Category Archives: Stress

Reversing Stress, Being Resourceful

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Reversing Stress, Being Resourceful
By Anna McRobert

Even when our outer world resources seem far from abundant and we are stressing out, we still have inner resources that are amazingly effective.

We live in a body that is self-healing. How totally remarkable! But at times our body becomes overwhelmed, when life events take up more energy to deal with than the energy we can generate under the circumstances. That’s when the body struggles and symptoms become obvious, health deteriorates, causing even more stress, and we go downhill.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You have an inner resource that is constantly available.

Your mind, and how you use it becomes super crucial now, and you can harness the power of your mind to turn things around, if you know how to do that. If life events are generating distressing thoughts that are dragging you down, then give your mind some productive, positive work to do. What you think about, matters. How you think about events, matters. You can help your body and mind to heal, or you can add to their burdens. Because where your attention is focused, where your thoughts take you, that is where your energy is engaged and utilized, for good or for bad.

Stressful thinking, going round in circles, worrying, feeling stuck, all chew up your energy, lower your immune system capacity, and put you into an ever decreasing spiral of poor health, and progressively to tissue breakdown, and to energy exhaustion.

Life is not always easy, so energy lowering stressful thinking is familiar to us all.
What can you do instead of getting caught in the downward spiral?

First is breathe. Under ongoing stress we breathe shallowly. We deprive the brain and every cell in the body of essential oxygen for generating energy. Shallow breathing keeps the brain in stress mode. So breathe in and out, out, out, empty your lungs. Now you can take a full breathe in naturally. Repeat till you are emptying and filling your lungs easily.

Next, bring blood into front brain, the only area with cells designed for new thinking. This is your problem solver, the planner, the organizer, the creator of solutions. Stress increases blood in brain areas for survival, locking you into repeating how you survived in the past, no matter how unproductive that might be for you right now.

How do you put your problem solver to work? Put you hand on your forehead, breathe in and breathe out, and acknowledge to yourself your problem, your worry, your distress. Thinking those things with more blood in back brain keeps you going round in circles. But thinking those things while holding your forehead, draws blood into the front brain cells that are solution creators. This cancels the stress signal. It turns off the alarm.

The forehead will become warm very quickly, indicating there is more blood there now. Review your current problems again and breathe in, and out. Keep doing the review and breathing and soon you’ll find that the stress feeling begins to subside, that you begin to accept the problems not just fret about them. You will start to focus on producing new thoughts and new ideas. In Kinesiology this technique is called Emotional Stress Release.

With blood now in front brain, and more oxygen available for in-the-now energy production, your brain is ready to do something to help you with those problems or issues. You are reversing the stress and on the way to creating a solution.

Help your mind to help you. Instead of locking energy into unproductive worrying and depriving the body of healing capacity, direct your powerful mind to do productive work. You can specifically direct your energy to where your body needs it for healing, for regulating, for normalizing internal functions. What you think about and how you think about your health and life really matters, it matters heaps.

Slow down the adrenals. They have been in alarm, in fight-flight-frozen mode, while you were stressed. Under stress their job is to raise your blood pressure and body temperature so you heat up when stressed, also raise blood sugar for muscles to take action, block digestion and immune system, and block thinking so you can react with survival tactics, definitely not with creating a new future. This is not a healthy, productive state for daily living.

Talk kindly to your adrenals. “Thank you for keeping me going. You can take a break now.” Engage your mind to turn your adrenal thermostat down to normal, just as you would turn down the heat to your hotplate on the stove and see the fire-y red coils reducing to a lower heat level. What colour to you relate to as healing, normalizing? Is it white, blue, green? Different colours may work at different times. Direct your healing colour as a ray of light to your adrenals. Breathe in and breathe out. Allow your adrenals to respond and find their balance again as they absorb your healing rays.

Thyroid, when underactive can make you feel depressed and anxious, and when overactive can cause anxiety and insomnia. Send healing, normalizing light and colour to your thyroid. Breathe in and out.

Digestion, reset it to normal now that you are focused on reducing your stress and allowing your body and nervous system to recover, rebuild, regenerate. Send the healing rays to your digestive system too. Breathe in and out.

Liver has to detox the backlog of stress hormones and other toxic wastes. Give your liver a hand with your mind’s focus on sending healing energy to your busy liver as it does its work willingly. Breathe in and out.

Weight, imagine your stored energy in fat cells, being converted, melting, being mobilized to provide extra energy for your body and brain to recover, rebuild, regenerate. Focus the healing, normalizing rays to your fat cells so they readily help the body to restore balance. Breathe in and out.

Water is essential for hydrating every cell so it can do its job efficiently and effectively. Write the word “Love” or “healing” or “gratitude” on a folded paper, making a coaster. Put your water container or glass on that coaster. The water molecules become your healers too when you infuse them with the positive energy of positive words. Direct your healing, normalizing, balancing energy rays to the water in your body too, especially to flush your kidneys.

