Posts Tagged ‘stress’

Raging Against What Is

September 20, 2018

people-1316292__340Do you ever find yourself in a situation that is totally unacceptable and yet there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it? This can be one of the greatest sources of frustration in your life. I like to quote from the Prayer of Serenity used by Alcoholics Anonymous:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”

I’ve written previously about the fine line we walk between complacency and acceptance; between moving forward with enthusiasm and confidence versus living with the circumstances that we’ve been given. My patients will never hear these words from me, “You just have to learn to live with it.” I don’t give up. I don’t believe that because a solution doesn’t immediately present itself or that I don’t currently know of any way to provide meaningful treatment for a specific issue right now, that the solution to the problem does not or will not exist. How arrogant it is for a doctor to say that if they don’t have the answer, there is no answer!

Let’s look at that Prayer of Serenity. The first request is to have the serenity to accept the things you cannot change. The fact is that there are things you cannot change, at least not in a big way or right away. Imagine that there’s a hurricane bearing down on your city and your house is right in the way. You can board up your windows, secure your belongings and head for higher ground. However, you cannot stop the hurricane! You can rage against it all you want, but it will come whether you like it or not. Perhaps prayer and positive thinking could change its course. However, you yourself do not have the power to stop it or change it in any way.

The second request is that we have the courage to change the things we can. If there is anything that can be done to improve a situation, certainly we should act. Sometimes it does require courage. Remember, if it were easy, you would have done it already. We can do hard things. We can move forward even when the odds seem to be against us.

Lastly, the prayer asks for the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and can’t change. There’s the real kicker. We can so easily be blinded. Our judgement is often clouded by strong emotions. We can feel helpless even though we may be surrounded by solutions. Or we can be ignorantly over-confident, thinking we should be able to easily resolve a situation, but it just isn’t happening, no matter how hard we try; causing us to rage against the situation. This creates huge amounts of stress, which hurts us physically, emotionally and spiritually.

One thing that I would add is that it’s seldom black and white as the prayer seems to suggest. There are some things that we absolutely cannot do anything about, which we just have to accept and be serene as we can about it. However, most things, we can do something about. We may not be able to completely make the problem go away, but we can lessen the problem, find ways to work around the problem, or lessen the effects of the problem. Sometimes we can do something about the problem, but it takes a lot of time and effort. That requires a lot of patience, which really takes us back to the first line of the prayer. We still need serenity to accept things we can’t change 100% RIGHT NOW.

I have great respect for the strength and simplicity of that prayer, but if I were to change it at all, this would be my humble suggestion:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change immediately or completely,
Courage to change the things I can to whatever degree I have the strength and capacity,
And wisdom to know the difference as it stands right now,
As well as patience, determination and tenacity to keep moving forward no matter the odds.

So don’t stress yourself by raging against what is the current situation. Find peace in doing what you can to improve your situation at this moment and every moment going forward. You cannot coast to your goal, since it usually lies uphill. However, you can feel serenity in taking it one step at a time, whether big or small, depending on your strength and capacity. Still know that there are some circumstances that you may not be able to change. We work with whatever circumstances we find ourselves currently in, whether those circumstances are our own making or have been thrust upon us. We just keep moving forward in faith.

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Don’t Sneeze on Me!

February 28, 2018
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Rotavirus

Are you a germaphobe? Or in other words, do you suffer from mysophobia? Do you freak out or are tempted to spray a can of Lysol in your face if someone sneezes within 40 feet of your personal space? Clinically, you probably don’t have this phobia. However, I see a lot of people that seem to come close to it. Do you subscribe to germ theory – the idea that many diseases are caused by microorganisms (or pathogens) such as bacteria and viruses? If you do, you’re not alone. Most people see it that way. And I’m not here to disprove it or say that germ theory is all wrong. However, I believe we need a more balanced view.

Blaming illness on infection by common germs is like a drunk driver who hit a telephone pole blaming his injuries on the telephone pole. Was the telephone pole directly responsible for the damage to his car and his body? Yes, of course. Was the telephone pole the cause of his accident? Of course not! He was driving drunk! That’s why he hit the pole.

I don’t dispute the existence of bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens or their role in illness and infection. Even I have taken antibiotics when I had infections that could not be controlled by more natural means. And yes, there are some pathogens for which our immune systems cannot mount an adequate defense (such as Ebola). However, in most instances, our immune systems are capable of fighting off illness or infection due to reasonable exposure to common germs.

