Strip Away Stress in 60 Seconds or Less

Life can certainly be difficult. And chaotic. And stressful. We seem to get pulled in a hundred different directions all at the same time. Everyone else’s problems seem to become our problems. And our problem is that everyone else can’t seem to do things the way we do things. Our economy is in turmoil. Jobs are being lost. Work sucks. Weekends go by too quick. Everything costs more. Good customer service seems to be a thing of the past. We get stuck in traffic, we get stuck in the same job, we get stuck trying to figure out how to order a five dollar coffee. Life is difficult. And chaotic. And stressful.

Yes. Stress is everywhere, whether real or imagined. The term generally gets used as a catch-all for all perceived difficulties in life. Stress can lead to tension, the inability to concentrate and a number of physical reactions such as increased heart rate and headaches. If you’ve never experienced this, then just try and put together a barbeque. 9 hours and 176 steps later I’m usually quite irritable – a “grumpy-gus” my wife and daughter would say.

What is stress anyway? In my experience, most people view stress as being completely negative. I know I certainly hear the term “stressed-out” on a daily basis. But stress can be both positive and negative. Positive stress, or eustress, is experienced as an adaptive response that prompts us to rise to challenges and achieve goals. With positive stress our body releases a number of chemicals that provide a feeling of enjoyment or relaxation. Negative stress on the other hand refers to our inability to respond or adapt. An overload of adrenaline is released with negative stress which results in a worried or fearful feeling.

Coherence gives us the chance to reboot when times get tough. It also helps give you a competitive edge and provides the ability to sustain your activities towards achieving your goals.

Persistent negative stress that doesn’t get resolved, through coping or adaptation, may lead to anxiety or withdrawal behavior (depression). Definitely not something that helps us on our path to optimal health and peak personal performance. Unless, that is, we find a way to better manage our emotional reaction to our “stressful” events.

In a previous post (Do Your Emotions Control You?) I briefly touched on a concept called heart intelligence. This is where our heart works in direct consort or support with the intelligence that we have in our brain – so heart-brain integration. I wanted to expand on this notion of heart intelligence and dive into the finer details of how it can be utilized to cope with stress and truly improve our overall health and personal performance.

Your Heart Influences Your Entire Body

First, a little science. When we look at the heart from the perspective of heart intelligence, we realize that the heart itself is more than just a blood pump. The heart influences and is interconnected with your entire body. HeartMath, a company dedicated to facilitating heart-based living, has found that the heart does communicate very powerful healing commands to the brain and the rest of the body. This happens through:

1. A nervous system in your heart, which communicates with your brain.
2. Blood pressure waves. These waves mediate and modulate electrical activity in the brain.
3. Hormone production. One of which, atrial peptide, is actually used to reduce the release of the stress hormone cortisol.
4. Electrical energy production. Our heart produces a field of energy around our body. This field can actually be detected 3 to 4 feet outside our bodies. This is not like an “aura”, it is actually a very measurable field of energy. It permeates every single cell in our body and radiates beyond our body.

Now I’m definitely not going to pretend that I understand how your heart goes about doing all that. While fascinating, what I really want to focus in on is how can all this improve us? How can we use this to reduce stress? How can we use this to optimize our health and personal success in life?

The answer to these questions lies in item 4 above – in the electrical energy produced by your heart. This field of energy produced by the heart transmits information which is relative to what we are feeling. When we are angry or upset it is a very incoherent field. On the flip side, when we have emotions that are usually associated with the heart – love, compassion, care, non-judgment – the field becomes very different. So we are literally broadcasting our emotions from the heart. This is the intelligence of the heart.

This heart intelligence is also what breathes life into the Law of Attraction. It’s what gives the Law of Attraction its magnetic quality – attracting back to you that which you want. The Law of Attraction itself is activated by intention, from our mind, but responds to emotion, from our heart. So it’s not the desire, it’s the emotion that is the powerful force. Gregg Braden, a science and spirituality author and speaker, has summed this thought up nicely: “We all live in a field of energy that reflects back to us, not what we think in our minds, but what we feel in our hearts“.

Risks for Not Managing Our Emotions

I think that most of us will agree that life itself can become rather busy and hectic. This speed of life puts us into ambition mode, which generally means that we start living from the head up. Heart intelligence itself is the next generation of behaving and understanding. This is the intelligence that gives us our emotional guidance. Now this may all start to sound rather mystical, but it’s not. We’re all actually born with this “intelligence”. We just tend to not have contact with this emotional intelligence on a consistent basis.

So what are some of the risks for not managing your emotions or under-utilizing the intelligence of the heart?

