Reduce the Taxes of Financial Stress: Nine Tips for Relieving Money Worries

Posted on | by HeartMath

For millions of people, financial stress is eating away at their basic sense of security and well-being. And it’s not just bank accounts that are being drained, but also physical and emotional ressenting the people or issues you care about.ources, which in turn impact health, relationships, productivity and happiness.

Note: This article may be reprinted in its entirety. Permission to reprint is contingent on the inclusion of the attribution statement found at the end of this article. The content herein may not be modified or altered without written permission from HeartMath. Please send permission requests to gboehmer@heartmath.com.

Reduce the Taxes of Financial Stress
Nine Tips for Relieving Money Worries

Do you get a knot in your stomach when you sit down to pay the bills each month? Wake up in the middle of the night wondering how you’re ever going to get out of debt? Get a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness when you read headlines about the housing crisis, oil prices, soaring healthcare costs, inflation, recession and unemployment?

If you’re feeling worried and anxious about money, you’re not alone. For millions of people, financial stress is eating away at their basic sense of security and well-being. And it’s not just bank accounts that are being drained, but also physical and emotional resources, which in turn impact health, relationships, productivity and happiness.

Most of us believe if we just work harder, think harder and try harder, we can resolve our financial issues. But what if focusing more brainpower and effort in these problems actually gets us even further away from finding solutions? Instead of trying even harder to think our way through these problems, here’s an alternative approach to consider.

A different method for resolving your challenges involves releasing stress and allowing your intuition to help guide your thoughts and actions. By using tools to stop the continual loop of anxiety and fear, we actually free up energy to find new answers to old problems. Even when we can’t control our external situation, creating a balanced connection between the heart and brain helps reduce the internal taxes of scarcity and insecurity and opens new pathways in the problem-solving process.

Here are nine practical and affordable tips for relieving financial stress:

  • Take advantage of new technology. You may already use a sophisticated computer program to manage your personal and professional finances, but did you know there’s innovative stress reduction software available, too? Much like cell phones, PDA’s and mp3 players make life easier and more enjoyable, there are handheld devices that help you relieve stress. Why not use the latest digital tools to improve your quality of life?
  • Sit down and make a list of what you’re grateful for. It’s hard to feel anxious or scared while focusing on feelings of gratitude. Think about someone you appreciate, then, take a moment in your heart to feel appreciation for them. If you choose to, tell him or her. You’ll be surprised by the new energy you bring back to solving money issues by cultivating gratitude and expressing appreciation.
  • Approach your financial problems more objectively. If you were going to give advice to a person who was in a similar situation, what would it be? Stepping outside yourself enables you to see things more dispassionately, without being as invested in the outcome.
  • Shift your focus. Stop and remember the basic conveniences and luxuries you may take for granted. Much of the world lives in poverty and while it may sound simplistic, when we stop to think about someone much less fortunate, it puts our financial situations in a larger wholeness perspective.
  • Get to the heart of the matter. If you feel like you’re in an endless cycle of worry and angst, try the Cut-Thru® technique to help gradually release the accumulated anxiety caused by financial stress. To gain some immediate relief, you don’t need to sort through all the details of the issues you’re facing; simply address the perceptions, feelings and thoughts that come up while using this technique.
  • Don’t over-saturate yourself with bad news about the economy. While staying informed is important, taking in so much disturbing news day after day can lead to a growing sense of pessimism. Try to watch or read the financial news without getting lost in a negative mindset and look for stories that help stimulate more creative, optimistic thinking about money.
  • Don’t keep everything to yourself. Reach out to a friend who can help you gain a clearer perspective, but not necessarily one who will simply sympathize with your pain. Or find an expert you can talk to about your money issues who is knowledgeable and unbiased. Financial advisors and credit counselors can help take off some of the pressure and there are many free resources for financial advice.
  • Give some money away. It doesn’t matter how much. Whatever the amount, giving to someone in need or to a cause or charity you feel aligned with takes you out of self-centeredness and focuses compassion and caring on someone else. Knowing you have enough to share builds your own sense of personal empowerment.
  • Don’t punish yourself with blame or shame. Having financial difficulties does not equate to failure. Many times the circumstances are beyond your control. Freeing yourself from these disapproving feelings enhances your perception and intuition, allowing you to think better and more clearly. Despite a sense that things may always be this way, your current condition is not permanent. Change is constant and that includes your finances.

While money issues are real, they don’t have to destroy you. Letting go of stress, even for just a few minutes, can lead towards fresh ideas and new solutions. If you’re looking for greater prosperity and peace of mind, reducing stress is a risk-free financial strategy.

Copyright © 2008 HeartMath. Since 1991 HeartMath has been dedicated to decoding the underlying mechanics of stress. HeartMath is internationally recognized for their solutions to transform the stress of change and uncertainty, and bring coherence and renewed energy into people’s lives. Research and clinical studies conducted by HeartMath have examined emotional physiology, heart-brain interactions, and the physiology of learning and performance. Through their research they have demonstrated the critical link between emotions, heart function, and cognitive performance. HeartMath’s work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Cardiology, Stress Medicine, and Preventive Cardiology, as well as business journals such as Harvard Business Review and Leadership Excellence. HeartMath’s organizational clients include NASA, BP, Duke University Health System, Stanford Business School, Redken, Kaiser Permanente, Boeing, and Cisco Systems, as well as dozens of school systems and thousands of health professionals around the world. To learn more about HeartMath, go to www.heartmath.com.

Solution for Pain Management

Posted on | by HeartMath

Your Immune System

Pain is the sensation of hurting resulting from an unpleasant or strong discomfort from injury, sickness, disease or functional disorder and is transmitted through the nervous system. More than a physical sensation, pain is our body’s way of defending us from physical harm and further pain by triggering processes that prompt us to seek strategies to protect ourselves and end the experience. Typically, pain is classified as acute or chronic. Acute pain usually is immediate, such as the kind that results from injury, sickness and disease, and then begins subsiding. Chronic pain, described as the disease of pain, serves no apparent biological purpose and can persist for long periods, in some cases years and others indefinitely; frequently it’s resistant to treatment and its cause often is an enigma.

“One in four U.S. adults said they suffered a daylong bout of pain in the month prior to being surveyed, according to a 2006 annual report. One in 10 said the pain lasted a year or more.”
—National Center for Health Statistics

“Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.
—Dr. Albert Schweitzer

Knee Surgery Patient Feels No Pain

The following is a brief summary of an article from Dr. Raymond T. Bradley, who was familiar with HeartMath techniques such as the Heart Lock-In prior to undergoing knee surgery in 2004, and later wrote for the HeartMath Institute.
Dr. Bradley was to have bilateral knee arthroscopic surgery on both legs as an outpatient. To prepare for the surgery, he had visualization sessions with his therapist in conjunction with and complemented by daily Heart Lock-In® sessions in the morning and evening. “My goal was to create a safe and secure place in my mind and heart in which to enter for the surgery – filled only with love (no fear) – and to be able to totally surrender myself to the surgery, whatever the outcome. … My last memory was of total peace and calm and a heart filled with unbounded love and appreciation,” he said, referring to when he was wheeled into the operating room, at which time he did a final Heart Lock-In session. “The surgery went well and I awoke with no side effects: clearheaded, hungry and thirsty, and totally energized and exuberant in spirit. My body felt full only of love and appreciation – I had no pain at all!”

