The Importance of Stress Relief
When most people talk about being stressed, they usually are speaking about feeling tense, agitated, overwhelmed physically or emotionally, or under the pressure of an unreasonable timeline. These situations certainly do create a feeling of being stressed; however, stress is often much more involved than that. Prolonged stress of any nature can result in more serious problems.
Your central nervous system consists of two main parts (consult the illustration below): the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for preparing your body to respond to stressful situations that threaten your survival. It actually diminishes or shuts down some functions so your body can concentrate its energy towards fighting a disease or running away from an aggressor. The parasympathetic nervous system relaxes your body so it can function properly the rest of the time, while you are not being threatened internally or externally. You can see that if the sympathetic nervous system isn’t turned off when it isn’t needed, eventually you are probably going to suffer in some way; for example, it isn’t healthy to have your heart racing or your adrenal glands working overtime or your urination inhibited for too long. You need to find a way to get the sympathetic nervous system balanced and working properly.
It is common in our modern society for people to suffer from what is often called “sympathetic on” syndrome, a condition in which your body is so used to being overly stimulated by high doses of adrenaline and cortisol to get through the hectic day that it soon forgets how to relax. The parasympathetic nervous system is not able to turn off the sympathetic nervous system, as it should. In time, this imbalance usually leads to some type of health problem.
During the stress response, the sympathetic nervous system instructs the adrenal glands to produce cortisol. The precursor to cortisol is cholesterol; therefore, high cholesterol could result from long-term stress. Cortisol causes the liver to convert glycogen into glucose for energy. If this energy is not used, the excess glucose must be removed from the blood, which requires the pancreas to produce insulin, and the long-term stress of over production of insulin can contribute to diabetes. The glucose then gets deposited into fat cells and can contribute to obesity. Long-term stress also decreases the immune response, compromises the digestive system, and can contribute to leaky gut syndrome. It can even decrease the sex hormones, which could contribute to decreased libido, increased infertility, and increase impotence.
While all of the conditions mentioned above are complicated and have several contributing factors, the point here is to describe how stress can contribute to their development. If that stress is reduced or removed, the body can use its own resources to heal in a natural way, often without drugs or surgery. For many years, stress caused by problems such as injury, disease, physical or emotional trauma, allergy, relationships or many other reasons has been addressed effectively by biofeedback, which re-educates / re-trains your body to relax and respond differently to stress now and in the future.
Ideally, we could learn relaxation and stress reduction exercises to look after ourselves, but many people are beyond that point or the stresses are lodged in their organs or blood and they need professional help to initiate effective stress release.
We at Quality Learning Connexion Inc. are certified specialists in stress reduction techniques as well as licensed spiritual health coaches. We primarily use biofeedback and counselling to facilitate a more relaxed and balanced state in the body, mind, and spirit. We also can use scalar wave laser therapy to help reduce pain.
Please feel free to do your own research on this subject.
