Stress administration is a hot topic; stress-related illness and suffering is at an all-time high in America and increasing every year. Cliff Kuhn, M.D.'s work with the considerable natural medicine of humor has uncovered the customary culprit behind your unhealthy stress symptoms, as well as the explication to simple, wholesome stress management.
Astronomer-mathematician Ptolemy (85-165) devised a system of planetary motions that located the earth at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, and planets revolved around the earth in the Ptolemaic universe. This notion was suitable for roughly 1,500 years. More on this in a moment...
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Shelly was in such need of stress administration that she was unhappy much of the time. Shortly after she became my patient, I was able to help Shelly see that, just like Ptolemy's theory, she was casting herself as the center of the universe, thereby causing unmanageable stress levels in her life. We began a regimen from my Fun Factor designate that afforded Shelly allowable stress management, reintroduced joy and happiness, and brought her life back into balance.
Shelly's qoute was common; I see more and more population each day who suffer from unhealthy levels of stress. Whether it is sleeplessness, weight gain, mood changes, hair loss, worry, agitation, or any other of the myriad symptoms generally connected with stress, stress-related illness and suffering is at an all-time high in America and increasing every year. Luckily for you, my work with the considerable natural medicine of humor has uncovered the customary culprit behind your unhealthy stress symptoms, as well as the explication to simple, wholesome stress management.
My healing practice, spicy decades of work with chronically and fatally ill patients, has clearly identified the cause of our painful stress symptoms - seriousness. Seriousness means taking yourself too seriously; seriousness means over-reaching - taking accountability for things beyond your power, such as the outcomes and results of all your hard work. Consequently, you're positioning yourself incorrectly as the "center of the universe." Seriousness causes so much pressure that productive stress management, which I will teach you in this article, becomes impossible.
The antidote for your seriousness, and your foundation for wholesome stress management, is the natural medicine of humor. Humor's expected power is harnessed to maximum impact straight through my unique Fun Factor prescription. Based upon my Fun Commandments, which were forged in unison with some expected patients of mine, my Fun Factor designate is capable of producing such profound certain turn to your condition and personal success that you will soon have population whispering, "Is she all the time this happy?"
In this article, I will explain how my Fun Factor designate can be directly applied to your stress. You will be amazed at how much lighter and happier you feel, with each passing day, as you put the following Fun Commandments to work in your life. You are about to scrutinize that the natural medicine of humor produces flawless stress management, putting an end to your painful stress symptoms.
The Fun Factor Stress administration Formula
Step One: Laugh with Yourself
My first stress administration Fun Commandment is: Laugh with Yourself. This Commandment is not about humiliation or self-denigration, it is the greatest in self-respect because it teaches you to appreciate your "perfect imperfection" and to find diplomatic amusement in your foibles. And, when it comes to stress, there is fullness of amusement to be found which will greatly aid your stress management.
Here's the first amusing thing about your stress: you can't live without it, yet too much is bad for your health. Like many of the critical things in life: we need a certain estimate of stress to survive, yet too much can kill us. For example, we die if we are without water for more than a few days; but submerge us in water and we die a lot sooner.
It is said that we can die from boredom. I don't think there is any scientific evidence for that theory, but one thing is certain - stress relieves boredom. Ending boredom, indeed, could be carefully a form of stress relief. An amusing paradox, no doubt!
Without stress, also, we might not eat. Hunger is a form of stress our body needs occasionally to remind us we need food. Stress causes the adrenal glands to work. Athletes would not perform at their best without stress-induced adrenaline. Every action causes a certain estimate of stress. So does inactivity. In fact, to be thoroughly stress-free we would have to be dead - not a highly recommended stress administration technique!
The idea that stress is a killer is exaggerated, which is also humorous. Too much stress can be a killer, and it is against too much stress in our lives that we need to guard. Fortunately we are equipped with the finest potential stress administration mechanism: the natural medicine of humor and the quality to laugh with ourselves. Far better and safer than Valium, it is our built-in stress administration system.
As you learn to laugh with yourself you will become like an athlete - who can have fun running the mile or the marathon and still turn in peak performance. In fact, since too much seriousness can tighten muscles straight through negative tension, laughing with yourself may even heighten performance. This Fun Commandment works wonderfully on many levels.
