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What causes you stress and how do you relieve stress? For me, it is fear of heights. I didn’t realize I had acrophobia, which is a great fear of heights, until I was driving in north-eastern India some years ago. The memory came back to me recently in Juneau Alaska when my wife asked me to go on a cable car to the top of Mt Roberts. Both experiences induce stress and make me wonder how I can relieve stress.

Self-hypnosis, also known as autosuggestion, is a situation where a person hypnotizes himself. The reason for such an act varies from individual to individual. Some do it to quit smoking, some for dieting purpose; But the main aim is always to improve one’s quality of life. Whether the method actually works or not, has been a matter of debate among the academic communities. Regardless, from an art to becoming a science subject, it has open up numerous possibilities in the improvement of the quality of life for many people. Only a short training period and a little patience is required for you to be able to use this form of therapy. Although the results vary among individuals, as a rapidly developing science, it had helped many to overcome the hurdles in their lives.

I really couldn’t shut my brain off today. I just couldn’t stop thinking.

“What drove me to work online?”

How did I decide that THIS is what I’m going to do?

What drove me from earning over $6k a month as a personal trainer, a single father with a 1 year old son, to deciding that I was going to be successful in this world of 1s and 0s (that’s internet speak for you non-nerds)?

What is my motivation for working online…..it must have been insanity.

Absolutely.

To be competent in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), You have to master four main skills:

1. Calibration: This refers to the ability to read people’s mind. There must have been occasions that people assumed that you are angry while in fact you are feeling quite all right. In those instances, these people misread you, in other words, they did not calibrate you properly your feelings. Calibration refers to reading what inside a person’s mind regardless of the physical appearances maybe. A good example of where a situation involves a lot of calibration is at the World Poker Championship. Here the players are constantly trying to read what is in the other players mind to see who is calling the bluff.

Before I proceed to tell you how to deal with stress, I want to give you some idea of how people respond to stress. Then I want to introduce you to the idea of negative self-talk - one of the great enemies of stress reduction techniques. My first example is Jane who is failing to cope at work.

What has happened to 42-year-old Jane? No previous stress attacks or mental-health problems. But she came to me because she was very stressed at work. She felt she was being criticised all the time and that her colleagues did not respect her productivity. She became socially phobic. He has difficulty going out with her husband. She hides away from people when she goes to parties.

Having struggled through my own alcoholism and drug addiction, I know what a horrible place it is to be. The sense of shame and guilt you feel almost makes you feel like a sub-standard human being sometimes. And that can be a really lonely and isolated place …

One of the big issues around having alcoholism or drug addiction, is the fact that even though they are widely regarded as a disease in medical circles, there are lots of people who just don’t agree or see it that way. You certainly wouldn’t get the same response from people, as if you were to come out with cancer for example, where you’d be given a lot more encouragement and support.

You had trouble concentrating, your work and social life was suffering and you couldn’t keep it together long enough to hold on to regular a job for long.

One day, while surfing the web, you read an article on the Internet about adult attention deficit disorder, otherwise known as ADD and wondered if you had it.

You got checked out by prominent psychologist who specialized in adult ADD diagnosis and sure enough, you are suffering from the disorder.

The revelation is bitter sweet. On the one hand you now know what has been happening to you. On the other, you now have more questions than ever before.

Having watched the presidential and vice presidential debates, and having an interest in stress, I started to wonder about the effects of this debate on the four people on the two tickets. Sarah Palin, John McCain, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are the four contenders experiencing the stress. But what about the stress during the televised debates?

The first major stressor during debates is the ultimate victory or loss. At the back of their mind must be the constant fear that they might make an incredible blunder. With the dual pressure of handling content intelligently and presenting oneself as a credible and attractive person comes great strain.