Stress management can be complicated and confusing because there are different types of stress— ACUTE STRESS, EPISODIC STRESS, & CHRONIC STRESS — each with its own characteristics, symptoms, duration and treatment approaches. Let's look at each one.

ACUTE STRESS:  is the most common form of stress. It comes from demands and pressures of the recent past and anticipated demands and pressures of the near future. Acute stress is thrilling and exciting in small doses, but too much is exhausting. A fast run down a challenging ski slope, for example, is exhilarating early in the day. That same ski run late in the day is taxing and wearing. Skiing beyond your limits can lead to falls and broken bones. By the same token, overdoing on short-term stress can lead to psychological distress, tension headaches, upset stomach and other symptoms.
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Fortunately, acute stress symptoms are recognized by most people. It's a laundry list of what has gone awry in their lives: the auto accident that crumpled the car fender, the loss of an important contract, a deadline they're rushing to meet, their child's occasional problems at school and so on.

Because it is short term, acute stress doesn't have enough time to do the extensive damage associated with long-term stress.

The most common symptoms are:

• Emotional distress - some combination of Anger or Irritability, Anxiety/Depression, the 3 stress emotions.
• Muscular problems - including tension headache, back pain, jaw pain and the muscular tensions that lead to pulled muscles and tendon and ligament problems.
• Organ disruptions - Stomach, gut and bowel problems such as heartburn, acid stomach, flatulence, diarrhea, constipation and irritable bowel syndrome.
• Other body issues - Transient over arousal leads to elevation in blood pressure, rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, heart palpitations, dizziness, migraine headaches, cold hands or feet, shortness of breath and chest pain. 

​Acute stress can crop up in anyone's life, and it is highly treatable and manageable.  I saw this the strongest with one of my daughters when we moved from California to Utah.  Got so bad she started getting IBS and had to be pulled out of school for a while.  With Body Code treatments and working on managing her thoughts, she recovered and is happy and going to school again.  


EPISODIC ACUTE STRESS: There are those, however, who suffer acute stress frequently, whose lives are so disordered that they are studies in chaos and crisis. They're always in a rush, but always late. If something can go wrong, it does. They take on too much, have too many irons in the fire, and can't organize the slew of self-inflicted demands and pressures clamoring for their attention. They seem perpetually in the clutches of acute stress.
It is common for people with acute stress reactions to be over aroused, short-tempered, irritable, anxious and tense. Often, they describe themselves as having "a lot of nervous energy." Always in a hurry, they tend to be abrupt, and sometimes their irritability comes across as hostility. Interpersonal relationships deteriorate rapidly when others respond with real hostility. The workplace becomes a very stressful place for them.

• The cardiac prone, "Type A" personality described by cardiologists, Meter Friedman and Ray Rosenman, is similar to an extreme case of episodic acute stress. Type A's have an "excessive competitive drive, aggressiveness, impatience, and a harrying sense of time urgency." In addition there is a "free-floating, but well-rationalized form of hostility, and almost always a deep-seated insecurity." Such personality characteristics would seem to create frequent episodes of acute stress for the Type A individual. Friedman and Rosenman found Type A's to be much more likely to develop coronary heat disease than Type B's, who show an opposite pattern of behavior.

Another form of episodic acute stress comes from ceaseless worry. "Worry warts" see disaster around every corner and pessimistically forecast catastrophe in every situation. The world is a dangerous, unrewarding, punitive place where something awful is always about to happen. These "awfulizers" also tend to be over aroused and tense, but are more anxious and depressed than angry and hostile.
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The symptoms of episodic acute stress are the symptoms of extended over arousal: 

• Persistent tension headaches
• Migraines
• Hypertension
• Chest pain
• Heart disease.

Treating episodic acute stress requires intervention on a number of levels, generally requiring professional help, which may take many months.

Often, lifestyle and personality issues are so ingrained and habitual with these individuals that they see nothing wrong with the way they conduct their lives. They blame their woes on other people and external events. Frequently, they see their lifestyle, their patterns of interacting with others, and their ways of perceiving the world as part and parcel of who and what they are.
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Sufferers can be fiercely resistant to change. Only the promise of relief from pain and discomfort of their symptoms can keep them in treatment and on track in their recovery program.


CHRONIC STRESS:  While acute stress can be thrilling and exciting, chronic stress is not. This is the grinding stress that wears people away day after day, year after year. Chronic stress destroys bodies, minds and lives. It wreaks havoc through long-term attrition. It's the stress of poverty, of dysfunctional families, of being trapped in an unhappy marriage or in a despised job or career. It's the stress that the never-ending "troubles" have brought to the people of Northern Ireland, the tensions of the Middle East have brought to the Arab and Jew, and the endless ethnic rivalries that have been brought to the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.  

