World of Stress

I have written many essays on stress but the last thing I would have thought about the gastro malaise I have been fighting for 17 months is that I am fighting a stress disorder. When I did break down a few months ago and saw an MD he did suggest a neurological examination and I looked at him like he was crazy. However, the reality is that it is difficult for a person to understand one’s own internal stress level. This is why a stroke or heart attack happens so suddenly and unexpectedly.

How a person perceives stressful situations is important. One individual may feel major stress from a particular situation, whereas another person will handle it better by using the event as an opportunity to learn. Someone like me, who has perceived little stress as he works 365 days a year on average of about 14 hours a day in front of a computer without stop, perceives little stress but in the end almost goes down for the count because of it.

“The effect that sitting has on your ability to breathe is a serious and underappreciated problem. In fact, it’s so underappreciated that you probably don’t even realize it’s a problem for you at all. Just think about what happens when you are sitting hunched over your computer: because your front body is collapsed, the lungs and the diaphragm have much less space to expand. Therefore, as your body collapses further and further in on itself, your breathing becomes increasingly shallow.”

The sad news is that stress is going off the Richter scale for many if not most people around the world. As the world’s financial and economic situation careens out of control, as toxic exposures increase, as the rich steal the poor and middle classes blind, as rape and child sexual abuse continues, and as governments get meaner and more aggressive against their own and other’s peoples, the list is endless for reasons to freak with stress.

The most common cause of stress in women is sexual trauma. A person’s vulnerability to develop PSTD is linked to that individual’s history of victimization. Reports estimate that 15%-38% of women experience childhood sexual abuse, 13% to 20% experience adult rape and at least 20% experience battering.[1] Sexual and physical abuse in women, either when they were children or as adults, can result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological and psychiatric disturbances. A growing number of studies indicate that such abuse may produce a wide variety of somatic symptoms and disturbances in physical health including cancer.

There is a link between a history of sexual and physical
abuse in women and functional disorders such as
irritable bowel syndrome and chronic pelvic pain.

We are experiencing an escalation of stress and symptoms across the board. People are starting to grieve over what they see as the end of their lifestyle and work as we have reached the zenith of our present situation and as it now is in rapid decline. Realities are setting in and there is a definite threat of people moving from sad to hopeless.

From The Burning Platform: “A central question is whether people can maintain their humanity amidst so much horror, brutality, death, and desolation that is increasingly taking place in our world today. Can we expect people to continue to show compassion, kindness, mercy and love in a world torn apart by disarray, violence, viciousness and despair?”

Without power and access to food and water, modern society breaks down quickly, with chaos, looting and anarchy only days away. Around the world violent climate change, lack of food, war and political chaos are just some of the stresses effecting people. In addition, Fukushima should be giving us nightmares, especially for the future of our children, but this and many other threats are carefully hidden from public site as much as possible.

Despite a dramatic increase in treatment of psychiatric disorders
during the past 10 years, there has been no decrease in the rate of
suicidal thoughts and behavior among adults, according to a federal
study primarily funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.
The Washington Post

Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee said a few years ago that, “We’re seeing a very angry population, and they don’t go to fists anymore, they go right to guns,” she said. “When we ask, ‘Why did you shoot this guy?’ it’s, ‘He bumped into me.’ or, ‘He looked at my girl the wrong way.’” said Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson of Philadelphia. “It’s not like they’re riding around doing drive-by shootings. It’s arguments – stupid arguments over stupid things.” While arguments have always made up a large number of homicides, the police say the trigger point now comes faster. In robberies, Milwaukee’s Chief Hegerty said, “Even after the person gives up, the guy with the gun shoots him anyway. We didn’t have as much of that before.”

Dr. Dennis Charney, a psychiatrist and director of clinical neuroscience at the National Center at Yale University tells us that, “It does not matter if it was the incessant terror of combat, torture, or repeated abuse in childhood, or a one-time experience. All uncontrollable stress can have the same biological impact.”  The operative word here is uncontrollable. The key psychological aspect of PTSD is helplessness, the feeling that you are being threatened or your life is in danger and there is absolutely nothing you can do to avoid it.

Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon recognized 90 years ago that when confronted by a threat – physical or emotional, real or imagined – the body responds with a rise in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and breathing rate. We now know that this physiological “stress response” involves hormones and inflammatory chemicals that can foster everything from headaches to heart attacks.

Stress produces a series of effects most of them are invisible emerging only subsequently; our doctors or we do not see them. Stress, which has been loosely defined as "a state of threatened homeostasis," has repeatedly been shown to result in changes in the immune system’s ability to mount a response to an immune challenge.

Dozens of studies have shown that stress can alter the levels of certain biochemical markers in the body — key players in the human immune response. Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a team of researchers from five universities argue that stress can lessen a person’s immune response and that change can make them more susceptible to infectious diseases.

Patients who had made suicide attempts (by using either
violent or nonviolent means) had significantly lower mean
CSF magnesium levels irrespective of the diagnosis.[2]

Intense emotional stresses weaken the internal viscera, thus increasing the opportunity for pathologies of all types, including cancer. However, most doctors are still loath to connect body chemistry with emotions but neurobiologists know that neural and other biologically measurable changes accompany PTSD. Sufferers of PTSD are known to undergo a numbing of certain feelings, the inability to feel pleasure, a general emotional lack of feeling, a sense of being cut off from life or from concern about others feelings.

When the body is under stress, it releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol that causes suppression of our immune system. Stress does wide scale damage to our physiology and even reaches down to DNA and RNA proteins forcing activation of certain genes and deactivation of other—leading to changes that impact the growth of cancer. The stress hormone cortisol changes the body’s genetics and interferes with the ability of tumor-suppressing genes to do their job.

Laboratory animals exposed to high levels of stress
show irregularities in the enzymes that are
responsible for repairing damaged DNA and genes.

Anything that compromises your immune system dramatically reduces your chances for long term survival. Women with advanced breast cancer who have abnormal daytime levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, are significantly more likely to die sooner than patients with normal levels of the hormone, Stanford University researchers report back in 2000. The researchers also found that women with these abnormal cortisol levels had fewer immune system cells known as natural killer cells, and this reduced immunity was associated with higher mortality. Dr. David Spiegel, MD, Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences said, "We found that patients who had abnormal cortisol patterns died significantly sooner."

Treating Underlying Conditions

Mg deficiency increases susceptibility to the
physiologic damage produced by stress.
The adrenergic effects of psychological stress induce a shift
of Mg from the intracellular to the extracellular space,
increasing urinary excretion and eventually depleting body stores.[3]
Dr. Leo Galland

The last thing most doctors treat is stress and the inflammation that comes with it. The diagnostic labels—diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease, ulcers, acid reflux, colitis and many other diagnostic labels tell us little about the stress and inflammation underlying such disorders. Thus, doctors do not treat the stress component nor the nutritional deficiencies running head on with our toxic insults that include the pharmaceutical medicines too many people are taking. One of the basic reasons pharmaceutical medicine is madness, is that they are almost all mitochondrial poisons that usually make our stress and inflammation worse via their side effects, which are actually, if all truth be known, are their main effects.

The list of things I use and recommend for stress is long but on top of the list is breathing retraining, the use of magnesium oil especially for massage and hot bathing, yoga, and the BioMat, which not only feels fantastic, especially when under stress, but because of the deeper penetration of FIR energy people will see a reduction in cortisol levels of up to 78%.[4]

Climb into a warm magnesium bath and feel the tensions slip away from your body and soul. Get a magnesium massage it will simply help you cope. Slow your breathing down and your life as well if that is possible.
While stress leads to magnesium depletion, magnesium deficiency causes stress-related symptoms such as insomnia, muscle tension, migraines, and irritability. You can avoid this vicious cycle by staying on top of your magnesium needs.

Increased alcoholic intake, which happens frequently in times of stress for some people, depletes magnesium in our bodies. Alcohol increases urinary magnesium excretion by as much as 260% above baseline values; this occurs within minutes of ingestion.[5] Often by increasing magnesium, the perceived need for alcohol decreases while some of the depression and anxiety are alleviated.

In addition, now it is going to be legal to light up and smoke some marijuana in most places petty soon. There is nothing like it for stress reduction and it does not have the heavy downside that increased alcoholic intake has.