The
Nature of Stress Part II : Change Your Emotional Responses
The
last Care 2 post, the Nature of Stress–Part I, discussed two of the
key aspects of stress:
- It is our perception of events and challenges that cause much of our stress.
- Our emotional responses to our perceptions of events and challenges are key drivers of stress.
Based
on those important discoveries, researchers at the Institute of
HeartMath began exploring people’s emotional responses to how they
perceived various events and situations in their lives. For instance,
did they tend to become angry when others said or did things they
didn’t like?
The
findings along with other IHM research, including the intelligent
nature of the human heart, resulted in the discovery that each of us
is highly capable of changing our emotional responses. This is a
remarkable ability, one that sparked more than two decades at IHM of
developing methods for and educating people about changing their
emotional responses to experiences in their lives. For example, they
developed techniques to help those who become angry over what others
do or say to intentionally experience or focus on a positive emotion
such as caring, compassion or sincere understanding.
In
2005, Transforming Stress, the first in HeartMath’s Transforming
Series, stated it this way: “Letting go of a stress habit requires
changing your response to stress and modifying the information going
through your body’s circuitry.”
The
brain interprets stress as a threat to our safety and activates the
“fight or flight” response, explain the book’s authors,
HeartMath founder Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman, president and CEO
of HeartMath Inc.
“This
ancient survival mechanism was critical when human beings had to
protect themselves from wild animals and marauders,” they said.
“Most of our stresses today are not life threatening, yet the
body’s stress response system does not accurately discern the
degree of threat. We react to daily stress as if it is a matter of
survival, and the accumulation of these reactions takes a toll on the
body.”
The
solution, Childre and Rozman say in Transforming Stress, is to change
our stress circuitry, taking “a fast-track approach to managing and
relieving stress that clears the emotional memory banks.”
HeartMath
development teams have been incorporating IHM stress and emotions
research into strategies that help clear those emotional memory
banks.
“By
using HeartMath techniques,” Transforming Stress explains, “you
change your heart rhythms and emotional or attitudinal state, right
in the moment when you’re perceiving and feeling stress.”
The
heart can clear our emotional memory banks.
Heart
rhythms and heart rate variability – the beat-to-beat changes in
heart rhythms – provide a highly accurate measure of how each of
our various emotions affects us.
The
heart possesses what scientists have called a “heart brain.” Like
the brain proper, it is vitally engaged in a wide range of bodily
processes and activities. So, beyond stress diagrammerely pumping
blood through the body, the heart is constantly engaged in gathering
a wealth of information the body needs and sending out signals,
information, instructions and alerts critical to our health and
well-being.
Being
able to change in the moment is a tremendous power to possess.
Whether you are about to go off, in a funk or headed into an
important meeting in the wrong frame of mind, it’s in your power –
the power of your heart – to change it. Moreover, Childre and
Rozman write, “With practice, new habits are built that transform
the old stress circuitry.”
HeartMath
has lots of solutions available that can work for you, including its
widely used science-based technology. Check out the following Free
Services – Solutions for Stress and if you think you’re due for a
change in how you respond emotionally to what comes up in your life,
try something here for adults and children
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