Relieving Stress Relieves Pain

The HeartMath Institute has 16 years of research on the effects stress and emotions have on our health and quality of life. Researchers found that the presence or absence of stress can directly impact levels of pain. For example, in the first two weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, pain-treatment specialists were inundated with complaints of worsening pain. Calls came from patients who suffered from many types of illnesses – cancer, back problems, arthritis, diabetic neuropathy, chronic headaches and others. According to the medical director of pain management at Washington Hospital Center at the time, many patients who had been stable for years on their medication flooded the center with phone calls in those first two weeks after the attacks, saying their pain had gotten out of control. In Houston, specialists reported that pain complaints from cancer patients were up 33 percent, and in Buffalo they had doubled. Why?

“Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.”
—Charlie Chaplin

Endorphins are chemical messengers your body can create to help manage pain naturally. The more endorphins released into your system, the less pain you experience. It is believed there is some endorphin secretion into the body at all times. When endorphin levels fall, particularly during times of stress, aches and pains can increase. When these levels rise – exercising, listening to music or doing something as common and pleasurable as laughing – aches and pains diminish. HeartMath has received many reports over the years from people who say utilizing our scientifically researched and validated tools and technology helped decrease their pain. (Regardless of your circumstance, always consult your physician before changing your pain-management program.)

A HeartMath TIP:

Heart Lock-In® technique: Use the Heart Lock-In technique – an adapted version follows here – especially first thing in the morning, to increase your endorphin level and to give your body an energy boost for the day. Then try it before going to sleep at night to reduce the stress and aches and pains of the day and enjoy restful sleep.
In-depth details and a discussion about HeartMath’s Heart Lock-In technique are available in the book Transforming Anxiety: The HeartMath Solution for Overcoming Fear and Worry and Creating Serenity, by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman.

  • Shift your attention to the area of your heart and breathe slowly and deeply.
  • Activate and sustain a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in your life.
  • Send these feelings of care toward yourself and others. This benefits them and especially helps recharge and balance your system.

Benefits of Reducing Stress

  • Aches and pains decrease
  • Energy increases so you can do more
  • Overall outlook Improves, less focus on pain
  • More restful sleep at night

Tools For Pain Management

emWave® & Inner Balance™: Regular use of this scientifically validated, stress-relief technology has proven to be a vital tool in reducing anxiety, stress, anger, emotional chaos and boosting energy and vitality. The emWave technology is easy to use and noninvasive. It will help you achieve heart coherence – synchronization between the heart and brain – and reach your optimal physical, mental and emotional balance. When your emotions are in balance, you stop the energy drain and start the energy gain. Then, by practicing the easy-to-learn techniques you’ll receive with your emWave only minutes a day will help you revitalize and re-energize your mind, body and spirit anytime, anywhere.
» Learn More

Transforming Depression: The HeartMath® Solution to Feeling Overwhelmed, Sad, and Stressed, by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman. Depression commonly goes hand in hand with those who suffer chronic pain. Transforming Depression, the fourth book in HeartMath’s Transforming Series, can help you to understand the feelings you are experiencing such as hopelessness and disinterest in activities you formerly enjoyed, among others, and then teach you powerful tools for easing your pain and overcoming those feelings, including Notice and Ease, the Power of Neutral and the Cut-Thru® technique. With a little practice, you can lessen feelings of depression and see dramatic changes occur in your mind and body that can lead to better health and greater peace of mind.
» Learn More

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension – Childre, Rozman, 2004. Learn more about the warning signs of chronic stress and what you should know about your “intelligent heart” and how it can help you immediately begin reducing the stress in your life. You’ll learn several key HeartMath tools and techniques, including the complete details of the Attitude Breathing® tool and step-by-step instructions on how and when to use it.
» Learn more

Solution for Managing Your Weight

Posted on | by HeartMath

An International Epidemic

Everybody needs a certain amount of body fat to function and perform optimally, and the consensus is that the greater the disparity between the two, the more at risk a person’s health is. Being overweight or obese greatly increases the chances for one or more of a long list of serious health problems, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and some cancers – breast and colon cancer among them. (See our Recommendations).

The number of overweight adults and children in the United States is so great that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the International Association for the Study of Obesity and many other organizations are calling it an epidemic of major proportions. Recent studies indicate 64 percent of American adults are overweight. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 2003-04 found nearly 33 percent of adults aged 20-74 were obese and by 2010 that figure could grow to 40 percent. The survey showed high overweight rates among children and teens: 13.9% of children aged 2-5 years; 18.8% of 6- to 11-year-olds; and 17.4% of 12- to 19-year-olds.

Obesity poses one of the greatest public health challenges for the 21st century. … The prevalence of adult obesity has risen three-fold in many countries since the 1980s and the epidemic is spreading at particularly high rates in children.

International Association for the Study of Obesity

The crisis has no borders: The International Obesity Task Force estimates 1.7 billion people internationally – that’s about one-quarter of the world’s population – aged 15 and above were overweight in 2005, with 400 million of them listed as obese. If current trends continue there will be 2.4 billion overweight and 700 million obese people by 2015.

Overweight, Stress and Your Intelligent Heart

The simple explanation for what causes overweight is more calories coming into the body than going out. Two major contributors have been the global shift to foods that are fast and high in fat and sugars, and a decline in physical activity, not only in affluent nations, but also in the developing world because of changing modes of transportation, urbanization and more sedentary types of work.

There are many factors contributing to the increase in overweight and obesity, but experts say emotional eating is the primary cause in a high percentage of cases. Today’s fast-paced and demanding world has given rise to alarming stress levels and people seek any way they can find to cope. For many that means turning to food, especially comfort food, and that largely means precisely the kinds of food that are high in fat and low in nutrition. A Harris Interactive survey reported 46% of Americans are less careful about the food they eat when stressed. And the more stressed you are, the more your body produces the hormone cortisol, which turns fat into energy, unless you regularly overeat: Then cortisol can take all that excess fat and redistribute it around your waist and hips.

The HeartMath Institute has researched stress for 16 years and has established numerous scientifically controlled studies that validate reducing stress is beneficial in our ability to manage our weight. Reducing stress begins by learning to control emotions and this is where HeartMath can help. The HeartMath System has taught thousands of people, from young children to seniors, how to replace negative emotions such as anxiety, a key contributor to overeating, with positive ones such as appreciation and caring.

One of the most important aspects of successful weight control is helping people learn to regulate their emotional balance in the rhythm of their day-to-day life.

