Taming the Stress Monster

by Dr. Hyla Cass and Kathleen Barnes
authors of
8 weeks To Vibrant Health: A Take Charge Plan for Women

It’s almost impossible to exist in today’s world without stress. We all feel it. The pressure of job, home, kids, health, finances go on and on. And now we’re “lucky” enough to have cell phones and Blackberries and iPhones, so your office, your kids, your spouse, your best friend in crisis, your child’s teacher . . . you name it: Stress can now find you any time any place.

Every day, our personal time shrinks. We consider it an indulge if we can squeeze in the time to simply sit and enjoy a cup of tea, read a book for the sheer pleasure of it or take a long leisurely walk in the woods.

Never before in history have humans had so much to do and so many ways to do things. Even sitting around the television set with your family can be stress producing with so many channels form which to choose (and deciding who gets to choose them) and then watching shows with so much fast-paced and violent action. We rarely get a chance to catch our breath.

Stress is taking a huge toll on our health.

Stress and health challenges

The American Psychological Association estimates that 75% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related problems and 75% of us have reported we feel “great stress” at least one day a week.

A 2007 study by he American Psychological shows that more than one-third of Americans suffer extreme stress on a daily basis.

Unresolved stress that plaques almost al of us can lead to a downward spiral of depression and anxiety and cause a wide range of physical problems from headaches and heart disease to weight gain, gastrointestinal problems and more.

Stress itself is not the issue. Stress is in our lives whether we like it or not. The real question is this: How do you deal with stress?

Causes of stress

You might find some rather surprising causes of stress in your life if you complete the stress questionnaire on the 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health website.

Until you find a way to resolve and release your stress, you’re creating a vicious cycle than can cause serious damage to your health in the long run. This type of stress is sometimes called chronic or toxic stress. This kind of stress overrides your body’s natural abilities to bounce back from stressful situation. Stress keeps piling on stress, laves stress hormones at high levels and suppresses your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to colds, flu and all kinds of illnesses.

Toxic stress

We don’t want to scare you, but this fact has been scientifically validated: People who are diagnosed with various types of cancer have frequently undergone a major life stress, such as the breakup of a marriage, a bankruptcy or the illness or death of a close family member.

The first step in addressing toxic stress is to recognizing the stressors in your life, take action to break the stress cycle and we’ll offer you some long-term methods to keep stress from spiraling out of control.

Here are signs of stress that we may have forgotten how to recognize:
• muscle tension
• irregular breathing
• pounding heart
• butterflies in stomach
• agitation
• irritability
• sudden flush

Breath connects body and mind

The simplest and fastest way to address stress is through your breath. Taking deep slow breaths through your nose will break the stress cycle within a few seconds and allow you to recover your mind-body equilibrium.

Dr. Andrew Weil, the famed integrative doctor, offers a simple breathing technique that he promises will heal almost anything that ails you because it breaks the stress cycle which causes so many health problems.

Repeat this four times:
• Inhale slowly through your nose to the count of four.
• Hold your breath to the count of 7.
• Exhale slowly through your pursed lips (like blowing through a straw) to the count of eight.

That’s it. Simple! All you need to do is repeat this at least twice a day, more if you recognize the signs of stress. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Natural supplements to relieve stress

There are also a number of natural supplements that can help your through stressful times, including valerian, L-theanine, GABA, kava kava, magnesium, L-glutamine and B-vitamins. For specifics on how to use them and dosages, please see our book, 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health: A Take Charge Plan for Women.

Please join us for the 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health teleseminar on Taming the Stress Monster starting Thursday, April 16. Register here.

Even though the series targets womens’ health problems, stress is everyone’s problem,. Men are always welcome to join us.

If you’ve missed to earlier segments, you can easily catch up.
When the series is complete, we’ll be making available a coaching package containing recordings of all the sessions.

–Kathleen Barnes

Antidepressants Linked to Sudden Cardiac Death

Can you die from using antidepressants? Absolutely, according to a large study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

For the first time, scientists have found an alarming link between the use of antidepressant medications and sudden cardiac death in women not previously diagnosed with heart disease.

Scientists long-ago documented a link between depression and heart disease, but this study based on a long-term study of 63,000 women shows that women with clinically diagnosed depression who took antidepressants were more than twice as likely to experience sudden cardiac death as those who did not take the drugs.

More depression=greater risk

The results, based on data collected in the long-running Nurses Health Study, show that the more severe a woman’s depression, the greater her risk of sudden heart failure and death in a group of women never diagnosed with heart disease. However, researchers tied the risk of death not to the depression alone, but to the prescription medications used to treat it.

The results do not necessarily apply to men, since only women are involved in the Nurses Health Study.

The antidepressant drugs were not associated with a higher risk of heart attacks or overall fatal heart disease.

Researchers said the study’s findings were “surprising” and “merit scrutiny.”

