Learn to Be Stress Free
Nothing Causes More Disease Than Stress
That's right, stress is linked to 90-98% of all disease today. The CDC says 90%, Dr. Bruce Lipton says at least 90% too, and others say 95% or even 98%. The precise number isn't relevant here, what IS relevant is that by far and away most illness has roots in chronic stress. This is a remarkable discovery and realization.
What Diseases Can Stress Cause?
More than you would think.
Heart disease
The health of your cardiovascular system is intricately connected with your mental and emotional well-being. Acute stress causes heart attacks every single day, while chronic stress has been known to clog arteries.
Autoimmune Disease
Stress is maybe THE biggest causative factor when it comes to the onset of autoimmune disease. Researchers Ljudmila Stojanovich and Dragomir Marisavljevich found that up to 80% of people diagnosed with autoimmune disease reported intense emotional distress before the onset of their symptoms.
Cancer
Stress has also been linked to increased rates of cancer. Stress triggers inflammation throughout the body and this inflammation creates the environment necessary for tumors to develop.
Why Does Stress Cause Disease?
This is a complex question with a lot of factors involved, but here are a couple of reasons.
Stress causes the digestive system to shut down. Stress triggers the fight or flight response which sends all the blood to your brain and your muscles. This causes the digestive system to become chronically impaired, allowing undigested food to putrefy in the intestines.
Stress triggers systemic inflammation in the body. In the pre-industrial world this acted as a protective mechanism but today, in the world of chronic stress, the inflammation too becomes chronic and creates the perfect climate for a myriad of diseases to take hold.
Stress is also known to affect the body in many other ways such as cause hormonal imbalances, trigger the release of toxins in the blood, as well as disrupt metabolic processes in the body.
Learn to Be Stress Free
This is clearly one of the biggest health crises we face today, the effects of stress are felt on virtually every aspect of our health. Sleep, digestion, blood pressure, hormonal balance, inflammation, all these things suffer when we're dealing with chronic levels of stress. And it's all from your state of mind.
While this is alarming, it's also encouraging if you look at it from another angle. If our minds, alone, have this incredible power to cause harm, our minds also have an equal ability to heal us.
Whenever we stress, we often ask ourselves a lot of negative "What if" questions. "What if I lose my job?", "What if my health never improves?", "What if I'm not good enough?". We use our imaginations to ask these negative "What if" questions and visualize a potential disastrous outcome, and it has a disastrous effect on our health.
I like to do the inverse of that and ask myself positive "What if" questions and use that same creative faculty to imprint positive thoughts into my mind. "What if my life will always be filled with abundance from here on out?", "What if I can continue to reach more and more people with my health programs?", "What if everything works out?". Use that same creative stress mechanism to program your mind and body for health and abundance.
Be proactive about managing your stress, it matters. It matters a lot. A whole lot.
God Bless,
Mercy Ballard