Dr. Rollin McCraty, Executive Vice President and Director of Research, HeartMath Institute

At the core of emotional management is your intelligent heart. Science shows the human heart has an even greater neurological capacity than the brain, generating 60 times the electrical amplitude. These two powerful systems act in concert with each other to keep all of your body’s systems operating smoothly. During the best of times, in what is known as a state of heart coherence – when your heart rhythms are smooth and balanced – you function at optimal levels and your emotions are under control. When you’re out of coherence – heart rhythms are irregular or disordered – your emotions can spiral out of control and you’re liable to experience decreased energy or fatigue, anxiety, anger and other negative emotions and conditions. When you’re in command of your emotions, stress levels drops and your heart produces the anti-aging hormone DHEA, which actually makes you feel younger and more energetic and lowers your cortisol to more beneficial levels.

There are dozens of food diets today and perhaps the latest one to be embraced by the popular culture may be right for you. But are you emotionally prepared? At HeartMath we believe the very best diet begins with emotional regulation. The world’s greatest diet is also the world’s worst diet for you, if you can’t stick to it, and that often occurs when you can’t control your anxiety, anger and other emotions. Researchers at HeartMath have studied what we call the “wholeness diet,” which entails regulating your emotions through heart intelligence and coherence before and after you eat. Then, your intuitive heart eventually steers you away from overeating and toward foods that are good for you.

A HeartMath TIP:

The Quick Coherence Technique®, a rapid three-step tool, is a great first step for shifting into coherence and experiencing a sense of well-being. It only takes a minute and once you’ve learned it you’ll be adding heart power to will power, giving you greater ability to change old behaviors and habits.

Time needed: 5 minutes.

When you feel stressed or have the urge to eat outside of regular mealtimes, try the following, adapted from HeartMath’s Quick Coherence Technique:

  1. Heart focus:

    Shift your attention to the area of the heart and breathe slowly and deeply.

  2. Heart breathing:

    Keep your focus in the heart by gently breathing – five seconds in and five seconds out – through your heart – and do this two or three times.

  3. Heart feeling:

    Activate and sustain a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Focus on the good heart feeling as you continue to breathe through the area of your heart.

Benefits of Losing Excess Weight

  • Lower risk of heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, some cancers and many other health problems
  • Feel better, look better, and live longer
  • Increased energy to do more
  • Emotional strength
  • Feeling of empowerment, self-regulation, control over eating patterns

Tools For Managing Your Weight

Transforming Anxiety: The HeartMath Solution for Overcoming Fear and Worry and Creating Serenity: by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman. When you consider that most people have some anxiety about themselves, family, future and for other reasons, it helps explain why overweight and obesity are so prevalent. That’s because anxiety is a leading contributor to these conditions: Millions of people try to escape their anxieties through overeating, binge-eating and consumption of comfort foods. Transforming Anxiety provides proven solutions to help you overcome your fears and worries and create more serenity and a sense of well-being in your life. Based on IHM’s 16 years of research into the physiology of emotions, the book includes the scientifically proven Attitude Breathing® tool and Cut-thru® and Heart Lock-In® techniques to help you release your anxieties and replace them with new, positive feelings.
» Learn more

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension – Childre, Rozman, 2004. Learn more about the warning signs of chronic stress and what you should know about your “intelligent heart” and how it can help you immediately begin reducing the stress in your life. You’ll learn several key HeartMath tools and techniques, including the complete details of the Attitude Breathing® tool and step-by-step instructions on how and when to use it.
» Learn more

Learn to recognize your stressors so you can stop harmful emotional responses like binge-eating and eating too quickly. This informative book will tell you the warning signs of chronic stress and the latest research on your intelligent heart and its ability to help you immediately begin reducing your stress and start managing your emotions. HeartMath’s widely acclaimed Attitude Breathing® tool and Freeze-Frame® technique are included to help you transform your health and your life.

Solution for Energy Quantum Nutrients: Energy Out, Energy In

Posted on | by HeartMath

Quantum Nutrients: Energy Out, Energy In

Eat smart and exercise regularly: That’s what people generally believe to be a successful formula for maintaining a good supply of energy to do the things they want to do and live long and healthy lives. There’s no debate: This formula is a great start, but millions of people who subscribe to it nevertheless find their energy drained by the end of the day or work week. Ever wake up and almost immediately begin dreading your day before you climb out of bed? At a time when you’re supposed to be rested and ready to venture forth, you’ve already begun spending precious energy and your day has barely started. (See our Recommendations).

Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath and elsewhere know our thoughts and feelings are as important or perhaps more so than the food and drink we consume. It is our mental and emotional diets that determine our energy levels, health and well-being to a greater extent than most people realize.

As human beings we all want to be happy and free from misery… we have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger, attachment, fear and suspicion, while love and compassion and a sense of universal responsibility are the sources of peace and happiness.

Dalai Lama

The process by which the body’s systems are maintained, repaired and regenerated, though biologically complex, are easily grasped intellectually. When we have negative emotions such as anger, anxiety and dislike or hate, or think negative thoughts, we experience stress and our energy reserves are redirected. When our energy reserves are constantly redirected into the stress pathway, we frequently don’t have enough left for the normal regenerative processes that replenish the resources we’ve lost or repair damage to our bodies and defend us against disease. Over the long term, stress depletes our bodies’ systems and can severely damage our health and age us faster, mentally and physically.

In contrast, when we activate the power of our hearts and intentionally have sincere feelings such as appreciation, care and love, we allow our hearts’ electrical energy to work for us. Consciously choosing a core heart feeling over a negative one renews our body mentally, physically and emotionally. The more we do this the better we’re able to ward off stress and energy drains in the future. Heartfelt positive feelings fortify our energy systems and nourish the body at the cellular level. At HeartMath we call these emotions quantum nutrients.

We live in deeds, not years: In thoughts not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heartthrobs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

Aristotle

A HeartMath TIP:

Take a few minutes with this simple Asset/Deficit Balance Sheet to track your emotions and thoughts to see where you’re spending your energy.

  • On the top half of a sheet of paper, write “Assets.” On the bottom half, write “Deficits.” As you make your lists, be prepared to consider the effects on family, work and personal balance, and the negative consequences of each event.
  • Under Assets, list the positive events, conversations and interactions of the past few days, things that made you happy and gave you energy. Write how each asset, including ongoing ones – the quality of interactions with your friends, family, working environment, etc. – made you feel.
  • Under Deficits, list issues, conflicts and events in the period that were negative or draining, including conversations and events that turned from good to bad, for whatever reason, and how they made you feel.
  • Now, step back and, from the heart, note which deficits could have been neutralized or turned into assets at the time and still could be turned into assets, look or repeating patterns and write your insights and conclusions.

Adapted from the Asset/Deficit Balance Sheet available in various HeartMath materials, including the book The HeartMath Solution, by Doc Childre and Howard Martin, with Donna Beech.