Pathogens, or the illnesses they are related to, are rated on two scales – morbidity and mortality. Basically, morbidity means what percentage of people who are exposed to a pathogen actually get sick from it. Mortality is the percentage of people who die from it. There are many factors that affect morbidity and mortality, outside of how mean the germ is. These include your basic level of health, stress levels, nutrition, age, etc. Often times, the very young (whose immune system hasn’t matured yet) and the very old (whose immune system is worn down) are the most susceptible.

Our susceptibility to illness varies from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment. For instance, strong negative emotions such as fear and anger seem to put our immune system on hold temporarily, leaving us vulnerable. Excessive sugar intake (as with most Americans) can cause our immune system to be depressed. Lack of sleep, too much stress, vertebral subluxations, poor eating habits (i.e. junk food – high in toxins and chemicals, low in nutrition), and other factors also reduce our immunity.

Some of these things are hard to avoid. Lifestyle changes are generally difficult to make overnight. So it is wise to reduce the exposure. That doesn’t mean to be a germaphobe, but just exercise a little caution. It’s important to note that many viruses (such as those that cause cold and flu) thrive in a warm, moist environment, such as your sinuses. You should wash your hands with soap and water a few times a day. Why? It’s not that your hands are susceptible to these viruses. It’s because we can’t seem to keep our hands away from our nose and eyes! Those are the pathways to our sinuses. What goes in the mouth (except for poisons and serious toxins) is usually not as much of an issue.

So, yes, be on your guard in a reasonable fashion. However, if you do get ill, the most effective way to figure out what happened is not to look around and see where you got the germs. You need to look in the mirror and try to figure out why your immune system failed you. It probably won’t be too hard to figure out. Most illness happens when you’re not taking very good care of yourself or you’re under a lot of stress. Take responsibility for your health and your emotions. Take care of yourself, and get natural, effective healthcare as needed.

P.S.- After I published this, I thought of some personal insights I’d like to add. What prompted this particular blog post is that I was recently sick (first time in 2-3 years). My wife is prone to bronchitis due to her asthma, which is related to a weakness left behind from having pneumonia as an infant. In spite of this, she did very well this winter until a few weeks ago. She came down with bronchitis. Then a week later, I got it. Many people would say this is typical, but in our house, it’s not the norm. While I was caring for her, I had a particularly stressful night where I slept very little. The stress plus the lack of sleep weakened my immune system. Low immunity plus high exposure equals a strong chance of getting sick.

My children are all adopted. They come from very different gene pools. But one thing they all had in common is that they rarely got sick as they were growing up. I’ve heard of families where illness goes around from child to child and often starts up again at the first child, continuing the cycle. Our family was not like that at all. My kids didn’t eat great, but their diet was above average. I taught them to enjoy fruits and vegetables and limited their consumption of junk food. But most importantly, I kept them in proper alignment with chiropractic. Whenever they would start to not feel well, I would give them an adjustment. Then they would either not get sick or it would be very mild. By working to keep their immune systems strong, there was very little illness in my home.

For more information on caring for your health and well-being, go to www.GoodHealthChiro.com or www.ohanachiropractor.com.

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“I Tried!”

October 27, 2016

falling-dominoes-1422284For a long time now, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of “trying”. The word “try”, along with all of its variations, is often misunderstood and misused. I believe that looking at this concept in the proper manner can have a major impact on your success in life. Imagine the following two scenarios –

Scenario one – I have a pencil on my desk and I ask you to try to pick it up. An easy task, right? If you pick it up, that’s doing, not trying. If you don’t even attempt it, you can’t say that you tried.

Scenario two – I ask you to pick up a large truck and lift it above your head without the use of any tools or equipment. I would consider that an impossible task, as I’m sure you would also. You can pull up on it with all your might, but you won’t be able to lift it, even if you have some delusion that you have super powers.

For some of you word buffs, you will argue that the word “try” also means to accomplish something. However, the way that I think of it and the way that it’s often used, especially in the past tense, means that you attempted something but did not succeed. So please bear with me as I use it in that manner. The way I see it, there are three prerequisites for honestly saying that you tried to accomplish something.

  1. You must approach it with the belief that the task is something that is possible for you to achieve.
  2. You must put forth a full, honest effort with a clear intention to succeed in the task.
  3. In the end, you must fail in the attempt (going back to the way that I’m using the word). Based on 1 and 2, if you do not succeed, this will qualify you as having tried. If you do number 1 and 2, in most cases, you will succeed, in which case I would say that you didn’t just try, you did.