By harnessing your mind to do your bidding in supporting healing and balancing in your body you can achieve miracles. You can recover, rebuild, regenerate. Take charge or your thoughts. Acknowledge what issues need to be addressed, and put yourself into healing and creative thinking mode to achieve the positive results that will make for a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

If you want more tools for creating health contact me: anna@annamcrobert.com.au
If you want to know and learn more about how to work productively with our body
Register for Touch For Health Workshop on 25 & 26 March by sending an email to: anna@annamcrobert.com.au

How Stress Can Get To You

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We keep hearing that stress is damaging to our health. Actually stress has its place as a motivator, a stimulator to action. But too much of this useful stress becomes distress – now that’s how stress can get to you. So how do you know when you have crossed from stress into distress, from useful stress into destructive stress?

Under extreme or sudden stress various glands are triggered into action and release hormones to deal with the threat, the sudden demand or the overload in our personal world. It’s the body’s automatic reaction that bypasses rational thinking. This is your fight or flight, self-preservation, knee jerk reaction that floods your body with adrenaline (called epinephrine in USA) and cortisol secreted by your adrenal glands along with other hormones.

Adrenaline is produced during high stress or exciting situations. This powerful hormone is part of the body’s acute stress response system, known as fight or flight.

Under stress Adrenaline:
– stimulates the heart rate
– contracts blood vessels
– dilates air passages
– increases flood flow to muscles

Cortisol is one of the hormones that rises rapidly under high stress and is produced by your adrenals, situated on the top of your kidneys. Cortisol is not a bad guy in the system. It is part of regulating normal everyday activities, like getting you out of bed in the morning. Cortisol tends to peak in the morning and decrease as the day progresses. This hormone is essential for life and is high only under high stress, and is low when you are going about your normal daily business in a relaxed state. It rises and falls according to need.

Cortisol regulates:
– how we use fuel, our glucose metabolism
– regulates blood pressure
– regulates insulin release for blood sugar maintenance
– regulates rapid fat and carbohydrate metabolism in emergency
– impacts on immune system balance
– involved in inflammatory response.

Cortisol increases levels of blood sugar to help the body to adapt to changing situations or circumstances that provoke stress, to stand and fight or take off and escape. Cortisol is responsible for about 95% of stress adaption in your body.

When you are relaxed cortisol is low but rapidly increases when you are under stress so its key job is to keep blood sugar levels appropriate during stress and relaxation. The problem can be that when the stress has passed the cortisol levels may stay high for some time. If stress occurs on a regular basis, like daily deadlines and strict time frames, then the cortisol does not have a chance to drop down in the brief moments of relaxation. This can lead to adrenal exhaustion and chronic fatigue, with blood sugar irregularities, immune system deficiencies, anxiety, panic attacks, depression and various degenerative diseases.

Continuous high levels of cortisol can interfere with serotonin and dopamine production, two neurotransmitters that affect mood and sense of well-being.

General Adaption Syndrome – GAS

It’s important to recognize how stress can get to you. Under stress your body has to adjust or adapt and functions differently from your healthy norm. It does the best it can to regain balance within the changed circumstances. This is known as General Adaption Syndrome and has three recognizable phases.

Phase One – Alarm: immediately activates the nervous system and adrenal glands to increase energy for defence or offence.
Phase Two – Resistance: activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the three primary glands that manage our response to stress, often referred to as H-P-A axis. These glands together regulate energy use, immune system activity and digestion. Under stress they instantly increase energy for fight or flight, and reduce energy to immune system and digestion while you are engaged in survival activity in the moment.
Phase Three – Exhaustion or Overload: prolonged stress, or often repeated stress, without opportunity for recovery, leads to breakdown of the weakest body function and dis-ease. The most common diseases in the developed nations of the West are hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, stomach ulcers, neck and back pain, to name a few.

Signs of Stress

Know how stress can get to you. The cause of stress can be physical, mental, emotional, or environmental and the adaption to the stress will involve all these aspects. The body will do the best it can to stay productive and effective under the stress load. But the signs will become evident, not always to your self, but often to others with whom you interact.

Physically the tension in our muscles can increase and we become rigid, with neck, jaw and back pain as a result. Tension headaches are common, as are twitches and tremors and poor sleep. Dry mouth and throat can indicate very low levels of digestive juices for effectively gaining nutrition from your food, and obesity can result from comfort eating and storing instead of burning foods consumed. Bowels become over active or under active, or both in turn. Cold sweaty hands and itchy skin are further indicators, as are increased heart rate, pounding heart, high blood pressure, and shallow breathing.

Mental stress shows as forgetfulness, preoccupation, lack of concentration, diminished productivity, past focused or future obsessed, disorganized, negative view of everything, undermining self talk, loss of meaning of work and life in general.