It comes when a person never sees a way out of a miserable situation. It's the stress of unrelenting demands and pressures for seemingly interminable periods of time. With no hope, the individual gives up searching for solutions.

Some chronic stresses stem from traumatic, early childhood experiences that become internalized and remain forever painful and present. Some experiences profoundly affect personality. A view of the world, or a belief system, is created that causes unending stress for the individual (e.g., the world is a threatening place, people will find out you are a pretender, you must be perfect at all times). When personality or deep-seated convictions and beliefs must be reformulated, recovery requires active self-examination, often with professional help. 

The worst aspect of chronic stress is that people get used to it. They forget it's there. People are immediately aware of acute stress because it is new; they ignore chronic stress because it is old, familiar, and sometimes, almost comfortable.
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If people go long enough without getting help, chronic stress can kill through suicide, violence, heart attack, stroke and, perhaps, even cancer. People wear down to a final, fatal breakdown. Because physical and mental resources are depleted through long-term attrition, the symptoms of chronic stress are difficult to treat and may require extended medical as well as behavioral treatment and stress management. 

I help clients learn stress management by:

• Empowering and Teaching them EFT techniques and Life Coaching Processes to use through out their day.
• Releasing past emotional traumas causing reactions to stressful experiences with Emotion Code Energy Clearings. 
• Also correcting imbalances causing the feelings of stress.  Common issues tend to be balancing the fight or flight response by balancing the nervous system.  Like the hypothalamus and amygdala, just to name a few.  I do this with The Body Code.

Here's how you can learn more: 

• Check out more of my blogs here on this page
• Schedule a free 20 min discovery session with me HERE
• Sign up more my free Resource Library HERE
• Join my Private self care support group for women and moms HERE
• Like my Facebook Page below for constant information and inspirations 

If everything is made up of energy then thought is energy too. Your thoughts have a certain vibration which is what you send out into your world - like a signal.

Negative Thoughts are created by being formed by your perception. They are shaped by your negative beliefs about yourself, your abilities and your world. These beliefs, mostly subconscious, together with whatever the strongest emotions are within you, will draw to you the experience that most truly represents these ideas or images.

After you think these negative thoughts and beliefs, you experience the accompanying emotion and then....if you don't do something to release it, you physically feel it in some shape or form. 
Whatever that may be, within your body or they are expressed (manifested) in some way in the reality of your life. Thats never fun.

THOUGHT -> FEELING -> MANIFESTATION (behavior, action, or experience)

Every time you feel, for example, the emotions of failure, fear, anger or guilt or you realize you have reacted in a particular way in certain situations, you are confronting the effects of your limiting beliefs buried away in the subconscious parts of yourself.  Some people call it Emotional Baggage.  As a Body Code Practitioner, we call the result, 'Trapped Emotions'. As Dr. Brad Nelson, creator of The Emotion Code explains, “Emotional baggage consists of discrete energies that became trapped during emotional events experienced in your past”. 

Facts about the Negative Thoughts & Beliefs you hold:

• They act together like an energetic blueprint 
• Subconsciously take over and become the driver. 
• Are fueled by your ’ trapped emotions’
• Keep generating life experiences according to the pattern of the blueprint.
• Create the self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviors preventing your success. 
• Affects your choices, from the negative belief and trapped emotions cycle
• Promotes destructive behaviors 
• Creates unwanted situations

Its a cycle.  The ‘trapped emotions’ glue the belief in place and the belief in turn, creates emotions that reinforce it – the energies are vibrationally matched; so then you get more evidence in your life to confirm your belief. The belief and the ‘trapped emotions’ mutually reinforce each other. And can create more negative thoughts.

So, in order to make any measurable change in your life and create the reality you want, one needs to change their subconscious programming. 

Here are 3 Steps you need to do:

• RELEASE your negative, limiting beliefs (with The Body Code, life coaching processes, & EFT) 

 

• RE-PROGRAM these limiting beliefs with positive self-serving beliefs & patterns  (with The Body Code, life coaching processes, & EFT) 

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• RELEASE their accompanying ‘Trapped Emotions’ (The Body Code)

Once you become consciously aware of your negative beliefs playing out, you can take control of the factors creating your life. Suddenly, with this new awareness you have a choice...

 1. Continue to go down the habitual & familiar, yet chaotic & stressful road, one so comfortable that you play your part within it without even realizing it. 
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OR

  2. Choose to transform and find yourself doing something very different and discover how it really feels to be free. 

You hold so much power once you become aware of it.  I am here to support you.  If you are interested, you can schedule a Free Buds 2 Blossoms Discovery Session to discuss your issues and how I can help.

Also, keep up with Blossom's social media sites, you will learn ways to release negative thoughts and beliefs on yourself using processes and EFT.  As well as experience The Emotion Code in FB Lives.  Coming soon!

With love and light,
- Amy Francis, Certified Body Code & Pro EFT Practitioner, & Life Coach ​
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