Step Two: pick To Motivate Yourself With Fun, Not Fear
Step two in my Fun Factor stress administration recipe is one of my most recent Fun Commandments. Motivating yourself with fun rather than fear is a crucial step that allows your commitment to laugh with yourself to fully impact your wholesome stress management.
This brings us to the only true choice you have in life. Will you be inspired by fear or by fun? One choice is all we have for our health, wellness, and fitness - fear or fun. It all boils down to that. It is your accountability to pick one or the other.
The inquire is, which is the responsible choice? Which of the two is a considerable medicine, which will give you condition and motivate you greater success, sustaining you over time? The natural medicine of humor gives us the answer.
There is no doubt that both fear and fun are potent stimulants to behavior over the short run. So the inquire becomes one of sustainability. Will fear or fun best help us preserve our excellence over time? Which of the two is a considerable alternative medicine that you can learn to use for your most health, wellness, and fitness? (That's a trick question, by the way)
Let's Encounter A Man-Eating Bear!
The fear of being eaten alive motivates us to run as fast and as far as we can when chased by a bear. There is little to no fun in that experience. It is purely fearful, but the power it provides maximizes the possibilities of sustaining life for that moment. For the moment, in such a life-threatening situation, fear seems to be an productive and productive choice. Though full of stress, it relieves us of the immediate threat!
But let's take it a step further. Having survived my wilderness encounter with the bear, I return to my home in an urban environment. The next morning, as I start out for work, I run desperately for the car, speedily jumping inside and locking the doors.
When I arrive at my workplace, I race into the building. Before I get down to work I suspend my bagged lunch high above my desk, roping it to the light standards. I insist upon all doors being locked and secured. When asked why, I answer, "I'm merely doing what got me straight through my wilderness feel over the weekend. I don't want to be eaten by a bear."
You'd think I was over-reacting just a wee bit, and you'd be right. You could say that my stress relieves my anxiety, but my anxiety is based on a lie conjured and sustained by my fear! Not exactly the most of stress administration techniques.
The Three Biggest Dangers Of Our "Run-From-a-Bear" Stress administration Techniques
1. We live our lives as though every day was an emergency; as though a bear is chasing us all the time. This is unfortunate for three reasons:
2. We now know that such a constant state of "wariness" or agitation breaks down our coping mechanisms over time. It is impossible to preserve the fear-based behavior without breaking down or burning out.
3. Of all the stress administration techniques, this is the absolute worst to pick because it only increases our stress! It reduces the effectiveness of humor's natural medicine to zilch.
A more pernicious error occurs. We begin to think that the avoidance of anyone we fear is the same as having fun. Joy becomes synonymous with the avoidance of fear.
The Absence Of One Thing Does Not Indicate The proximity Of Its Opposite
If this sounds ridiculous to you let me put it in more well-known terms that have become suitable where your condition is concerned. With rare exception we have agreed in our community that condition is synonymous with absence of symptoms. Do you admittedly believe your condition is merely the absence of your symptoms? My Fun Factor designate teaches you that, not only is the absence of symptoms not synonymous with health, but also that you never have to fall for that lie again.
You never have to resolve for second-rate health! You can use your considerable natural medicine of humor to stave off seriousness' debilitating effects.
Therefore the issue becomes balance. Fun balances fear. The greatest inquire is not, "Are you without fear?", but "Is your fun in balance with your fear?" If you're not 100% certain of a "yes" response to the later question, then you need to Stop - Right Now - and take the last step in my Fun Factor stress administration recipe to ensure that your life is as remedial as it could be.
Step Three: Tell the Truth
The final step in your Fun Factor stress administration recipe is the Fun Commandment, Tell the Truth. This Commandment refers more to self-integrity than it does "cash register" honesty. Getting in the habit of telling yourself the truth will cement humor's powerfully certain corollary over your stress. Your stress administration becomes second nature when you are honest with yourself each day, because you can then immediately, easily, and naturally apply steps one and two to your life.
Telling yourself the truth, for our purposes, focuses on knowing when your stress levels are rising. As we noted in step two, daily activities commonly yield a baseline level of stress and this stress is commonly alleviated by your daily routines (for example, when you feel the stress of hunger, you eat). Step three in my Fun Factor stress administration recipe teaches you to recognize the signs of unhealthy stress and take remedial action immediately.