You and Your Energy: Key Points

Our mental and emotional diets determine our energy levels, health and well-being much more than most people realize.
Look at life as an energy economy game. Each day, ask, “Are my energy expenditures – actions, reactions, thoughts and feelings – productive or nonproductive? During the course of my day, have I accumulated more stress or more peace?

Keeping an asset/deficit balance sheet even for a few days will give you an extremely clear picture of where and how you’re adding to your energy account and where and how you’re overdrawing it.

When we consciously evoke core heart feelings, we nourish our bodies at every level. Like quantum nutrients, core heart feelings keep our cells regenerating.

At the HeartMath Institute, our goal is to help you learn to generate emotional and mental coherence deliberately and on demand, so you ultimately spend more of your day at an optimal, regenerative level of energy efficiency.

Benefits of Intentional Emotions and Thoughts

  • Energy used for positive purposes and constantly replenished.
  • Look and feel mentally, physically, emotionally healthier.
  • Mental, physical aging reversed.
  • Outlook transformed to positive one.
  • Stress levels reduced.
  • Conversations, other interactions with people more relaxed, not draining.

Tools For Increasing Energy

emWave®: Regular use of this scientifically validated, stress-relief technology has proven to be a vital tool in reducing anxiety, stress, anger, emotional chaos and boosting energy and vitality. The emWave technology is easy to use and noninvasive. It will help you achieve heart coherence – synchronization between the heart and brain – and reach your optimal physical, mental and emotional balance. When your emotions are in balance, you stop the energy drain and start the energy gain. Then, by practicing the easy-to-learn techniques you’ll receive with your emWave only minutes a day will help you revitalize and re-energize your mind, body and spirit anytime, anywhere.
» Learn More

emWave® Pro: emWave Pro turns your computer into a self-contained heart-rhythm-coherence monitor and manager. It lets you see how thoughts and emotions affect your heart rhythms – negative ones pulling you down and draining your energy, positive ones lifting you up and allowing your body to perform its normal function of replenishing your energy. Discover how easily you can reduce your stress level and replace those negative emotions with positive ones that, with a little practice, can give you instant energy boosts and gradually help build a more invigorated you. Relying on decades of scientific research, the emWave Pro, in tandem with key HeartMath techniques that you’ll receive and easily learn, will help you increase your energy and start living life more fully.
» Learn More

Transforming Anxiety: The HeartMath Solution for Overcoming Fear and Worry and Creating Serenity: by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman. When you consider that most people have some anxiety about themselves, family, future and for other reasons, it helps explain why overweight and obesity are so prevalent. That’s because anxiety is a leading contributor to these conditions: Millions of people try to escape their anxieties through overeating, binge-eating and consumption of comfort foods. Transforming Anxiety provides proven solutions to help you overcome your fears and worries and create more serenity and a sense of well-being in your life. Based on IHM’s 16 years of research into the physiology of emotions, the book includes the scientifically proven Attitude Breathing® tool and Cut-thru® and Heart Lock-In® techniques to help you release your anxieties and replace them with new, positive feelings.

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension – Childre, Rozman, 2004. Learn more about the warning signs of chronic stress and what you should know about your “intelligent heart” and how it can help you immediately begin reducing the stress in your life. You’ll learn several key HeartMath tools and techniques, including the complete details of the Attitude Breathing® tool and step-by-step instructions on how and when to use it.
» Learn more

Solution for Managing Overwhelm

Posted on | by HeartMath

What is Overwhelm?

Many people experience relentless overwhelm every day and fret over how they can get though everything they have to do. The sense that you have to take care of everyone because no one else will or can, ambition that leads many to burn the candle at both ends, and performance anxiety stemming from the fear that not doing more will cost you your job, are a few of the byproducts of overwhelm.

Chronic overwhelm is one of the major causes of anxiety and anxiety disorders. When you’re overwhelmed, your mind overloads with all that’s going on. It takes a toll on your nervous, immune and hormonal systems, and left unattended will likely produce cycles of anxiety, fatigue and temporary despair. Your intelligent heart knows when you need to chill out and re-energize but unfortunately, your mind can easily override warning signals until you spiral down into overwhelm. People on this kind of overload are more susceptible to disease and they age faster.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.Henry David Thoreau

Whether you’re on the treadmill of stimulation overload, working at a job where the pace is unbearable and you can’t see a way out, or you simply want to rein in your emotions before overwhelm can take hold, you can rest assured knowing help is within reach. The HeartMath Institute has devoted more than 16 years to helping people around the world manage their stress and emotions and live healthier, happier lives with easy-to-learn tools practiced minutes a day.

Recognizing Overwhelm

  • Always rushed, too much to do, not enough time.
  • Mentally scattered, not feeling in control.
  • Tunnel vision: irritation at anyone or anything that breaks your focus.
  • Internal pressure: raw or gnawing feeling in your gut, knot in your stomach.
  • Impatience: lack of compassion for self and others, judgmental thinking.
  • Zombielike numbness: no feelings – positive or negative; mental or emotional paralysis.
  • Feeling disconnected from life.
  • Decreased enjoyment of projects, relationships, or life in general.
  • Feeling an all-consuming alarm and dread.

The Pressures of Time

Who hasn’t reached some milestone such as a birthday or anniversary, graduation or retirement or the passing of a loved one and paused to reflect on the relentless passage of time. It can safely be argued that collectively we are overwhelmed by the pressures of time now more than at any other point in history. The sense that there’s never enough time is a major energy drain and can leave us feeling inadequate, nervous and hopeless, adversely affecting our health and well-being.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.Author unknown

Time-shifting is a simple process in which time is saved and gained as you change your perceptions of it. Recall any situation that elicited a negative response from you and consider how much time you spent entwined in that response: was it a minute, five minutes, an hour or more? What if you had stepped back immediately and told yourself, “OK, it happened, but I won’t dwell on it”? How much time would you have saved then? How much would you have saved in the past year?

Consider the following from the groundbreaking book

From Chaos to Coherence – The Power to Change Performance, by HeartMath founder Doc Childre and Bruce Cryer

“Time shifting is survival in the Internet age. It describes an internal state so coherent that your perception of time – and your ability to shape it – changes dramatically. Every time you catch yourself before falling into a negative reaction, you have time shifted. Every time you stop long enough to find an intuitive solution instead of rushing ahead impulsively, you have time shifted. Every time you allow your intuitive intelligence to propel you out of inertia or confusion, you have time-shifted. If you arrive at a solution to a difficult personal or organizational issue in five minutes instead of five hours, you have time shifted. You have jumped out of the self-limiting mental frequency that says, “Certain things just take time,” into a new dimension. Time shifting means moving past standard linear time flows.”

A HeartMath TIP:

When you start feeling overwhelm or time pressure, take a few minutes to try these simple steps adapted from the HeartMath Attitude Breathing® tool.

  • Focus on your heart as you breathe in. Focus on your solar plexus as you breathe out.
  • Concentrate on a positive feeling or attitude as you breathe.
  • Lock in this feeling.
  • As you become adept at this technique select new feelings and attitudes.

