What's the Most Important Step You Can Take to Dramatically Improve Your Health?

"Learn how to manage emotional stress effectively.All of my clinical and personal experiences over the years have me convinced that no other factor has more influence over your health.Not diet, not exercise, not even how much you sleep."

Why is emotional stress one of the most significant causes of all chronic health challenges?

Because your body cannot defend itself against the damage that emotional stress creates quietly over time. Your body pays a heavy physiological price for every single moment that you feel anxious, tense, frustrated, and angry.

I'm not suggesting that you should strive to never feel these emotions. Anxiety, tension, frustration, and anger all serve important purposes when they first arise. The danger is in experiencing these emotions on a chronic basis.

Emotional stress sets off a series of reactions in your body that involve your sympathetic nervous system, the portion of your nervous system that would increase your chance of surviving if you were to run into a mountain lion during a hike. In such a situation, your sympathetic nervous system would:

• Speed up and intensify your heart and breathing rates, so that you could have more oxygen and nutrients available to your muscles to run or fight.
• Divert the bulk of your blood supply to your large muscles groups to run or fight.
• Slow or even shut down your digestive system so as to not waste blood, nutrients, and oxygen that could be used to run or fight.
• Stimulate the release of extra glucose into your blood to give you a burst of energy, just as a cheetah's spleen gushes extra blood into its circulation when it needs a burst of acceleration.
• Cause your adrenal glands to release epinephrine and norepinephrine into your system to increase cardiac output and increase blood sugar.
• Stimulate the release of cortisol from your adrenal glands to increase blood sugar and energy.
• Increase the diameter of your pupils to allow for more light to enter your eyes and more acute vision for fighting and running quickly on any type of terrain.Clearly, it is to your advantage to have a healthy sympathetic nervous system, one that is capable of providing all of the functions listed above during physical emergencies.

What you don't want is for your body to experience all of the above on a continuous, low-grade level because of emotional stress.And this is exactly what many of us are suffering from in today's hectic world.

Emotional stress is immensely harmful to your health because your body reacts to it in the same way that it would react if you came upon a wild mountain lion. Not always to the same degree, of course, but there's no question that your sympathetic nervous system increases its output whenever you feel anxious, tense, frustrated, or angry. In other words, whenever you feel stressed.

There's really no need to provide a list of health conditions that are partly caused by emotional stress,because every health condition is partly caused by emotional stress. Emotional stress always equals increased output by the sympathetic nervous system, which always equals accelerated aging and breakdown of your tissues.

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