Pervasive use despite lack of efficacy

The use of antidepressant medications is pervasive in American society. One in ten American is using antidepressants, according to recent government figures and that number has nearly tripled in the last decade. Drugs like Xanax, Prozac and Zoloft are in such wide use that 17-year old I know says she is the only teen among her friends who is not using antidepressants.

Doctors are prescribing antidepressants like candy and we’re happily gobbling them up, despite their obvious risks. There are also the not-so-obvious ones, like the fact that lack of attentiveness associated with these drugs has been blamed for anywhere from 300,000 to 2 million car accidents a year.

Not worth the risk

I can’t imagine any drug being worth the risk of a sudden heart failure, but the widespread use of these dangerous drugs is even more perplexing when we consider that they only work in in about one-third of the people who take them.

Yet medical literature is highly biased toward supporting the use of antidepressants and there have been suggestions that negative studies have been biased or even suppressed. I can only surmise that is because these drugs rake in big bucks for the drug companies.

I can’t for the life of me underdstand why anyone would want to take these drugs, especially in light of the likelihood that:
1. They don’t work
2. They might kill you

These are dangerous drugs. They should not be on the market. I am perplexed that the mainstream media has not widely reported this important story.

Depression is a disease, most often caused by brain chemistry imbalances. It requires treatment.

Fortunately, if you are clinically depressed, you have choices.

Natural choices

There are numerous natural ways of approaching the problem without the high risks.

Among the best supplements are GABA, rhodiola, St. John’s wort, 5-HTP, SAM-e, phenylalanine and tyrosine.

WARNING: If you are taking prescription antidepressants, DO NOT stop taking them suddenly. This can also cause severe health problems.

You can learn more natural ways to treat brain chemistry imbalances in the April 30 session of the ongoing 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health no-cost teleseminar series with Dr. Hyla Cass and myself, based on our book, 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health: A Take Charge Plan for Women. You can register for the teleseminars here and you can buy the book here.

Spring House Cleaning: Safe, Natural, Effective and Cheap!

In the last couple of days, I’ve had several conversations with people who want to keep toxic chemicals out of their homes, protect the environment and to save money at the same time.

It sounds like a big order, but there are actually easy answers:

You can clean almost anything in your home with seven ingredients. You probably already have most of them in your kitchen:
• Vinegar
• Baking soda
• Borax
• Lemon juice
• Olive oil
• Vegetable-based liquid soap
• Washing soda

Many people seem to think that cleaning naturally is expensive and inconvenient ad only minimally effective.

Cheap. Easy. Effective.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s cheap. It’s easy and it’s effective. AND you’re not exposing yourself to a toxic soup that that includes allergens, carcinogens, neurotoxins, hepatotoxins, central nervous system depressants that can cause everything from liver failure to life-threatening allergic reactions to cancer to death.

We are all exposed to toxins every day. We can’t avoid them. Research tells us that even newborn babies already have nearly 300 toxic substances in their bodies, passed on from their mothers. Over our lifetimes, that toxic load builds and builds until, one day, we may tip the balance and experience one of the terrible side effects of toxic overload.
So if we can reduce our toxic load as much as possible, we can avoid that toxic load, we can postpone or even overcome toxic overload.

Ok. I’m back from my toxin rant.

Homemade natural cleaning products work. They are safe, easy and cheap. What’s not to love?

What could be simpler than combining ½ teaspoon of vegetable based oil, 3 tablespoons of vinegar and 2 cups of water in a spray bottle to make your windows sparkling clean for a nickel a bottle? Add a few drops of lemon essential oil to long-lasting shine, a great scent and to help energize the window washer!

How about scrubbing sinks, tubs and showers with a gentle paste of baking soda and borax? It works just as well as commercial cleaners with no toxic fumes and again, it costs mere pennies.
Pour a cup of borax in your toilet and leave it overnight. That’s it takes to wipe out my least favorite household task. Add a few drops of tea, tree, lavender or white thyme essential oil for disinfection.

Easy oven cleaner

If your oven is an embarrassment like mine can be, try this:

Sprinkle water in the bottom of the oven, then cover the yuck with baking soda. Sprinkle some more water on top and let it sit overnight. In all but the worst cases, you’ll be able to simply wipe it clean the next morning. If there is still stubborn baked on grease, add a little washing soda to the mixture to cut the grease. Rinse well.

The best book I’ve read on non-toxic cleaning is Annie Berthold-Bond’s Clean and Green. Annie website is http://www.anniebbond.com.

All of these recip0es are nontoxic and they don’t require any power tools. If you have a truly untenable stain or grease sploch, you might consider buying a Scunci steam cleaner. It uses nothing but water. In fact, you’ll damage it if you try to add any cleaners to it, and the superheated water will clean just about anything for a few pennies worth of electricity.

Finally: If you want to help keep outside toxins from entering your home, have all family members leave their shoes at the door. I actually have “indoor ” and “outdoor” shoes and I scrupulously keep them apart to avoid tracking in toxins that attach themselves to our shoes as we walk around our toxic world.