Here are some simple stress administration techniques to apply when your self-honesty reveals rising stress levels:
1. Start your day off by singing in the shower at the top of your voice. Make up your own song that incorporates the idea that you are embarking upon a glorious day in which great things are going top happen to you. Can't sing? Good! Can't rhyme? Who cares? The words are for you alone. This is not a contest. Be as off-key as you need to be...unless you are Placido Domingo.
The prominent thing is to be loud (your inner ear has to hear it), upbeat and convincing. The subconscious believes what it is told. Start your day by telling it that it will be a great day and you will be more than halfway to producing exactly that result. Think of your singing not as singing but as a stress relief game played before stress has a opening to rear its ugly head.
2. Tour to work alone, along the same boring route every day? Make up a game to play as you look out the window of your car, bus or train. For example, how many dogs will you see on the way to work?
Try to guess before you set out and see how close you are when you arrive. Reward yourself every time you guess correctly to within a certain number. Drivers: limit yourself to dogs (or green elephants) you see straight through the windshield only. This game does not work well in subways; there are no green elephants in subways.
3. Have a routine job? One that you find boring? Does it yield stress symptoms, such as drumming your fingers or tapping your toes? perhaps you need to introduce fun into your workday.
For example, if your job is to make selfsame widgets each day, how could you do something separate to give variety to what otherwise could become a monotonous task? Could you, for example, place each new widget relative to the others so that together they make a pattern, or spell the name of your sweetheart? How many do you make an hour? Could you make one more than that the next hour, safely and with the same perfect quality? Make a stress-relieving game out of your work and it will feel less like work and more like fun.
4. Smile. You feel stressed? Smile. It is a simple activity, so simple that even infants can do it. Just for kicks, count how many times you smile in an hour. None, you say? Then this stress relief game is even easier for you, and more prominent than it is for those who smile all the time. (No wonder they don't feel the same degree of stress that you do!)
Your smile doesn't need to be a broad grin that suggests to those around you that they need to call the men in white coats. But it should be more than a mental smirk; your facial muscles should be aware that they are smiling.
It is potential naturally to paste a smile on your face without any hypothesize other than you want to smile. After a while, your subconscious will take over, lighten your mood, and the smiles will come admittedly and naturally.
It's best, if possible, to think of something that can give you a genuine smile, a hypothesize you can talk about if called upon to do so. Each of us, no matter how depressed, has something in life to celebrate.
5. recognize that stress is a choice. We can accept it and put up with it, and the damage it can cause our bodies. We can avoid it, but that could be a difficult choice; especially if it means quitting the only job we know in a tough job market. That choice might admittedly create worse stresses. Or we can deal with it and defeat it.
That is not as difficult as it might sound if you make up your mind to use my Fun Factor designate in all things you do. That doesn't necessarily mean, laughing, joking and playing the community idiot - though all those activities can relax stress too. You can have fun without ever cracking a single joke.
A game of tickle with the children or grandchildren can be fun and bring energetic screams of satisfaction from them and you. Touch football or, for the less energetic, lawn darts or horseshoes can be fun. For others, it's a walk, socializing with friends, admiring the beauty around us or following a hobby - especially if it is an engrossing one.
Attitude Is Everything
The key is to recognize stress symptoms when they occur, recognize what's causing them, and use my Fun Factor recipe for wholesome stress management. Since fun is the best natural stress reliever known, it makes good sense to integrate my Fun Factor stress administration recipe into your daily life.
But don't get obsessive about it. Don't be stressed by removing stress. Be content with removing some of your stress, and with taking the edge off it so that you function as a healthier, happier and more productive humor being. After all, perfectionism produces stress.
Shelly, by the way, has learned to take herself much more lightly now and she does not suffer nearly as many stress symptoms. The paradox she loves is that taking herself less seriously admittedly permits her to take her responsibilities more seriously than ever before! The natural medicine of humorr, supercharged by my Fun Factor prescription, has allowed Shelly to admittedly and naturally administrate her stress and enjoy a life others have started to envy.
Just as Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus disproved Ptolemy's earth-centered universe in the 16th century, so the natural medicine of humor disproves that you must suffer from being the center of your universe. Take off yourself from the pressure and stress of a life where all things revolves around you...start using my Fun Factor stress administration formula, and the rest of my Fun Commandments, today!
Stress administration Made straightforward And Easy...Just corollary Cliff Kuhn M.D.'s Foolproof recipe