Emotional signs of stress can be irritability, depression, angry outbursts, anxiety, impatience, narrowed focus, low self-esteem, loss of confidence, inability to make decisions, lack of interest, tendency to cry easily, compulsive thoughts, and feeling a victim. We become angry or fearful.

Behavioural changes include increased alcohol consumption, under or over eating, smoking, withdrawal, carelessness and being accident prone.

To Reduce Stress

Make sure you recognize how stress can get to you so you can stop it and reverse it. Stress diverts energy away from your immune system leaving you vulnerable to health breakdown. Medically prescribed adapaogens have been in common use for stress over the last 50 years but the results are less than favourable with many side effects and long-term problems.

Traditionally herbs from the East and the West have been reliably used in many parts of the world to reduce stress, along with acupuncture, tai chi and various martial arts, meditation and other practices. Psychologists have applied various systems and processes with varying success.

Since the 60s and 70s Kinesiology has provided effective options that allow the body and its nervous system to identify the best way to reduce stress, lift energy, and bring meaning and value back into the events of our days as we each walk our life path.

Also see: 3D “Switch On” for Your Brain http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=289
and Stress Release Process http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118

STRESS, SAM and HPA, What’s That About?

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Stress is blamed for everything now, from forgetfulness to mistakes minor and major, to depression, overweight, poor sleep, emotional meltdown, health breakdown, poor work performance, to relationship breakup. Pioneering doctors of the 1920s to 1940s researched and collated the various symptoms that we now associate with stress, SAM and HPA.

In the late 1930s Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist coined the term “stress” and defined it as “The non specific response of the body to any demand (stressor), whether it is caused by or results in pleasant or unpleasant conditions.” He first wrote about General Adaptation Syndrome, GAS, now generally know as the stress syndrome, in the British journal Nature in 1936.

Walter Cannon in 1932 established that shock or perceived threat quickly release hormones in the body for access to extra energy for survival action. We are designed to either face and attack the enemy or to out run it. Nothing else counts at that moment as all possible energy is diverted to in the moment survival, putting many functions on hold till the stress has gone.

Stress is a natural part of life and cannot be avoided. Stress is experienced when we extend beyond our comfort zone into new territory, be that socially, in our work situation, in questioning our life direction and changing direction.

Stress, physical, mental or emotional, sets off the same reaction in the brain. This reaction is in two parts, the instantaneous flight or flight reaction initiated by amygdala, the SAM axis, and the slower HPA axis triggered by long-term stress. They have opposite symptoms. Stress, SAM and HPA are part of your survival and adaption systems.

SAM – Sympathetic Adrenal Medullary Axis
HPA – Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis

SAM is the super fast fight or flight reaction your amygdala sets into action, totally bypassing any conscious thought process. It’s what happens when driving normally and suddenly a child on the footpath decides to run across the road – without looking – and you slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid hitting the child. That life saving reaction happens in less than the blink of an eye. And you are left with a pounding heart and gulping for breath.

SAM basically reroutes your blood flow to increase your heart rate, feed your brain and the muscles required for action, and limits the activities of parts of your body that are not required in the moment. This reaction settles down once the danger has passed.

HPA on the other hand, is slower in activation and continues to be activated long after the stressor has been removed. Its what happens when you go into “what if I had hit that child,” playing it over and over to the point of being too scared to drive at all.

It is regulated by hypothalamus that sends a hormone to your pituitary gland, both located in the brain, which then sends a hormone to adrenal glands in the body to increase output of cortisol. This is a self regulated system and relies on increasing levels of cortisol produced in the body to feedback to the glands in the brain to suppress the initial hormone cascade. But what if you can’t shut off the thoughts that you nearly killed a child, can’t sleep, can’t eat?

With prolonged stress cortisol initiates breakdown of muscle protein for the liver to convert to essential blood glucose, your brain’s fuel, and for other essential functions to deal with or adjust to the ongoing stress. Cortisol reduces reproductive and immune systems activity until the ongoing stress is resolved, which can be days, weeks, and even years. Stress, SAM and HPA are part of your inbuilt survival and adaption systems.

Who Is At Risk
Any stress you feel is impossible to resolve will keep you in this HPA cycle. This is common with family health carers, those who care for parents with dementia for instance, or for a disabled child. Its common after a failed business venture or marriage breakdown, or dealing with drug addicted teenagers, or post traumatic syndrome of war veterans.

Ask any world class athlete and they will tell you the risk keeping HPA cycle going through over training is very real when the focus is on winning or maintain their world ranking. Over training is a physical as well as mental and emotional stress plus a massive demand on constantly rebuilding the body to keep up with the rigorous training programs.

Even the medical professionals are acknowledging that almost all physical illnesses have mental factors that determine their onset, presentation, maintenance, and susceptibility during illness. Stress, SAM and HPA in active mode means the body is focused on survival with limited resources for recovery from illness.

