Three guided relaxation sessions:

THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF STRESS

The World Health Organization cites stress as "a global epidemic." They say that the effects of stress are more than emotional or physical. Stress affects all aspects of well-being, the end result being disease and illness. In a recent article in American Psychological Association it was reported that “75-90 percent of all physician office visits are for stress related ailments. Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.”

SURPRISING HEALTH BENEFITS FROM RELAXATION

“The simple act of becoming relaxed can have surprising health benefits. In addition to the obvious psychological effects of relieving stress and mental tension, the new findings indicate, deep relaxation, if practiced regularly can strengthen the immune system and produce a host of other medically valuable physiological changes. Relaxation may also help ward off disease by making people less susceptible to viruses, and by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Research by Dr. Dean Ornish, director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in San Francisco, has shown that relaxation training improves blood flow to the heart. He also found that relaxation lowered cholesterol levels and lessened the severity of angina attacks.

Relaxation offers relief for many asthmatics by diminishing both the emotional upsets that can trigger attacks and the constriction of air passages that chokes breathing, according to a report by Paul Lehrer of Rutgers Medical School.

Diabetics can benefit from relaxation, according to research at the Duke University Medical Center. In a series of studies, Dr. Richard Surwit found that relaxation improved the body's ability to regulate glucose in patients with the most common type of diabetes. It is the body's inability to control glucose that ultimately leads to the damage done by the disease.

In a recent article in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Dr. Kabat-Zinn reported a sharp decrease in pain and related symptoms in patients trained in relaxation at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The patients in the study were able to lessen or, in some cases, stop altogether their use of pain drugs.

In another study researchers taught relaxation techniques to residents of a retirement home. After a month of training their levels of natural killer cells and antibody titers - indicators of resistance to tumors and viruses - had improved significantly, according to a report in Health Psychology.” Daniel Goleman, The New York Times

STRESS AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

For thousands of years, people believed that stress made you sick. In the last decade, scientists like Dr. Esther Sternberg, director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have been rediscovering the links between the brain and the immune system.

According to Dr. Sternberg, if you’re chronically stressed, the part of the brain that controls the stress response is going to be constantly pumping out a lot of stress hormones. The immune cells are being bathed in molecules which are essentially telling them to stop fighting. And so in situations of chronic stress your immune cells are less able to respond to an invader like a bacteria or a virus. National Institute of Health Online