In-depth details and a discussion about the HeartMath Attitude Breathing tool are available in the book Transforming Stress:

  • The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension.
  • Benefits of Managing Overwhelm/Time Pressure
  • New sense that you have the time you need
  • Hopeful feelings replace hopeless feelings
  • More time for things you want to do
  • Improved outlook on life
  • More patience with people, less irritable
  • More relaxed, greater enjoyment at work and play

Tools For Managing Overwhelm/Time Pressure

Transforming Anxiety: The HeartMath Solution for Overcoming Fear and Worry and Creating Serenity: by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman. When you consider that most people have some anxiety about themselves, family, future and for other reasons, it helps explain why overweight and obesity are so prevalent. That’s because anxiety is a leading contributor to these conditions: Millions of people try to escape their anxieties through overeating, binge-eating and consumption of comfort foods. Transforming Anxiety provides proven solutions to help you overcome your fears and worries and create more serenity and a sense of well-being in your life. Based on IHM’s 16 years of research into the physiology of emotions, the book includes the scientifically proven Attitude Breathing® tool and Cut-thru® and Heart Lock-In® techniques to help you release your anxieties and replace them with new, positive feelings.

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension – Childre, Rozman, 2004. Learn more about the warning signs of chronic stress and what you should know about your “intelligent heart” and how it can help you immediately begin reducing the stress in your life. You’ll learn several key HeartMath tools and techniques, including the complete details of the Attitude Breathing® tool and step-by-step instructions on how and when to use it.
» Learn more

Solution for Heart Disease And Hypertension

Posted on | by HeartMath

What is Heart Disease?

In the simplest of terms, heart/cardiovascular disease, the No.1 cause of death in the United States and in most countries today, is any condition that adversely affects the heart muscle or its blood vessels, ultimately resulting in the heart’s inability to pump enough blood to maintain the body’s systems. There are many types of heart disease, among them coronary artery disease, the most prevalent, atherosclerosis, angina and arrhythmia. All are greatly exacerbated by the presence of hypertension, which is simply the medical name for high blood pressure; the terms are used interchangeably. (See our Recommendations).

Connecting the mind, body and emotions, HeartMath offers a quickly learned scientifically validated approach to decreasing stress and impacting cardiac risk factors such as: high blood pressure, diabetes, arrhythmia and chest pain. Everyone needs to learn these techniques.Mimi Guarneri, MD, FACC, Medical Director Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine

Hypertension: The Silent Killer

One of the leading causes of heart attack and stroke and a major risk factor for developing heart disease is hypertension, widely known as the “silent killer” because the majority of people who have it don’t know it since there are no apparent symptoms. If you know you have high blood pressure you must act now to control it. If you don’t know whether you have it, see your physician to find out. High blood pressure can lead to heart attack, heart failure, stroke and kidney disease.

Nearly 1 in 3 American adults have high blood pressure.Mimi Guarneri, MD, FACC, Medical Director Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine

Do You Have High Blood Pressure?

The numbers are straightforward: Normal blood pressure is considered to be 120/80, with the first number representing the force of pressure exerted on the arteries, veins and heart chambers when the heart is contracting, or pumping blood out; and the second number is the pressure when the heart is not contracting, or filling with blood. If your blood pressure is 120-139 over 80-89 you have pre-hypertension. If you’re at 140/90 or higher, you have hypertension. There are a number of places where you can have your blood pressure checked, including doctors’ offices, clinics and drugstores.

Your risk for high blood pressure is greater if any of the following apply to you:

  • High level of anger, stress, anxiety, worry or fear.
  • Overweight or your diet includes foods high in salt or fat, and you’re not physically active.
  • Your family has a history of high blood pressure.

Although the medical community is aware of the predictors such as the above risk factors that contribute to high blood pressure and the dangers it poses, there is no known cause of high blood pressure in a large majority of cases. It is only in a small percentage of hypertension cases that causes are known, among them other medical problems and the medications people take.

If you are concerned about stress, anxiety, worry, fear or anger in your life or someone else’s, check out the following HeartMath books, which are also available as ebooks and audio programs:

  • Transforming Stress: Childre, Rozman, 2004. Learn about the warning signs of chronic stress and how your “intelligent heart” can help you immediately begin reducing the stress in your life.
  • Transforming Anxiety: Childre, Rozman, 2006 – Gives an in-depth look at why anxiety disorders are plaguing so many in today’s fast-paced world and how you can use the HeartMath System to overcome fear and worry and create more serenity in your life.
  • Transforming Anger: Childre, Rozman, 2003 – If you’re unable to control your anger, this book offers practical tools to help you succeed. Your own heart has an intelligence all its own that you can tap to manage anger, stress and much more.
  • Transforming Depression: Childre, Rozman, 2007 – Are you feeling hopeless and uninterested in things that you used to enjoy? You may be depressed. This book teaches you HeartMath techniques that help you lesson and eliminate feelings of depression.

The HeartMath Institute has been conducting scientific research and demonstration studies over the past 2 decades and has found a direct link between high blood pressure and stress. It works like this: The stress we experience activates our sympathetic nervous system, which increases adrenaline. The adrenaline makes the heart beat faster, causes blood vessels to constrict and prompts the production of cortisol, known as “the mother of all stress hormones.” Cortisol causes blood-vessel constriction as well as salt and water retention in the kidneys. The end result is elevation of blood pressure.

At the same time that HeartMath has been researching the connection between stress and high blood pressure, we’ve also been busy developing and demonstrating programs and tools to help people manage stress, anger and anxiety and transform their emotions using their “heart intelligence.”

Chris, a 45-year-old business executive whose family had a history of heart disease, was feeling extremely stressed, fatigued and generally in poor emotional health. After reviewing test results, his doctor told him it was critical for him to reduce his stress. He recommended practicing emotional restructuring techniques developed by the HeartMath Institute. First, his wife noticed a transformation, then his co-workers, staff and friends. New tests six weeks after undergoing the initial analysis confirmed his stress level was down and his blood pressure, which had been dangerously high, was now near normal.

After practicing HeartMath techniques, Chris began getting along with his family, colleagues and staff better than he could ever remember and he felt much more clearheaded and in command of his life.

A HeartMath TIP:

Use the Quick Coherence Technique®, a rapid three-step tool, that will help you start new heart and emotional coherence patterns so all of your body’s functions synchronize and you are able to respond to stressful situations more intelligently and ultimately reduce the stress that’s raising your blood pressure. Whenever you feel your stress buttons being pushed try the following:

  1. Heart focus: Shift your attention to the area of the heart and breathe slowly and deeply.
  2. Heart breathing: Keep your focus in the heart by gently breathing – five seconds in and five seconds out – through your heart. Do this two or three times.
  3. Heart feeling: Activate and sustain a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Focus on the good heart feeling as you continue to breathe through the area of your heart.

Benefits of Reducing Blood Pressure and Stress

Lower risk of heart attack, heart failure, stroke, kidney disease and complications to other health problems.

