive someone else crazy, but they can work happily through the radio blaring out or the bass of a remote stereo bouncing through the room.

Sometimes all we sense is the vibration of the noise, without even hearing the noise. In one particular instance where we lived across the stream from a light industrial area, a furniture manufacturer installed [very poorly] a big extractor fan on the steel roof, without any dampering between the room and the supports. That fan droning was enough, but I could filter that out with some classical music. What stressed my body was the vibration. I could tell you the instant that fan was turned off, even though I could not hear it, and I was correct 100% of the time.

Noise stress is extremely debilitating for those who do suffer from a noise induced stress response. Neighbors instantly become the neighbours from hell once their teenagers get new stereos, or take to bouncing basketballs for hours on end.

And remember, the stress itself does not have to be within your conscious awareness. A once perceived irritating noise can sometimes be pushed into your subliminal perception so you don't consciously hear it anymore. However, the vibration frequency still irritates/stimulates something in your body.

From a stress/response point perspective, the vibration in question is a stressor to you and not to others. It could be that certain tissues in your body resonate with this particular vibration, or reacting to the repressed memory as outlined above.

Your body reacts to the stressor by producing adrenalin, which diverts blood flow from organs to muscles. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase, the reticular alarm system connects with your adrenal glands and sympathetic nervous system to prepare you for a life-saving battle.

The sympathetic nervous system is part of your autonomic nervous system, which shuts down non essential functions to conserve energy, such as your digestive system, kidneys, bladder, bowel and immune system.

Your overactive adrenal glands and sympathetic nervous system makes you become uptight and irritable. Your sympathetic nervous system reduces immune system activity, so you have more difficulty resisting germs.

The end result of increased adrenalin can be a weakening of the heart muscle and ulcers in the stomach. The adrenal glands, forever activated eventually lose their ability to produce sufficient amounts of adrenalin. Your stress response is now compromised, and your ability to deal with stressors is significantly impaired, ultimately leading to illness.

Personal Radar

Vibrational frequencies include sounds, lights, colors, aromas, magnetic fields, electrical fields, barometric pressure changes and so on.
We can also be unconsciously stressed by molecules that are toxic or stressful to our biochemistries. These can be in food, drink, the air, our clothing, etc.

These "energy fields" in our daily lives either attract or repel us from certain people, locations or activities. Studies have shown that these energy fields exist both through and around living systems and have characteristics that correlate to certain emotions - anger, danger, fear, guilt, love, compassion, empathy, and other emotions.

It’s like we each have our own personal, custom programmed radar systems that guide us to avoid stressors known to be destructive to our particular physiology.

Managing Stress Response

The only way to avoid these stressful situations is to get to know what vibrational frequencies and molecules stress you in particular and find a way to either co-exist through cognitive therapy, or avoid such environments.

• Regular meditation and centering is often useful to avoid long-term responses.
• Exercise helps use up the excess adrenalin produced
• CranioSacral Therapy – to reduce sympathetic nervous system activity and irritability, indicating a decrease in adrenalin production. This is the immediate symptomatic effect. This includes:
  • Energy Cyst Release - releases old tissue memories from childhood events that are continuing to cause over-responses. By discharging foreign energies injected by injuries, infections and emotional crises, stress-response systems can be released so alarm systems can relax.
  • SomatoEmotional Release – to dis-empower previous experiences, such as abuse, rape and near-death traumas, so the hyper-responsiveness is calmed down.
  • Therapeutic Imagery and Dialogue - dialogue with the reticular alarm system and negotiate a reduced level of activity.

Learning to work with stress and managing our responses to stress is one of the most effective ways to avoid disease.