In the first scenario, there is a case in which you could say that you really “tried” to pick up the pencil. Let’s say that, unbeknownst to you, the pencil had been glued to the desk and it was your understanding that you could only use your bare hands to pick it up. In that case, you would have gone to pick it up and fulfilled all three of the prerequisites of having tried. What if you believed that the pencil were glued to the desk even though it wasn’t? Would you even make the attempt? If you really put forth an honest effort, you would pick it up easily and be surprised that it was no effort at all. What if you had been hypnotized to believe that the pencil actually weighed 2000 pounds? If you even tried at all, would your belief prevent you from lifting the pencil, even though in reality it only weighs a few ounces? That’s an interesting question.

There are actually many times in life that we encounter this type of situation. How many things would you attempt if you really believed you could and would succeed? How many things do you avoid because you don’t believe it’s possible (or at least likely) for you to be able to succeed?

Let’s say that the pencil really was glued to the desk but I never said anything about using a tool to lift it up. Would you just assume that you must use your bare hands, or would you get something to pry it up with, or if necessary, get it off the desk in pieces? In other words, do you think outside the box to get something accomplished, rather than giving up because you believe it’s impossible?

In the second scenario, what if you just thought it was a real truck, but it was actually a cleverly disguised balloon that was barely resting on the ground? Your internal beliefs may prevent you from even making an attempt to lift it. After all, you don’t want to look foolish! But in this case, if you really did make an honest attempt to lift it and were able to get past any personal belief that could prevent your muscles from even putting forth the effort, you would be very surprised to learn that it was not only possible to lift the truck above your head, but actually quite easy.

Everyone knows that even the strongest man in the world can’t lift a large truck above his head with just his bare hands. But how many situations are there where everyone believes that a task is not possible, but then someone goes out and does it anyway? There have been many examples of this. Either the task was easier than everyone believed, or as is often the case, someone found the strength, inspiration, ideas and determination to actually accomplish it, in spite of the difficulty.

Why is there so much confusion? The simple answer is that we need to have a clear understanding of what we can and can’t do. But obviously it isn’t always that easy. I’ve written in previous entries about how challenging it can be to perceive reality as it truly is. We have so many filters, biases and preconceptions, plus the fact that we don’t usually have all of the facts. Just like having a pencil secretly glued to the desk or a balloon that looks like a heavy truck. There can be many factors skewing our understanding of what is really possible for each of us as individuals. There can be a lack of understanding of what’s truly possible in any given situation. We may be lacking in belief and determination, including self-confidence. We may have false perceptions of the rules and limitations. Or in other words, we may be “stuck in the box”, like assuming we can’t use a tool to pry up the glued-down pencil.

I believe that some of the greatest sources of stress in our lives can be attributed to these kinds of confusion. One situation is where you truly believe you can do something, but you consistently miss the mark. Like if you really believed that you could lift a real truck with your bare hands, so you kept pulling and pulling on it with all of your might. You just wind up getting sore, worn out and wasting time. There may really be goals in your life that are beyond your reach, although I don’t believe that’s very common. The fact is that the truck CAN be lifted, but you need a lot of help and the right tools. So usually, it’s not so much that the task cannot be accomplished, but that you’re going about it the wrong way. So rather than stressing about not being able to ever accomplish a particular goal, if it’s something that you really desire, step back and take an objective look at how else the task could be accomplished.

Another source of stress is when you’re putting great forth great amounts of effort trying to accomplish something that you don’t even believe you can accomplish. If you really believe deep down that the pencil weighs 2000 pounds or is glued to the table and you think you’re not allowed to use any tools to pry it up, especially if you have a lot of time and emotion invested in that belief, would you be able to just reach down and pick up that pencil that isn’t stuck and only weighs a few ounces? This is where you get into some of these deep psychological mysteries. And yet, I think that it happens quite frequently. What if a football team was getting a pep talk right before a game where the coach said, “There’s no way we can beat this team, but go out and give it your all.”? (In other words, don’t plan to win, just “try” to win. Have you ever talked to yourself that way?) Maybe the other team will not be very good and they could beat them after all. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Most often, that team who doesn’t believe they can win has very little chance of winning. Any decent coach, even if he knows deep down that they’re playing a much better team, will do his best to instill into the players the belief that they can win.