What’s the Solution

Every body needs recovery time to repair the wear and tear of the day’s activity and life’s stressful experiences. Somehow we need to come to peace with the cards we are dealt in life, change our undermining beliefs and expectations, increase our resilience, adapt and lift our ability to function at our best in varying circumstances, with the least stress possible.

Kinesiology recognizes any imbalance will impact the physical, mental, emotional, biochemical, and spiritual elements of a person and they all need to be addressed and rebalanced for holistic wellness. The body will indicate the path to solutions through muscle response monitoring.

www.annamcrobert.com.au

Exhausted Adrenals

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Do you suspect you are dealing with exhausted adrenals? Here is a test you might like to do for yourself to get some idea of the state of your adrenals so you can choose the professional health advice and support you need to pursue.

Pupil Contraction Test for Exhausted or Under Active Adrenals

Hold a small pencil style flashlight near the outer corner of your eye so the light shines across the eye not straight on into the eye. Watch what happens in a mirror.

A normal reaction is for the pupil, the black part in the middle of your iris, to contract in reaction to the sudden flood of light.

With exhausted adrenals this initial normal reaction does not hold and the pupil will start to dilate again, become larger, letting in more light, the opposite of normal response. The pupil can also fluctuate, dilating and contracting, and then settle remaining dilated. This is an indicator of exhausted adrenals.

The iris responds to varying light conditions. The iris is muscular and contracts in strong light and relaxes to let in more light when in dim or poorly lit situations or outside at night. Like any muscle if your pupil muscle is over worked or exhausted it can’t hold a contraction for long and will need rest to recover.

Time It

If your pupil fluctuates and then dilates and stays that way instead of remaining contracted when you shine a light across your eye, time it. It may take 30 to 45 seconds before it can contract again. This will give you a marker to check against down the track when you have been making adjustments to your stress levels, lifestyle, nutritional needs, rest, sleep and exercise.

Adrenal function extremely low is labeled Addison’s desease and extremely high is Cushing’s disease. They account for the 5% of adrenal abnormalities. The remaining 95% represent adrenal hormone levels considered “normal”. As a result most laboratory tests will indicate “normal” if you are in the 95% range, in spite of any symptoms you may be experiencing that are clearly linked to low adrenal function. And of course, your individual biochemical make is not taken into account or considered in any way.

One of the most authoritative texts in medicine, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, states, “Most hormones have such a broad range of plasma levels within a normal population. As a consequence, the level of a hormone in an individual may be halved or doubled (and thus be abnormal for that person) but still be within the so-called normal range.”

Rebuilding Adrenals and Your Health

Each person’s experiences that lead to exhausted adrenals will be unique. But there are patterns to check to help identify the best way to track the improvement as recovery strategies are applied. How you feel is your most valuable subjective measure as only you live in your body.

Changes in lifestyle, including specific foods to support health and adrenal recovery, adequate rest alternating with gentle and gradually increasing exercise is important, building expectations and harnessing beliefs that promote a future of wellness are keys. Any action that can reduce stress is valuable.

Tuning into the body language of posture and muscle response testing with kinesiology is invaluable to recognize which internal organs and glands are struggling to maintain their health. Boosting them with specific acupuncture points for lymphatic clearance, for circulation improvement, and for meridian energy distribution enhances recovery. Emotional Stress Technique will reduce stress, releasing energy trapped in past experiences and make more energy available for your exhausted adrenals on their journey of recovery.

Your thoughts impact on your brain and body and kinesiology muscle monitoring can identify which thoughts and self talk lifts energy and which drags it down.

For more insights and strategies contact me for a discussion of your situation.
Cheers
Anna

www.annamcrobert.com.au
See Stress Release Process http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118

Emotional Stress Release for Stress and Muscle Tension

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It is natural for muscles to tense up when there is stress on line. It is also natural for muscles to release and relax when you are not in stress. So tension can come and go with different ups and downs of life. Muscle tension is how your body tells you that you need to do something to change what is going on so you are not wearing yourself out or making yourself sick.

Trouble is we often don’t recognize that we are carrying stress as muscle tension. Because it can be such an every day part of life it feels “normal”. We are often hurrying to get things done, get kids off to school, be on time, arrange events, keep appointments, complete work tasks, plan projects, or whatever. We may be dreading some coming meeting. We may have stirred up old fears. Our thinking and self-talk can easily reinforce stress and make it all worse.

Some people are habitual worriers and always stressed to some degree, and it shows in their muscle tension. Our muscles can be 75% contracted and that tension can still be out of our conscious awareness, till someone touches a tight muscle and we become aware it is hard as a rock. Or we are snappy or irritable and realize we are “holding our self together” with muscle tension.

So once you are aware of muscle tension, or stress, or worry, you can consciously choose to do something about it. Sometimes it is when there are headaches, or shallow breathing, or tight chest, or some other symptoms that finally you have to take the time to deal with the cumulative effects of daily stress.

