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Reducing Stress

Reducing Stress and Creating Better Health

What is stress?
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.

How does stress affect health?
Stress affects people physically, mentally and emotionally. According to the American Institute of Stress, up to 90% 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.


How stressed are you?
Everyone responds to stress differently. Take this quick test to see if areas you are experiencing stress.

• I feel overly tired or fatigued.
• I often am nervous, anxious or depressed.
• I have sleep problems.
• I have repeated headaches or minor aches and pains.
• I worry about job security, financial obligations or relationships.

What can I do about it?
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.

Emotions, or feelings, have a powerful impact on the human body. Positive emotions like appreciation, care, and love not only feel good, they are good for you. They help your body’s systems synchronize and work better, like a well-tuned car.

Our professional staff at Family Resources 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.

How does it work?
When you’re stressed, your body is out of sync. Typical negative emotions we feel when stressed—like anger, frustration, anxiety and worry—lead to increased disorder in the heart’s rhythms and in the nervous system. In contrast, positive emotions like joy, appreciation, care and kindness create harmony in the heart’s rhythms and the nervous system. Other bodily systems sync up to this rhythm, which scientists call coherence. Because coherence leads to more mental clarity, creativity and better problem-solving abilities, it’s easier to find solutions and better ways of handling the stressful situation.

Research at the Institute of HeartMath has shown that emotions are reflected in the beat-to-beat changes in the heart’s rhythms. This is called heart rate variability, or HRV. The analysis of HRV is recognized as a powerful, non-invasive way to measure nervous system dynamics. New clinical research identifies HRV as a key indicator of preventable stress and shows a relationship to a wide range of health problems.

How can I create and practice physiological coherence?
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.

Freeze-Framer® Technology
With this technology you see your heart rhythm patterns in real time on the computer screen. When you apply the Quick Coherence tool you can see the changes in your heart rhythm patterns. The Freeze-Framer® heart rhythm coherence trainer has been designed to help people prevent, manage and reverse the effects of too much stress.

By correlating the patterns on the screen with a calm internal feeling, you learn to find and maintain physiological coherence. You learn self-control of emotions, which helps reduce the physiological and psychological symptoms of stress. Your goal is to increase the amount of coherence you are able to sustain in each session and keep track of your progress.

Seeing your heart rhythms in real time can accelerate your progress. You learn how to quickly change your reactions to stress, increase your energy and improve your overall health and well-being.

Regular use of the Freeze-Framer® program has resulted in significant stress reduction benefits by people with ADD/ADHD, anger, anxiety and panic disorders, arrhythmias, asthma, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, digestive disorders, hypertension, and sleep disorders. The program is particularly effective in managing pain.

Click here for more information or to purchase the Freeze-Framer® learning system.