Managing your stress levels is one of the cornerstones in preventing acne. Before you can manage anything you should understand it. Makes sense? OK, so let’s start by looking at what is stress and what causes it.

What is stress

Stress is your body’s natural response to situation that you perceive to be threatening. It’s the fight or flight response. The body responses to a potentially life-threatening situation by gearing all the resources to fight the attacked or flee (flight) the situation.

That stomach wrenching feeling you get when you think of a deadlines, bills, exams, etc is the same response, just usually less severe.

Here’s the rub:

Most stress is about what may happen – “what if this happens, what if that happens?”. It has nothing to do with the here and now.

Let’s say you get an unexpected bill in the mail. If your bank account shows plenty of zeros but nothing before them you may start to worry about how to come up with the money to pay the bill. Or you may start thinking of all the bad things that happen to you if you can’t pay this bill.

Just recognize that the scary images/movies/feelings/sounds playing in your head cause the stress – not the situation itself. The bill is neutral, it’s what you perceive of it that triggers the stress.

Now that you know that you are not a victim of stress, but rather that stress is something you do to yourself, the solution seems obvious. Just stop doing that. Stop playing those scary images in your head.

Yes, I know, this is one of those darn things that are easier said than done. It’s not like you intentionally imagine those scary things. This stuff flies on autopilot. You get a bill and WHAM the stress hits you.

How to deal with stress

So how can you change something that running on autopilot in your head? Well first of all you have to understand that it’s a learned response. When you were child and saw a bill your brain didn’t automatically trigger a stress response. So it’s something you have trained your brain to do.

Whatever you repeat often enough goes into the subconscious mind (i.e. autopilot). Let’s take driving a car (or riding a bike) as an example. When you first started it took you quite a bit of conscious effort. You had to observe the traffic, gas, clutch and brake pedals were awkward . You had to focus when shifting gears. After you got few miles on your tires things started getting easier. Now you don’t even have to think about it – it runs on autopilot.

The same thing has happened with stress. Everytime you have seen a bill (or whatever triggers stress for you) you play those scary images in your head. You start asking the ‘what if’ questions. Repeat that often enough and every time you see a bill your brain triggers those same images.

The good news is that you can rewire or retrain your brain.

You just have to repeat the ‘training process’. This time you do it consciously and with much more useful response. So you can train your brain to trigger more useful response instead of stress. For example you could train your brain to find out ways you could save money or make few extra bucks to pay for the bill. It’s much more useful response than despairing over the bill.

Stop the stress response

So here’s what you can do. The next time you see a bill and you notice that you are getting stress yell STOP inside your head. Just so that you stop those images and thoughts that make you stressed out. Then just force yourself to remain calm and think of ways to pay the bill. Maybe you can think of few ways to save enough money to pay the bill.

Once you know that you can come up with enough money to pay the bill you won’t feel stressed. You know that it won’t threaten you anymore.

Do that every time you get a bill and after a while you have retrained your brain and won’t feel stressed anymore. You have to repeat this with every stressor (events that trigger stress).

Hypnosis for stress

Looking for a way to kick stress out faster?

This is where hypnosis comes in. Hypnosis is really nothing more than a relaxed state of mind. On this relaxed state your brain is more receptive to retraining or suggestions.

What you can achieve with few hypnosis sessions may take weeks or months of conscious reprogramming. Since hypnosis sessions are conducted/ recorded with professional hypnotherepists the results are more comprehensive. By doing it yourself you have to work through each and every stressor, but a hypnosis session or CD can through all of them at once.

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