When you realize muscles are tight you can take the tension out of the tight muscles with Emotional Stress Release, a technique from Touch For Health Kinesiology, as a first step to reduce muscle tension.

For Example, you may have been rushing to get things done before closing time. Following is what you can do to ease muscle tension gently.

Emotional Stress Release technique for Stress & Muscle Tension

First is always to acknowledge what is, the truth of your current experience.

Place one hand across your forehead and say to yourself:
1. “My muscles are tense, and my breathing is shallow and tight. (breathe in & out).
2. “I can feel the tension as I focus on it and realize my breathing is tense too. (breathe in & out).
3. “I recognize the tension has been building for a while.” (breathe in & out).
4. “The tension is adding to my tiredness / irritability / muddle-head feeling / etc.” (breathe in & out).

Acknowledge till the tension in your thoughts and your body starts to reduce and your breathing becomes a bit easier. You may need to repeat steps 1 to 4 a couple of times. Be sure to pay attention to your breathing between each statement. You may notice the warmth increasing under your hand on your forehead. That’s a good sign.

Next accept what is.

5. “Its not surprising there is tension in my muscles, its been a busy time, I’ve been rushing.” (breathe in & out).
6. “I’ve got some things done and there’s more to go.” (breathe in & out).
7. “I’ll be glad when its done.” (Breathe in & out)

Notice as more of the tension leaves, your voice becomes less harried, your body eases and your breath slows down.

Next look forward to when you will be more at ease.

8. “The more efficiently I get it done the sooner I can wind down.” (breathe in & out).
9. “Then I’ll have a cup of tea / glass of wine / ring a friend / smell the roses / or whatever.

The stress goes down as you acknowledge the problem, accept it, and look forward to when its over and dealt with. You have diverted your brain blood flow away from stress survival program area to problem solving front brain.

I may not have covered your particular cause of muscle tension so I hope you can get the idea of the process that you can apply to your situation. There are more techniques in Touch For Health Kinesiology you can use to help yourself.

Let me know how you go with this.
Cheers
Anna

PS. Emotional Stress Release was covered in a recent Touch For Health 1 workshop presenting several ways to rebalance stress and tension. Contact me for more on theses workshops.

Patti wrote: “Thanks so much for the wonderful learning experience, I thoroughly enjoyed it and am so looking forward to our next course.”

Eye Language and Body Language Say More Than Words

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I was reading an article (in U on Sunday, January 29, 2012) based on an interview with Dr David Craig about his book Lie Catcher, released late 2011 in Australasia.

David is called in at times to be a human lie detector. He has honed his ability over many years and collated is knowledge and experience in his book. Though both eye language and body language say more than words, David focuses on eyes as one tool particularly useful for lie detection. “It’s as if your brain and eyes are hard-wired together and when the brain is put under pressure, the eyes reveal it,” David Craig writes in his book.

Actually, the Brain and Eyes are One
There’s no “as if” about it. The eyes are a physical extension of the brain itself. In the early stages in the womb when the embryo is progressively forming, the eyes begin as dark spots on the tiny brain in the seventh week of pregnancy. The spots progressively become little buds that grow to balls and are slowly pushed forward on the end of the optic nerve, looking like balls on sticks.

Your eyes are actually an extension of your brain and are created from the same layer of the neural tube that becomes your brain and your nervous system. It is amazing how, with today’s technology, we can track every stage of development in the womb, from conception to birth, learning from nature the miracle occurring at every step.

Every nerve impulse that goes to your brain also registers in the fibres of your iris. This is why iridology can be used to analyze the state of functional health. Your eyes are on the same communication loop between body and brain. The fibres in the iris respond to the every nerve signals that your organs sent to your brain.

Overactive organs send lots of signals to the brain causing the fibres in the iris to be pulsed forward, towards the surface of the iris, which makes that area look white. When an organ is underactive it sends fewer or feeble signals to the brain and the corresponding fibres in the iris don’t get stimulated to move forward, can even drop back deeper than surrounding fibres, so the area looks darker. Your health can be read by looking at your iris and the arrangement and patterns of fibres. And your stress level too can be read in your iris.

Another way to pick up what pleases or displeases, delights or distresses is to watch for changes in the pupil. Your pupil is not static. It will contract when you look at something you don’t like and open wider to let in more light when you see something you do like. Just watch a woman looking at the latest fashions or at jewelry. The items that appeal to her will “light up her eyes” and often her whole face. Your emotions are reflected in your eyes.

Learn more about this in Dynamic Communications Program.

Eyes Reveal Brain At Work
Dr David Craig says that a lie can be revealed by changes in eye contact, in blink rate and eye movement. “Liars may look away briefly as they tell a fib to break eye contact, but may also try to disguise their guilt by looking back quickly, for example. A rule of thumb is that if a right-handed person is recalling something that has already happened, they will look to your right, their left. If they are creating something in their mind, something not seen or heard before, they will look to your left, their right.”

