Superpower Within

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How To Harness The HEALING POWER Of Relaxation!

Relaxation is a really key component in creating a balanced physical, mental and spiritual reality for yourself. One of the main benefits of relaxation is that it is the best antidote to excessive stress in your life.

Let me explain how stress affects you.

OK. Transport yourself back in time… you’re walking out of your cave and are shocked to see a sabre-toothed tiger eyeing up its next meal… YOU!

What happens next is that part of the most primitive element of your brain, the paleo section, secretes cortisol (amongst other things) and prepares your body for action… the fight or flight reaction. Heart rate increases and blood is pumped to your muscles. Eyes dilate. Blood is diverted away from extremities so that you don’t lose too much blood if you are injured fighting or running (the expression "I’ve got cold feet" comes from this phenomenon). Adrenaline is circulated to fuel & facilitate all this activity.

Action time! You either fight the tiger or you run to safety.

Assuming you didn’t become Tigger’s tea, your body will have exorcised the stress through taking physical action and your body returns to its normal, more relaxed state. The hormonal balance returns.

In today’s modern world, we rarely have a real need for this extreme bodily response to danger. However, that doesn’t stop this self-same reaction occurring during our daily life… but we find that we cannot exorcise the physical changes that are caused, for example, by a bullying boss. We can’t pick up our spear and pin him or her to the wall (much as we’d like to). We can’t run for cover either behind the office coffee machine. We just have to sit there and take it... without release.

This is where stress problems in modern life originate from… a fight or flight reaction that has no outlet. No release. What tends to happen is that the fight reaction is replaced by ANXIETY and the flight reaction is replaced by WITHDRAWAL. Hence the common modern phenomenon of anxiety and depression.

Oh, and don’t think that this is just a reaction to physical threats. Our subconscious mind treats real and imagined events in exactly the same way. So if you are sitting at home imagining that bullying boss raging at you the following day, the same stress reaction will take place. In fact, it’s fair to say that the majority of modern stress is as a result of how we perceive the situation to be, rather than how it really is.

If the body is subjected to frequent or continual unreleased stress responses like this, our mental, spiritual and physical health will suffer.

There are many effects of excessive stress. One of them is to disrupt the natural levels of cortisol in our bodies. Cortisol levels affect the immune system.

Our immune system has two basic modes, one for waking hours and the other for when we are asleep. The sleep mode is where our immune system "hunts" for cells infected by viruses or that are cancerous... and destroys them. Waking immunity "fire-fights" against all the potential infections we come cross in our active & waking life. Both modes are essential for our continued health & well-being.

Under prolonged excessive stress, our sleep mode immune system can be suppressed resulting in a much higher vulnerability to viruses. Meanwhile, with active mode permanently "switched on", we can suffer from a variety of allergies, skin complaints, and shingles.

Our bodies are simply not designed to be constantly at Red Alert. Something has to give. If you are a budding entrepreneur, the most important things that are affected are:

These are crucial business attributes and you need to have them firing on all cylinders for your business to succeed.

There are lots of attributes of successful business people that could be discussed here (for a comprehensive guide, see "Think & Grow Rich... Made Simple" by clicking here).

However, creativity and its near relation, innovation, are ones that should be at the top of everyone’s "must have" list.

Without the ability to think creatively, you will struggle to solve key business problems and your business will suffer as a result.

In addition, creativity and innovation are fundamental to getting your message across. Business is basically made up of three key elements

Of these three, marketing is by far the most important. All successful business people know that it’s better to have a mediocre product with top class marketing than the other way around. Look at what happened in the Betamax v VHS scenario when video players & recorders came on the scene! If you are unfamiliar with this classic business "duel", Betamax was considered to be by far the most superior technology… but was poorly marketed. This allowed better marketed rival, VHS, to clean up in this area.

Most people who are setting up in a work-from-home business begin having to do all three key business functions themselves, including marketing. That means they are writing their own sales copy, amongst other things. Sales copy without creative flair is like eating cornflakes without milk… dry, boring and likely to end up in the bin!

So, does that mean that if you’re not naturally creative you are doomed to business failure? No. Certainly not. There are always ways round a problem and you need creativity to discover them. The good news is that there are ways to increase your creativity no matter what your starting point is.

(To read the remainder of this (long) article, please subscribe to our FREE magazine, "Success Made Simple", by clicking here)