In life, we’re sometimes faced with situations that we don’t believe we can win with, but we put forth our best efforts anyway due to social pressure or physical necessity. It could be a salesman with a very poor sales record who’s been told that he’s got to get the top sales for that week or he will be fired. Then at the end of the week, his sales aren’t much better than normal and he gets fired. He then cries out, “I tried!” Or it could be someone who’s been trying desperately to find a job for a long time and who needs to find a job this month or his family will be out in the street. The next month rolls around and still no employment. He exclaims bitterly, “I tried my very best!” In neither of these cases is the person lying. However, as I stated earlier, I believe that part of trying is not just putting forth an effort, but actually believing deep down that you can accomplish the task. Trapped emotions, acquired beliefs, and so forth can prevent us from having the faith to really put forth a full and honest effort, even when we are doing our best to believe “on the outside”.

Energy work that we do, including the Emotion Code, Body Code and EVOX, can help people to release trapped emotions and false perceptions that prevent us from reaching our full potential. In the meantime, it’s important that we don’t judge others based on what WE believe they should be able to do. Notice that I did not state in either of the scenarios in the preceding paragraph whether or not they were capable of accomplishing the task that they absolutely had to succeed at. From the outside looking in, we have no way of knowing, in spite of how well we feel that we would do in that situation. One of my pet peeves is when someone says, “if I can do it, anyone can do it”. That is a slap in the face to our Creator who made each of us with unique talents and abilities. Also, we don’t know what someone is or is not capable of, given their current circumstances. For ourselves, we need to do some careful self-examination and make sure that if we feel that we’re really trying to accomplish something, we are fulfilling the first two prerequisites of what it means to really try. Then if you really do fall short of your goal and you don’t accomplish the thing you’re trying to accomplish, you can truly and justifiably say, “I TRIED!”

Remember though, it makes no sense to intend to try. Just like the example of picking up a pencil. You can intend to pick it up or you can refuse to pick it up. If it had been glued down, you could say you tried after the fact. But it doesn’t make sense to say that you intend to put forth an effort with an intention to fail. Like Yoda said in Star Wars, “There is no try, only do.” In future tense, never say you’re going to try, only intend to do.

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Crises and Priorities

August 1, 2016

storm-843732__180What are your priorities? In other words, what are the things that are most important to you? Although they could include sports, games, and other leisure activities, most likely your responses would include spouse, children, career, education, income, and or religion. When life is going smoothly, it can be easier to maintain your priorities, although a common problem is that people tend to get lazy and start slipping away from the things that are really important toward the things that are more fun or easier. When things aren’t going so smoothly, when times are turbulent and stresses mount, there are two common responses. For some people, it brings their priorities into sharp focus. Especially when we feel threatened, we cling to the things that are the very most important to us. For other people, they can sometimes go into panic or survival mode and completely lose sight of the priorities.

It is said that good health is one of the greatest blessings that you can have. It’s true that no matter who you are or what your station in life is, if you have poor health, your quality of life will suffer. This applies to old and young, rich and poor, even nobility. Of course, when I refer to health, I’m looking at it from a holistic standpoint. It’s not just a matter feeling good physically. It’s a state of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. When you’re young and very active, the tendency is to take your health for granted. As you get older and start to accumulate injuries, surgeries and other health problems along the way, you can go too far the other way and be obsessed with your health. Of course, what I often see in these cases is that people are not obsessed with their health, but rather their health problems. (Energy flows where the attention goes.)

The commotion in the world is increasing. There is greater stress and uncertainty. Even if you’re fortunate enough to be in a stable family and have a good job, chances are you’re feeling the stress. How will you react to crises around you? When the stresses of life, community and country are closing in around you, do you set aside priorities or do you focus on them more intensely? Hopefully your health is a priority for you. I think about how, when you’re preparing to take off in an airplane and they give you the safety instructions, they tell you that if oxygen masks are needed, to put yours on first and then help those around you. The reasoning behind this should be obvious. If you pass out, you’re unable to help yourself or anyone else around you. So in life, even when your spouse and children are your main priorities, it won’t help in the long run to sacrifice your own health in order to help your family. The more stresses you have in life, the more critical it is that you pay attention to your health.

Take care of yourself. I have a feeling that conditions in the world are going to get worse before they get better. Do whatever you can to prepare yourself mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually for whatever may lie ahead. If I can be of assistance, contact me.

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