So when you are watching the eyes you are watching the brain working.

Important Insights in Communications
What David Craig is referring to is the way the brain is set up. Most people store their memories in pictures for later retrieval. Complete or whole memories are stored in the right brain as pictures. Eyes that flick up left are referencing a picture in right brain. Just watch the kids in a spelling quiz in TV programs and you will see lots of eye flicks going up left as they confidently spell out a known and visually recalled word.

The left brain is active when we are building up a picture piece by piece so don’t know what the whole looks like as yet. Eyes right activates left brain and step by step thinking, and eyes left activates right brain to flash up a whole picture of an existing representation of an event or reference.

Learn more about this in Three In One Concepts program Basic One Brain.

Experiment
Check out eye/brain connection with this experiment: Ask someone to tell you about an enjoyable occasion, a special dinner, a sports event or a holiday. Watch their eyes and note which direction they look often while telling you about the event. A right-handed person will look up left to access their right brain.

Now ask them to tell you 3 things they did last week and to make one of them a lie. Note eye movements and look for the event where the eye movements are different from those when telling you about the past recalled events.
Some people look straight ahead and defocus when they access pictures from the past. That makes it a bit harder to pick the lie from the truth.

But you might notice a different blink rate or their voice tone may change or the rate at which they speak may speed up or slow down. An answer given more slowly is being considered more carefully. More on this is covered in Dynamic Communications Program too.
Lie detection is far from a precise science says David Craig. “Even with MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) and sophisticated machinery, you cannot tell. The polygraph has been disproved many times. Its accuracy depends heavily on how questions are framed.” It seems people are still better than machines at picking a lie.

Learn More About Dynamic Communication
Lie detection is not on my agenda to teach, but Dynamic Communications is on my teaching agenda and is coming up next month. Language of the eye movements, the way body “speaks” through gesture and other movement is the language we all learned first, before we learned to understand and use words. It’s in your subconscious to a greater or lesser degree. You can learn how to bring it up into conscious awareness and gain an enormous advantage in all communications is what you learn in Dynamic Communications program.

How to read “between the lines” or hear more than the words is invaluable in all human communications and is another part of the course.
In day-to-day communications we often get clues that “something doesn’t add up.” We may be getting mixed messages, several agendas at play, with the eyes and body saying one thing the words another. You will learn how to decipher that.

There’s more. Have you ever felt uneasy when listening to someone, not sure you can trust what they say yet you can’t put your finger on why something doesn’t sit right for you? Can you recall a time when you were aware of tension between people even though nothing was being acknowledged as a problem or issue? Did you ever see a person smiling but you knew it wasn’t real? How did you pick that? And how did others miss it?

Stress Communicates Itself
Communication is both verbal and non-verbal. Words are only about 7% of any communication. Your body language and voice tone and tempo are the other 93% and often speak much more loudly than the words. When words are not congruent with what you see and hear beyond the words, that incongruence will need some exploring to get the whole truth behind the words.

Secrets You Can Learn
Through Dynamic Communications Program you can learn many secrets that help you decipher the different layers in a communication. One challenge in communication with others is associated with making sure that what you thought you said is the same as what they think they heard.

Communication occurs on multiple layers simultaneously, on conscious and subconscious levels. The Dynamic Communications Program reveals the layers, shows you what to look for, how to read and interpret what you see and hear, and become aware of what you may have missed in the past. Take advantage of attending this course to have a big advantage “up your sleeve” when communicating daily and especially in sticky situations. (see notice attached to February News)

Eye language and body language say more than words. Learn what they are saying.
Cheers
Anna

Shift Your Focus

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An article I was reading in Prevention Magazine recently highlighted that all too often we easily focus on the bits of our appearance we don’t like – till that is all we see. Then we lose confidence and want to hide. Well, let me tell you how you can shift your focus and gain a new resourceful perspective?

View Of Self
The article suggested “step back” from looking in the mirror close up. Do it. When you step back you get a different perspective, you see the whole.

A close up view, of course, only lets you see bits, various parts, of your face for instance. So you see lines, sags, and skin tone. When you step back you see face proportions, sparkling eyes, nicely shaped brows, great cheeks, strong jaw, shapely lips etc.

Close up you use left brain’s speciality for detail. Step back and right brain’s bigger picture specialty comes into play more. Now you get some perspective on your self-criticism.

This is much kinder to your psyche and is much closer to the reality that others see. You are not bits or parts. You are a whole being and no one part is the only part that matters. A confident, animated, and interested face and expression is always a winner, especially when you focus on discovering something special about the person you are looking at – and in the mirror that person is you.

APPLY THIS USEFUL & EFFECTIVE STRATEGY

See the Stressor
This strategy works well when you have a “picture” of a stressful situation, issue or person.

Evaluate the Effect
Note where you represent the problem to yourself when thinking about it. Does your mind’s eye see the picture close up? to your left? to your right?