  • Fatigue less quickly or as often and have more energy to do things, including physical activities.
  • Less irritability and anger, think more clearly.
  • Get along better with family, friends, and coworkers, feel connected.
  • Revitalize your body, mind and spirit, feel happier.

Tools for Reducing Hypertension

Learn how to regulate your blood pressure at the source – the heart – and reduce the stress that causes high blood pressure.

  • What you and your doctor need to know about high blood pressure: Read what cardiologist Bruce Wilson, MD, co-author of The HeartMath Approach to Managing Hypertension, has to say about stress and high blood pressure, especially for people who have had a cardiac event.
  • Impact of a Workplace Stress Reduction Program on Blood Pressure and Emotional Health in Hypertensive Employees: This study examined the impact of the HeartMath Inner Quality Management stress-management program on blood pressure, emotional health and workplace-related measures in hypertensive employees at a global information technology firm.

Take me to the HeartMath Store now to learn more about HeartMath’s products or call us: 1-800-450-9111

Solution for Improving Your Immune System

Posted on | by HeartMath

Your Immune System

The immune system is your body’s intelligent and highly efficient process of protecting you against infection by identifying and killing pathogens – infectious agents. When your immune system is functioning properly, it is on a constant mission to seek and destroy these pathogens, distinguishing them from your cells and tissues as it goes about its work. When the immune system is somehow compromised, including by chemotherapy, side effects from drugs or congenitally, you are at risk of contracting any of a host of infections and diseases.

Maintaining good health so your immune system can protect you is vital to your well-being. Eating the right foods and regular exercise will go a long way toward that end, but may not be enough for a lot of people. Despite healthy diets and routine exercise, millions of people still are subject to frequent ailments because their immune systems aren’t performing up to their capability. Immune-system disorders can occur for many reasons and if you suspect this condition in yourself or another, a physician’s advice should be sought.

You Really Should Care

Researchers over the past 25 years have shown that our emotions may be as important to our immune systems, perhaps more so, than even the foods we consume. Among them are the HeartMath Institute’s Rollin McCraty and a research team, who wanted to go beyond the 1980s experiment by Harvard psychologist Dr. David McClelland. In this they found that immune-system functioning, as measured by IgA, or secretory immunoglobulin A levels, increased in students who were shown a video about Mother Teresa. A duplicate experiment produced very similar results in the study, The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Compassion and Anger. After test subjects learned the HeartMath Institute’s Freeze Frame® technique to guide them, they were asked to intentionally feel care and compassion for five minutes. Several days later, they were asked to feel five minutes of self-induced anger by remembering a situation or experience that made them angry and trying to recapture the feeling they had at the time.

Your emotions affect every cell in your body. Mind and body, mental and physical, are intertwined.Dr. Thomas Tutko, Father of Sports Psychology

The results McCraty and the team obtained were quite remarkable: In both cases, after five minutes of feeling care and compassion, the subjects had an immediate 41 percent average increase in their IgA levels. After one hour, IgA levels returned to normal, but slowly increased over the next six hours. The researchers observed that self-induced care resulted in a much larger rise in IgA than the care experienced by viewing the Mother Teresa video. In some individuals, IgA increased as much as 240 percent immediately after they performed the Freeze-Frame technique. Interestingly, there also was an 18 percent increase in IgA levels when the participants experienced anger, but an hour later, their IgA levels had dropped to only about half of what they were before the anger. Even after six hours, their IgA levels were still not back to normal.

Key findings: Heart-focused, sincere, positive feeling states boost the immune system, while negative emotions may suppress the immune response for up to six hours following the emotional experience. —The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Compassion and Anger, 1995, Rein, Atkinson and McCraty

A HeartMath TIP:

Cut-Thru: Here’s a simple exercise adapted from the HeartMath Cut-Thru technique to help you achieve emotional coherence, which has been shown to improve the efficiency of the immune system.

  • Be aware of how you feel about an issue at hand.
  • Breathe a positive feeling or attitude.
  • Be objective, as if the issue or problem is someone else’s.
  • Rest peacefully in this neutral state, allowing your heart intelligence new perspectives and possibilities.
  • Soak and relax all resistances and disturbing or perplexing feelings in your heart’s compassion.
  • Ask for guidance, then be patient and receptive. While awaiting an answer from the heart find something or someone to genuinely appreciate.

In-depth details and a discussion about the Cut-Thru technique are included in a number of HeartMath materials, including the book Transforming Anxiety, The HeartMath Solution for Overcoming Fear and Worry and Creating Serenity, by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman.

Benefits of a Coherent Heart

  • Lowers stress levels
  • Boosts immune system, enabling healthier living
  • Reduces anxiety, anger and other negative emotions
  • Raises energy and vitality
  • Increases caring and compassion

Benefits of Intentional Emotions and Thoughts

  • Energy used for positive purposes and constantly replenished.
  • Look and feel mentally, physically, emotionally healthier.
  • Mental, physical aging reversed.
  • Outlook transformed to positive one.
  • Stress levels reduced.
  • Conversations, other interactions with people more relaxed, not draining.

Solution for Developing Your Intuition

Posted on | by HeartMath

Developing Your Intuition is the process of perceiving or knowing things to a high degree of certainty without conscious reasoning. Researchers with the HeartMath Institute and many others who have conducted numerous controlled and scientifically validated studies over more than half a century have expanded the definition of intuition to include not only conscious perception by the mind alone, but also by the body’s entire psychophysiological system. This perception often is evidenced by a range of emotions and measurable physiological changes exhibited or detected throughout the body, according to the study Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition: McCraty, Atkinson and Bradley, 2004.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

Taking into account the array of intuition research, along with findings from years of experimentation at its research facilities in Boulder Creek, Calif., and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, HeartMath theorizes that intuitive abilities we’re unable to attribute to subconsciously stored memories and experiences or to the conscious brain’s analytic processes, make sense in another context: The body is connected by sensory perception to a field of energy that enfolds the information we attribute to intuition.

What the Heart Knows

What we know today about what the heart knows is truly exciting and the implications are great. Relying on a variety of data from numerous studies and experiments, particularly heart-rhythm-pattern measurements, IHM’s findings point to the human heart as playing a key role in the intuitive process, and a recent study concludes the heart actually receives intuitive information faster than the brain – by a second or slightly more. This would seem to attribute some independent intelligence to the heart: In fact, the concept of a “heart brain” is widely accepted today.

It has been established that the heart has a powerful electromagnetic field and its own complex nervous system and circuitry that generates up to an estimated 60 times the electrical amplitude of the brain. The electromagnetic signal our heart rhythms produce actually can be measured in the brain waves of people around us. It is no wonder that the findings by researchers at the HeartMath Institute and elsewhere conclude the heart has its own organized intelligence network enabling it to act independently, learn, remember and produce feelings – all attributes which, until recently, were nearly universally held to be solely in the brain’s dominion.

