Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Stress is a term used to describe the wear and tear the body experiences in reaction to everyday tensions and pressures. Change, illness, injury or career and lifestyle changes, are common causes of stress. However, it's the emotional pressure and tension we feel in response to the little everyday hassles — rush hour traffic, waiting in line and too many emails — that do the most damage.
Stress affects people physically, mentally and emotionally. According to the American Institute of Stress, up to 90 percent of all health problems are related to stress. Too much stress can contribute to and agitate many health problems including heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, depression and sleep disorders.
The first step is to understand how stress works. It's not the events or situations that do the harm; it's how you respond to those events. More precisely, it's how you feel about them that determines whether you are stressed or not.
The mind is known to be a factor in stress and stress-related disorders. Meditation has been shown to positively affect a range of autonomic physiological processes, such as lowering blood pressure and reducing overall arousal and emotional reactivity. We teach meditation, breathing and yoga techniques, as well as HeartMath solution techniques, as ways to effectively manage stress. Additionally, we teach stress tolerance coping skills, utilizing solution-focused, well-researched emotional intelligence strategies.
Our professional staff at Live Well Counseling Center is trained in the HeartMath stress management system using Freeze-Framer® technology as a powerful tool to help manage stress and anxiety. HeartMath's research has shown when you intentionally shift to a positive emotion, heart rhythms immediately change. This shift in heart rhythms creates a favorable cascade of neural, hormonal and biochemical events that benefit the entire body. The effects are both immediate and long lasting.
The HeartMath stress management system introduces you to two tools to help you increase physiological coherence: The Quick Coherence™ technique to use in your daily life to reduce the effects of stress and the Freeze-Framer® technology to accelerate your learning and enhance your practice.
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