Note how you feel when looking at the upsetting picture or scene. Where is the discomfort or stress registered in your body? Do you breathe shallowly? Is your chest or throat tight? Does your tummy churn? Do you get pain in the body or tension in your neck? Check your jaw for tension, and also your arms, hands, throat, chest, tummy, legs, toes.

Now mentally push your mind’s stress provoking image further away from you, out into the distance, an arms length, bit further. How do you feel now?

Bring the image close in again. Check the impact on body sensations and tension level. Note the differences.
Again push the image further away, check impact. Is it less stressful out there? If your breathing is more relaxed and body tension less, that’s good feedback from your body.

Push the picture further back still, till the image is very small and there is no tension or very little in your body. Leave the image there for now.

Connect With Your Resources
Now is the time to consider how you really want to feel in the situation or with that person.

Do you want to feel calm, clear headed, resourceful, focused, confident, present, relaxed, prepared, whatever?

Recall a time when you were experiencing all of that.
If you can’t recall a time create a picture of you with those attributes. Use someone you know with those attributes as a role model, put yourself in their shoes to feel what it is like to have those attributes.

Colour the picture with a positive colour, for you, bright yellow, soft pink, beautiful purple or vibrant red, whatever makes you feel the attributes more vividly and connects with the resources within.

Bring this resourceful picture close in until you, the colour, and the resourceful picture are one. Breathe in the colour and scene. Feel the impact on yourself. Enjoy the feel. It’s inside you and right through you now. The colour glows all round you.

Now look out and bring in the previously stressful scene and check the impact. Bring it in closer slowly and monitor its impact. At any time you can stop the picture where it is and draw breath, and breathe out the resourceful colour all round you again. Continue to bring in the picture till you feel your resourceful self, calm, relaxed, confident, totally present, prepared for whatever.

Holding your resourceful state is the secret. It has more energy than the issue or problem and allows you to apply your creative problem solving ability to handle the issue productively.

When your resources are bigger and stronger than the problem there is no problem. It’s just something to sort out and move on.

Keep It Happening
Remind yourself of the resourceful colour whenever you need as you breathe in and shift your focus.

Cheers
Anna

How To Reduce Stress, Improve Self-Esteem and Lift Your Mood, Easily

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How can you easily reduce stress, improve your self esteem and lift your mood? Well the answer is: with green exercise. Uh huh! What’s that?

Before I tell you what green exercise is I can tell you it has benefits. Evidence shows it leads to positive short and long-term health outcomes, reduces stress, bolsters your self-esteem and elevates your mood. So if it’s easy to get health benefits with green exercise, I want to know more.

Research from ten UK studies involving 1252 participants shows it pays to do things, some form of exercise, outside in the garden or in the park, any place that has green living plants. And, this multi-study analysis assessed the best dose of acute exposure to “green exercise” required to improve self-esteem and mood.

Dr Jo Barton and Professor Jules Pretty said, “Dose responses for both intensity and duration showed large benefits from short engagements in green exercise, and then diminishing but still positive returns.
– Every green environment improved both self-esteem and mood; the presence of water generated greater effects.
– Both men and women had similar improvements in self-esteem after green exercise, though men showed a difference for mood.
– Age groups: for self-esteem, the greatest change was in the youngest, with diminishing effects with age;
– for mood, the least change was in the young and old.
– The mentally ill had one of the greatest self-esteem improvements.
This study confirms that the environment provides an important health service.”

So we can thank the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Essex, Colchester in the UK for that research project.

Being a keen gardener I would have thought the benefits of being outside in fresh air, among the plants that deliver oxygen to us, would be obvious to all. But it seems not every likes to have their nose in the bushes.

The psychologists at Essex University have shown that just a small dose of nature, just five minutes, every day creates health benefits in measurable quantity.

There are days every one of us needs a pick me up. Lunch in the park and five minutes of walking can make all the difference for having a productive afternoon at home or at work. The greatest improvements in self-esteem were found in young children and people with mental illness and every age group did benefit across the board.

So a walk in the park is just what the doctor could prescribe in the future to reduce stress, improve self-esteem and lift your mood when you are feeling low. And pushing a pram, kicking a ball, skipping, riding a bike, fishing, boating, horse riding, gardening, doing farm work or any out door activity give endless scope to suit everyone. This is one form of self-medication that may be condoned and even encouraged in the future.

Sounds like common sense to me. What do you reckon?
Cheers
Anna

3D “Switch On” for Your Brain

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There are times your brain’s electrical circuits become overloaded or scrambled.

Circuits Under Stress
Any kind of stress, physical, mental, emotional, biochemical, situational or environmental, can scramble electrical signals between body and brain, between left and right brain halves, between front and back brain, lower brain and upper brain. The degree of stress or danger perceived can influence the degree of reaction. You can have side to side switching, or top to bottom switching or front to back switching, or all three. Now where is this 3D “switch on” for your brain?