• Well for starters, life becomes a “grind” – a dry experience.
• We tend to become shut-down or closed off from our emotions – disconnected from each other.
• We’re unable to find joy and appreciation in the small things that occur in our lives.
• More stress is created, we are less productive and we live less fulfilling lives.

This obviously does not create an environment where we can achieve optimal health and our desired success in life. In fact, when our emotions are left unmanaged we do not have the same passion or energy to help us achieve our goals. We don’t feel resilient in what we are trying to achieve. It then becomes a mind-based technique that is much less sustainable.

So what options do we have? What can we do to manage our emotions and utilize our heart’s intelligence to help us achieve peak performance? These questions lead me back to HeartMath and the HeartMath system.

What is HeartMath? [excerpt from HeartMath.com]
HeartMath is a unique system of rigorous scientific research, validated techniques, leading-edge products and programs, and advanced technologies for people interested in personal development and improved emotional, mental and physical health. HeartMath is internationally recognized for our practical solutions to transform the stress of change and uncertainty, and bring coherence and renewed energy into people’s lives.

Ok, the HeartMath system does sound like it has some amazing benefits. But what is actually involved?

Managing Your Emotions with emWave®

At this point the concept of managing your emotions may still seem to be very abstract. You may be saying, “Yes, this sounds great but it doesn’t really work in the real world“. Well you may be surprised to learn, as I was, that the HeartMath system of techniques and technologies is actually being used by hundreds of thousands of individuals around the world. It is also being utilized by thousands of health professionals as well as hundreds of companies, health care systems (like the Mayo Clinic), educational institutions (like Duke University), and government agencies. Let’s take a look at how this all becomes very practical and pragmatic from an business and organizational standpoint.

Large organizations are consistently looking for new and innovative ways to improve productivity. They know that stress is an issue but it tends to get ignored. Over time this creates conditions in the work environment that compromises the effectiveness of what the organization wants to accomplish. No doubt most of us can relate with our workloads becoming stressful from time to time. This issue itself usually hits the organization where it matters most – the bottom line, through increased health care costs, reduced productivity and increased employee turnover.

HeartMath works with Fortune 100 companies, health care institutions and other large organizations to address issues like stress in the workplace. How is this done? By using a HeartMath developed technology called emWave®. Now emWave® does not change work hours, adjust pay scales or alter managers or bosses. What it does do is trigger behavioral changes. It gives employees something they can use to change their own perceptions to the events going on in their workplace. The result – a bottom-line savings for the organization.

So What is emWave®?

emWave® is award winning coherence building technology. Coherence is a state where your body becomes synchronized. Where your heart-brain communication is optimized and all systems in the body are working in complete harmony. As mentioned in a previous post (Do Your Emotions Control You?) this is a state similar to what athletes experience when they are in “The Zone“. In psychology this is also know as flow.

The emWave® technology scores the degree of coherence that we are experiencing by measuring our heart rhythms (more specifically, the beat to beat changes that occur in our heart rhythms). On a technical level, this is known as heart rate variability analysis. Coherence itself is divided into three levels – low, medium and high. Where low is “normal” and high coherence is the high performance state that we want to be in more of the time. This makes the emWave® technology an empowerment tool – something that gives us the ability to enter into a high coherence state. It helps train us to do so.

The Benefits of High Coherence

This is where it starts getting good. In the section above I mentioned the advantages to how this technology can help organizations. Well as individuals we can achieve the same benefits on a personal growth and personal performance level – our bottom line. High coherence results in sustained positive emotion, which leads to:

• Improved brain function
• Improved memory
• Improved focus (clarity in thinking)
• Less stress (thus better health)
• Ability to be more creative
• Increased confidence and self control
• Increased and sustained energy levels

Coherence gives us the chance to reboot when times get tough. It also helps give you a competitive edge and provides the ability to sustain your activities towards achieving your goals. It is definitely an innovate and interesting way to improve personal performance.

Where to Start?

We tend to overlook or dismiss what we are feeling. But this river of emotion runs under everything we do, which affects all of our perceptions and actions. In society, the word emotion has a negative stigma. It is generally perceived as a sign of weakness. We tell ourselves: who wants to look at emotion? But the polar opposite is true. Emotion is a great gift that doesn’t get utilized by most people in a positive way. Utilizing our heart’s intelligence helps us leverage life. It is empowerment.

Here are some tips, tools and techniques that you can use to start leveraging your heart’s intelligence:

Tagged as: appreciation, biofeedback, Emotion, emotional intelligence, empowerment, emWave, fulfillment, happiness, heart coherence, heart intelligence, HeartMath, Law of Attraction, Motivation, Personal Stress Reliever, quick coherence technique, reduce stress, stress relief, well being