You may understand that your thoughts have a profound effect on your personal reality, but you may find that it is difficult, if not impossible to think of positive future possibilities while mired in negative feelings like fear, guilt, remorse and unworthiness.

It may be intuitive to understand that our solutions can only be found while our brain is in the ‘state’ of better feeling thoughts - and yet we may be unable to state specifically HOW we can change our brain state.

This blog, the companion book and the guided meditation MP3s provide such a path, and include practical meditations to take these theories and apply them to release normal daily stress and even heal from PTSD - no matter what caused the trauma.

Stress Is A Reflex.

All of us have experienced traumatic stress at some point within our lifetime.

We experience loss, we experience unwanted changes, we experience difficulty. And our brains are genetically wired to respond to these stimuli with the stress response.

When we experience a traumatic event, our stress response goes way beyond our physical movement and our feelings. In fact, the brain literally rewires and even our genetic expression changes to prepare the body for emergency.

For instance, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that chronic stress can alter the expression of genes involved in immune response, inflammation, and metabolism.

The Immunology of Stress

The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that acute and chronic stressors activate the immune system in different ways.

• Acute activation of the immune system in response to a threat is regulated by glucocorticoid negative feedback, which is a mechanism that helps maintain homeostasis.

• However, chronic stress, which involves persistent exposure to stressors, leads to a chronic activation of the immune system.

Chronic stress can contribute to what's known as an "allostatic load" - a kind of biological burden on the body that occurs when it's continuously trying to adapt to stress. This allostatic load is associated with an inflammatory state that has been linked to stress-related disorders such as depression and anxiety.

The study indicates that chronic stress can increase inflammation not only in peripheral parts of the body but also in the brain. This inflammation can alter the metabolism of neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that transmit signals in the brain. This alteration can impact the activation of different brain regions and lead to an increase in adverse behavioral health symptoms like anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure), anxiety, and fatigue. It can also cause problems with emotion regulation.

The researchers also note that interventions aimed at targeting the immune system and its downstream effects on the brain have shown some efficacy in treating stress-related behavioral health disorders. However, they emphasize that future studies are needed to better understand when and how anti-inflammatory agents should be used to treat these kinds of conditions​¹​.

Thinking Can Make Stress WORSE

A crisis event in our lives may not be immediately damaging - but thinking about that trauma over and over again will have the effect of reinforcing networks of neural connections, thus magnifying the negative aspects of the crisis into various forms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder... which in some cases, can take professional therapy, considerable time and effort to treat.

A Solution For Stress Relief

Let us explore a practical application of the science of how the brain and emotions work, so that we can make a conscious choice, and apply our intention to specifically unwire many, if not all of the stress reflexes we have acquired through our travels.