Switching
Under stress your brain is programmed to go into survival mode. Stress is processed as some level of danger to survival. The normal communications between body and brain and within the brain are put on the backburner and all focus, effort and energy is directed to survival in the moment.
We switch from normal whole brain communication to survival program mode.

Touch For Health level 1
At this introductory level of Kinesiology we learn how to, at least temporarily, ensure wholistic three dimensional electrical communication, so the brain is able to receive signals from the body’s muscles and respond clearly during the TFH energy and muscle balancing procedure.

Left and Right scrambling can be recognized as confusion following instructions such as “turn right”, and you immediately turn left. “Pass this to the person on your right” and you pass it to the person on your left. When writing there is often confusion between “b” and “d” and “p” and “q”.

Top and Bottom scrambling can be recognized as feeling unstable or queasy going up or down stairs, looking up at tall buildings or looking down from a height. When writing, there is confusions between “b” and “p”, “d” and “q”.

Front and Back scrambling can be recognized as lying on your back when asked to “lie on your front,” or having trouble reversing the car using the rear vision mirror. Writing can slide up or down a page.

When feeling stressed, or before starting any new learning process or doing homework or research for a project, it is a good idea to do the 3D Switch On and take some deep breaths.

3D “Switch On” for Your Brain
– one hand over the navel + rub under collar bones just beside breastbone
– keep hand over the navel + rub above top lip and below bottom lip
– keep hand over the navel + rub tail bone at end of sacrum
– deep breath, swap to other hand over navel
– repeat the sequence above

Any time confusion re-appears just repeat the 3D Switch On.
Cheers
Anna

Hay Fever – Food Allergy In Disguise

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Here is a novel idea, for some, and just common sense for others. A professor tells us if you have food allergies or sensitivities, when you reduce overall stress load on the body, very often the food reactions disappear. Hmmm. How come this works?

Hans Selye was a pioneering endocrinologist who was one of the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress. He wrote about General Adaptation Syndrome which showed that early stages of disease produced similar symptoms, involving adrenals, thymus, and digestive system, even though the diseases were different. Later Selye wrote of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as the body’s coping program. (more on that another time)

He noted there were three stages that lead to disease:

First is the alarm reaction. Your system puts up a fight to defend itself from the stress reaction caused by physical or emotional triggers. You breathe faster, your heart pumps harder, blood pressure goes up, digestions cuts out.

Second stage is resistance. With no relief you continue to resist the stress and keep up with daily functioning. Your immune system keeps defending while you keep on with life demands. You adapt to working under the stress load. It becomes your “norm”. You just keep on keeping on without looking at how to reduce the stress.

Third stage is exhaustion. You run out of steam, don’t have enough energy to fight and work at the same time, and the last straw results in a mental, emotional and/or health breakdown.

This is a common pattern leading to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and is associated with conditions like hay fever and asthma.

Hay Fever is often worse at certain times when grasses are producing pollen and being spread by winds or even gentle breezes. If you are plagued by hay fever in the spring for instance, Professor Keith Scott-Mumby says, “Stop eating grass.”

“Now hang on. I don’t eat grass,” you might say. Well you may not eat your lawn grass, but wheat, corn, oatmeal, rice and rye are all part of the grass family. You may often include foods like bread, pasta, corn, polenta, rice or rye bread on a daily basis. If that is the case, then your body has adapted by putting lots of energy into keeping symptoms at bay. If you are already resisting the stress caused by these foods in your system, then the spring conditions can be the last straw that collapses the resistance. Now the symptoms become very obvious, with no ability to adapt and disguise the internal stress.

So it’s not the fault of spring winds and pollen that you now have hay fever with streaming eyes and nose and feel lethargic and muddle headed. It’s the fact that you body has for a long time been resisting the stress of foods your body is sensitive to.

An asthma attack is very similar to seasonal hay fever except it is happening in every season for the sufferer. The body is adapting to functioning, even if poorly, but the last straw can be the final overload of adaption energy and an asthma attack is the result.

Well that’s interesting to know, but what can you do about it? You don’t want to spend the next two or three months in total discomfort and functioning under par for the season or having asthma attacks on a regular basis. Professor Scott-Mumby in his book Diet Wise says to take the grass foods out of your diet, at the very least during the season that highlights the stress and overloads your ability to cope or adapt.

His advice is reduce those foods in all seasons, but at least to definitely cut them out totally during your worst season.

Try it out and find out for yourself what many of his patients have learned from their own personal trials, that hay fever can be food allergy in disguise.
Cheers
Anna

PS You can use Kinesiology to reduce overall stress load: apply Emotional Stress Release technique, balance meridians to increase energy, muscle test to identify foods that deplete your energy and drop them out for now, identify the foods that regenerate and lift your energy and increase them in your diet – all are a useful steps in reducing food reactions.