It’s no secret that we live in the most stressful time in history. It is the opinion of a growing number of health professionals that stress has become a global health epidemic. Even in conversations we throw the word ‘stress’ more and more every day. You only need to stand in line at a busy post office to feel the stress and tension building in the room. People become extremely impatient and begin to gasp, mutter their unhappiness and begin to tremble. In fact, when I was in line the other days, someone in front of me said, ‘This is SO stressful!’ I thought to myself, what is this person’s life like on a day-to-day basis? If standing in line is so stressful, imagine the rest of your day. Having grown up in South Africa, I immediately thought of the unfortunate masses in Zimbabwe who have to wait in line for two to three hours at the ATM, every day, just to get enough hyperinflated currency to meet their daily needs. . Its inflation is so extreme that this is the only way the country can function economically. It makes me wonder how the person in front would survive there, and also how these people manage to cope.
stress and illness
Stress has been clinically linked to most major illnesses. Knowing this, I began to wonder about this lady’s health and how many current illnesses she might be allowing to grow in her body through stress. I couldn’t help but see this person as a heart attack waiting to happen. As a stress management specialist, I am not one to think negatively, this thought scared me. And this is just one example that I recently experienced, but more and more, people feel the negative effects of stress on a daily basis.
A disease like cancer or a stroke does not happen overnight. They are the accumulation of years of stress put on the body. When I talk about stress, I mean various types of stress. There is physical stress, such as repetitive motion, chemical stress, such as pesticides in our food and chemicals in our water, and emotional stress, which causes our cortisol levels and blood pressure to rise. The American Medical Association says that from the beginning of the problem, to the first symptom of a heart attack, forty-three years pass. Unfortunately, in many cases, the first sign of illness results in death.
Why are we so stressed? It is scary to measure how much stress increases each year. We live in a society now. Everyone wants everything now, gratification must be instant, and patience is fast becoming a thing of the past. If we could see into ourselves down to a cellular level at all times, we’d quickly think twice about losing our temper and getting angry over things we can’t control.
Going back to my example of the people of Zimbabwe, the irony is that they are some of the kindest and most patient people you will ever meet. They live extremely difficult lives under a brutal dictatorship and struggle to find enough money to feed their families, yet they still smile and are warm and friendly even to foreigners. How they did it?
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they are much more grounded in reality and spirituality than the average Westerner. I experienced similar amazement in Thailand, where a family took me in and treated me like family without knowing anything about me. His spirituality was so deep that it was almost tangible. They just live it by being selfless.
I believe that the Western world has become so far removed from our interior that we have lost sight of what is truly valuable; love, compassion and forgiveness. Western ideals of getting as much as you can for yourself are poisoning us and causing an epidemic of death from stress. People have become ‘externally reactive’ rather than ‘internally up-to-date’.
As I write this article, I hope you will think about the true meaning of life. Selflessness and true care for your fellow man is one of the main purposes of life. I hope that you can incorporate this ideology into a practical application in your daily life. There is so much negative self talk and negative talk towards or about others these days. Words are extremely powerful whether they are positive or negative. If you took two households with a pregnant wife and said positive words to one mother’s womb and negative words to the other, you would have two very different outcomes for those children.
For example, if the mother of the first child to be born has a calm and loving home with spiritual parents who constantly speak positively about the child, she will have a calm baby at birth and possibly throughout her life. If, on the other hand, the other child has alcoholic and irresponsible parents who constantly yell and talk negatively about the burdens of the child’s arrival, it will have an absolutely negative consequence on the baby.
Most of us have experienced someone yelling on the road, and even that seemingly impersonal confrontation can have many stressful repercussions. These events often lead to a lapse in concentration long after the incident and, believe it or not, have the ability to cause accidents. The person who starts the chain of events can affect many others. In turn, the person who started the chain probably entered that stress mode through another chain of events and had a negative impact on them. My point is that we all affect each other every day and our decisions are powerful.
stress and society
It has been scientifically proven that all matter is a collection of very dense or dispersed frequencies or vibrations. We are vibrational beings and our vibrations, whether positive or negative, have a constant reaction to each other, often on a subconscious level. This means that we actually affect the health of others. This may seem like a stretch to some, but I firmly believe it to be true. In fact, I’ll say I know it’s true.
As I mentioned before, stress is linked to all diseases: the father of stress research, Dr. Hans Selye, proved that all diseases are caused by stress. He dedicated his life to the study of stress and the negative impact it has on our lives and health. See what Dr. Seyle has to say:
“The body goes through three universal stages of coping. First there is an ‘alarm reaction’, in which the body prepares to ‘fight or flight’. However, no organism can withstand this condition of arousal and a second stage of adaptation (as long as the organism survives the first stage).In the second stage, a resistance to stress is built.Finally, if the duration of the stress is long enough, the body finally enters a stage of exhaustion, a kind of aging due to wear.” Dr Hans Selye
Stress affects the brain first, then the nervous system, and finally all other functional parts of the body. The big problem with the Western allopathic medical world is that even though they know this to be true, they are still in the business of treating the symptoms instead of getting to the cause of the problem (probably because there is more money in return). , but that’s another article for another time.)
In short, this means that if your treatment doesn’t go beyond where the pain or discomfort is, you’re not treating the cause. If you don’t treat the cause, the condition is sure to get worse. You only need to turn on the TV and watch commercials to see how Big Pharma is pushing pharmaceuticals further than ever. When the side effects are skimmed over at the end, it sounds like something out of a Saturday Night Live skit, but there’s nothing funny about it. The fact that the FDA approves a drug to treat a non-life-threatening problem with a drug that has life-threatening side effects is proof that the industry is driven by greed rather than love of humanity. We as humans have lost our way. We have moved further and further from our source and closer to death.
We have become a narcissistic society, less concerned with long-term health and more concerned with immediate and selfish gains. Dealing with stress properly is our only hope for a long life, happiness, and true success in its purest form. I think this could save humanity from its current decline. As I mentioned, we all affect each other every day and our decisions are powerful. Our lives can spiral up through sometimes difficult but positive decisions, or down by taking the easy way out. A powerful way to stay on the upward spiral path is to incorporate powerful stress relief solutions into your life. One of those solutions (the most powerful IMHO) is a wellness system I practice called Alphabiotics. Keeping your body and whole being in balance and ensuring that internal physical stressors are removed will allow you to have an increasingly positive outlook, allowing you to make better decisions and choices each day. If you haven’t already, I urge you to make the decision today to begin walking the upward spiral path, and you will never regret doing so.
Learn more at http://www.alphabioticbalance.com
Bruce Fulford, Board Certified Alphabiotic