… but it is wisdom to believe the heart.From a poem by George Santayana, 1863-1952.

You and Your Intuition

Perhaps the knowledge that the heart possesses this intuitive intelligence doesn’t mean much to you because your experience has been that although some people seem capable of tapping into their intuition, you haven’t been able to do it. As far as you know, you’ve never experienced intuition, or it is such a rarity that you readily dismiss all such instances as mere coincidence or sheer luck. What would it mean if you could fine-tune this intuitive ability? Is it even possible? The HeartMath Institute’s extensive scientific studies indicate you can develop and enhance your intuition. In tandem with its years of research, HeartMath also has engaged in comprehensive development and testing of tools and programs to help you develop your heart’s intuitive intelligence and use it advantageously.

Heart intuition or intelligence brings the freedom and power to accomplish what the mind, even with all the disciplines or affirmations in the world, cannot do if it’s out of sync with the heart.The HeartMath Solution, 1999, Childre and Martin

The Rhythm of the Heart

After years of research, the very core of HeartMath’s findings regarding the ability of human beings to improve their lives emotionally, physically and mentally is the revelation of what is known as “heart-rhythm coherence.” In simple terms, here is what heart-rhythm coherence and incoherence mean, followed by a description of what happens when the heart is in or out of coherence:

A coherent heart is one that has smooth, ordered heart-rhythm patterns such as might be seen in an electrocardiogram.

An incherent heart is marked by jagged, disordered or irregular heart-rhythm patterns.

As testing has shown, events, sights, sounds and other stimuli in the environment around you contribute to your heart-rhythm patterns, and regardless of the favorability or unfavorability of these patterns, the heart transmits them to the brain for processing. This process includes storing and remembering these patterns for future use. When heart-rhythm patterns are coherent, the heart’s ability to perceive intuitive information is heightened. Stress chemical pathways reverse, paving the way for increased synchronization between the heart and brain. It is in this synchronized state, which athletes call being “in the zone,” that you can achieve optimal mental clarity, cognitive performance and perception of intuitive information.

When you have a coherent heart, you are at your best. If you are accustomed to being appreciative, caring, compassionate, all of which lead to a coherent heart.

Your heart processes your caring attitude and responses into coherent rhythm patterns and these are sent to the brain, which in turn triggers remembered responses appropriate to or learned from previous similar situations.

When heart-rhythm patterns are incoherent – disordered and irregular – your heart sends these unfavorable patterns to the brain, which then searches its stored heart-rhythm patterns in search of a match and simply triggers a remembered emotional response – what you might call learned behavior. When things irritate or anger you and more often than not you respond by shouting or slamming a door the brain is likely to recommend the same emotional response the very next time something angers you. Anger leads to incoherence, which leads to a negative response, which leads to continued incoherence.

The Coherent Heart (Heart-Brain Interactions, Psychophysiological Coherence, and the Emergence of System-Wide Order). McCraty, Atkinson, Tomasino, and Bradley

A HeartMath TIP:

Try the Quick Coherence® technique to shift your emotional state and send positive emotions through your system.

  • Heart focus: Shift your attention to the area of your heart and breathe slowly and deeply.
  • Heart breathing: Keep your focus in the heart by gently breathing – 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out – through the area of your heart – and do this two or three times.
  • Heart feeling: Activate and sustain a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Focus on the good heart feeling as you continue breathing through the area of your heart.

Benefits of Developing Your Intuition

  • Make better, heart-based decisions more often
  • Improve physical, mental, emotional health
  • Increase effectiveness at home, work, school
  • Reduce stress
  • Maximize your creativity

Tools For Developing Your Intuition

Inner Balance™The Inner Balance Transformation Sytem is an innovative technology to improve health and well being. It includes self monitoring and integrated training. You simply run a session focusing on a positive moment and track your results over time. Research has shown that focusing on positive emotions like appreciation can greatly reduce the effects of stress and deliver you to a more calm peaceful state.
» Learn More

emWave®: Regular use of this scientifically validated, stress-relief technology has proven to be a vital tool in reducing anxiety, stress, anger, emotional chaos and boosting energy and vitality. The emWave technology is easy to use and noninvasive. It will help you achieve heart coherence – synchronization between the heart and brain – and reach your optimal physical, mental and emotional balance. When your emotions are in balance, you stop the energy drain and start the energy gain. Then, by practicing the easy-to-learn techniques you’ll receive with your emWave only minutes a day will help you revitalize and re-energize your mind, body and spirit anytime, anywhere.
» Learn More

Heart Lock-In Technique®: Using what HeartMath considers to be one of its foundational techniques for achieving synchronization between the heart and brain, you’ll to learn achieve and maintain a coherence level that will allow you to distinguish between the voice in your head and the one in your heart, where positive feelings of love, caring, appreciation, etc., will quickly transform you in ways you may never have dreamed possible. Learn the steps of the Heart Lock-In technique in the powerful book The HeartMath Solution, Childre, Martin, 1999.
» Learn More

Before Cognition: The Active Contribution of the Heart/ANS to Intuitive Decision Making as Measured on Repeat Entrepreneurs in the Cambridge Technopol: This report, presented at the Fourth AGSE International Entrepreneurship Research Exchange in Brisbane, Australia in February, 2007, provides the preliminary results of a study on the psychophysiological basis of entrepreneurial intuition possessed by that unique sector of persons in the business world “who have extraordinarily accurate hunches about the locus of new future business opportunities.” Repeat, or so-called serial entrepreneurs, were selected for the study “because they have beaten the odds against success.”
» Learn More

Solution for Effective Decision-making

Posted on | by HeartMath

The Decision-Making Process

Decision-making is the reasoning process we use to select a course of action from among any number of possibilities that present themselves mentally or otherwise. Making a decision either can involve a period of deliberation or seemingly none at all. Friends, family and others, sometimes even complete strangers, will advise us to stop and think before making a decision and never do the first thing that comes into our heads. Contrast that with wisdom passed down through the ages recommending we go with our instincts or that we listen to our hearts.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882.

It turns out that our emotions are much more important in the decision-making process than previously thought. The HeartMath Institute has conducted more than 16 years of research and has compiled substantial data about the role of emotions and the brain in decision-making. Quite often the choices we regret are the products of unmanaged emotions, but when we allow calm and intuitive heart-based feelings to guide us the outcomes of our decisions are far more favorable.

When the Heart Decides

Researchers with HeartMath and other organizations believe intuitive feelings emanate from the heart. They have found evidence showing the human heart has an intuitive intelligence greater than science and medicine have historically believed. Even without our realizing it, the heart guides us in much of what we do, but often we allow our brains or our unmanaged emotions to take the lead role in our decision-making and later regret our choices.

We now know the heart has a powerful electromagnetic field and complex nervous system and circuitry that generate up to an estimated 60 times the electrical amplitude of the brain. The electromagnetic signal our heart rhythms produce can actually be measured in the brain waves of people around us.

We also know our heart-rhythm patterns say a lot about our emotional balance and the stress we are experiencing: The calmer we are the more regular our heart-rhythm patterns are, and the more stress we feel the more irregular the patterns are. Researchers at HeartMath and elsewhere have concluded the heart possesses its own organized intelligence network that enables it to act independently, learn, remember and produce feelings. Until recently it was believed only the brain was capable of these functions. Through years of studies involving thousands of people, researchers at HeartMath and elsewhere have shown when we intentionally experience positive feelings such as care and appreciation we can improve our heart-rhythm patterns. That means reduced stress, getting sick less frequently, thinking more clearly, even living longer. So go ahead, let your heart decide.

The Stress of Making Decisions

In today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing world, we’re expected to make countless decisions – quickly. The pressure to think and act quickly never seems to let up and the consequences of not keeping up are always hanging over our heads. No wonder stress levels are at all-time highs among Americans.

“An estimated 75% to 90% of visits to primary-care physicians are for stress-related problems.”

–American Institute of Stress

What do we get for all the stress… confusion, irritability, anxiety, anger, illness and more severely impacting effective decision-making. You can, however, control negative emotional responses – the primary causes of stress – thereby reducing your stress to manageable levels. The knowledge HeartMath has gained and the scientifically validated tools we have developed has aided thousands of people in many walks of life to master their emotions and begin making the kinds of decisions that improve the quality of their own and other people’s lives.

Life’s Big Decisions

Not all decisions are equal, and not all take the same toll on us. The big decisions take much more intellectual thought, clarity and focus. Weighty decisions are stressful enough, but if we put them off until later, we’re bargaining for the stress that comes with indecision and we don’t need any more stress.

HeartMath’s Freeze-Frame® Technique is so uniquely suited to managing the nagging of lesser day-to-day decisions and the “stress emergencies” of life’s big decisions that it’s taught in most HeartMath training programs for Fortune 100 companies, health-care organizations and school systems. Freeze-Frame is a multipurpose technique for reducing stress and emotional chaos and improving decision-making.

Organizational Decision-Making

“The results of HeartMath interventions) speak for themselves. Our airline, Cathay Pacific, now prides itself on delivering an individual style of service, straight from the heart. This has resulted in consistently being rated as having the best in-flight service in the world.”

–Peter Buecking, Sales/Marketing Director, Cathay Pacific Airways

Buecking and many others with public- and private-sector organizations have learned coherent alignment of the heart and mind through HeartMath training. Employees at all levels gain greater ability to manage emotions, igniting the higher centers of the brain, sparking greater insight and better decision-making skills.

Researchers investigated the impact of HeartMath’s Inner Quality Management program on managers and staff within the California Personnel Retirement System’s Information Technology Services Division, which had recently initiated profound changes to meet the changing information services marketplace. Learning new technology skills proved to be challenging. The results suggested that by facilitating increased self-management of the participants’ mental and emotional turmoil, the program enhanced employees’ ability to defuse personal and organizational stress. Check out the HeartMath book From Chaos to Coherence for further details on the Inner Quality Management program.

A HeartMath TIP:

For most decisions, try the following to rapidly shift your emotional state by sending positive emotions through your system and opening up the pathways of communication between your heart and brain. With practice you can routinely achieve the clarity and “heart coherence” necessary for optimal heart-brain decision-making.

  • Heart focus: Shift your attention to the area of your heart and breathe slowly and deeply.
  • Heart breathing: Keep your focus in the heart by gently breathing – 5 seconds in and five seconds out – through the area of your heart – and do this two or three times.
  • Heart feeling: Activate and sustain a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Focus on the good heart feeling as you continue breathing through the area of your heart.

(Adapted from HeartMath’s acclaimed Quick Coherence™ technique which is included in the book, Transforming Stress.)
For more complex, life-changing decisions, we recommend the Freeze-Frame technique.

Benefits of Successful Decision-Making

  • Less stress
  • Emotional balance
  • Time and resources used more efficiently
  • Better communication and success at home, school, work and socially
  • Fewer regrets

Tools For Effective Decision-Making

Inner Balance™ & emWave®: Regular use of these scientifically validated, stress-relief technologies has proven to be a vital tool in reducing anxiety, stress, anger, emotional chaos and boosting energy and vitality. The Inner Balance & emWave products are easy to use and noninvasive. They will help you achieve heart coherence – synchronization between the heart and brain – and reach your optimal physical, mental and emotional balance. When your emotions are in balance, you stop the energy drain and start the energy gain. Then, by practicing the easy-to-learn techniques you’ll receive with your HeartMath technologies only minutes a day will help you revitalize and re-energize your mind, body and spirit anytime, anywhere.
» Learn More

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension – Childre, Rozman, 2004. Learn more about the warning signs of chronic stress and what you should know about your “intelligent heart” and how it can help you immediately begin reducing the stress in your life. You’ll learn several key HeartMath tools and techniques, including the complete details of the Attitude Breathing® tool and step-by-step instructions on how and when to use it.
» Learn more

What You Need to Know About Stress

Posted on | by HeartMath

Five Uncommonly Know Facts

Fact: Your body doesn’t care if it’s a big stress or a little one.

The human body doesn’t discriminate between a BIG stress or a little one. Regardless of the significance, stress affects the body in predictable ways. A typical stress reaction, which most of us experience dozens of times each day, begins with a cascade of 1,400 biochemical events in your body. If these reactions are left unchecked we age prematurely, our cognitive function is impaired, our energy is drained, and we are robbed of our effectiveness and clarity.

Fact: Stress can make smart people do stupid things.

Stress causes what brain researchers call “cortical inhibition.” The phenomenon of cortical inhibition helps to explain why smart people do dumb things. Simply said, stress inhibits a small part of your brain and you can’t function at your best.

Fact: Many people are oblivious to their stress.

We can be physiologically experiencing stress yet mentally oblivious to it because we’ve become so accustomed to it. Some have become so adapted to stress that it can seem to be our normal state. Small stresses accumulate quickly and impair our mental and emotional clarity and our overall health. Eventually it shows up as a bad decision, an overreaction or an unwanted diagnosis at the doctor’s office.

Fact: We can control how we respond to stress.

We don’t need to be victims to our own emotions, thoughts and attitudes. We can control how we respond to stress and we can become more sensitive to stressful situations and how they are affecting us before it manifests as a physical, mental or emotional complaint. There are simple, scientifically validated solutions to stress that empower people to rewire their own stress response.

Fact: The best strategy is to handle stress in the moment.

The best way to manage stress is to deal with it the very moment you feel it come up. Millions of Americans unsuccessfully use the binge-and-purge approach when it comes to stress. They stress out all day, believing that they can wait until later to recover when they go to an evening yoga class, go to the gym or take the weekend off. Unfortunately, when we put off going for our own inner balance our bodies have already activated the stress response and it’s our health that suffers.

Take this survey to see how stress affects your quality of life, and what strategies work best for handling stress in the moment.