How Can I Handle Tough Times?

Are you trying to deal with something you can’t control – tough times due to a natural disaster, the plunging economy, or just plain old bad luck?

 It IS possible to bounce back from tough times and go on to create an even better life.  But this requires a  kind of deep inner strength called resilience.

What is resilience? It’s the ability to find hope amid uncertain conditions. Resilient people do not let adversity define them. They transcend pain and grief by perceiving tough times as temporary, and believe better times are coming.

People do seem to differ in their inborn ability to handle life’s stresses, but resilience can also be cultivated. At the heart of resilience is a belief in yourself. It’s possible to strengthen your belief in yourself and to define yourself as capable and competent.

How to Handle Tough Times
One key to developing resilience is to go back in your mind and reinterpret past events. What you  want to do is  to discover the personal strength you built by surviving that event.

Resiliency is the capacity to rise above the challenges of tough times. Resilience is not the ability to escape unharmed. Resilient people have scars to show for their experience.

At the  heart of becoming more resilient is a technique called Reframing. This is a way of shifting focus from the cup half empty to the cup half full. Take the case of one woman who had been emotionally abused by her parents throughout her childhood. Her healing occurred in an instant when she realized what a powerful survivor she was.

Re-examine your life story to see how heroic your acts were as a child. Go back to an incident, identify your resulting survivor’s strengths, and your build self-esteem from this achievement. Build your resilience FAST!

Does Relaxation Really Change Your Genes?

Scientific studies now show that deep relaxation actually changes our bodies on a genetic level.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered that long-term practitioners of relaxation methods such as yoga and meditation have far more “disease-fighting” active genes compared to those who do not practice relaxation.

This includes genes that protect from: pain, infertility, high blood pressure and even rheumatoid arthritis. The changes were induced by what they call “the relaxation effect” — a phenomenon  just as powerful as medical drugs,  but without the side-effects.

The experiment, which showed just how responsive genes are to behaviour, mood and environment, revealed that genes can switch on, just as easily as they switch off.

“Harvard researchers asked the control group to start practising relaxation methods every day,” explains Jake Toby, hypnotherapist at London’s BodyMind Medicine Centre, who teaches clients how to induce the relaxation effect. “After two months, their bodies began to change – the genes that help fight inflammation, kill diseased cells and protect the body from cancer, all began to switch on.”

More encouraging still, the benefits of the relaxation effect were found to increase with regular practice – the more people practised relaxation methods, the greater their chances of remaining free of arthritis and joint pain with stronger immunity, healthier hormone levels and lower blood pressure.

The research is pivotal because it shows how a person’s state of mind affects the body on a physical and genetic level. But just how can relaxation have such wide-ranging and powerful effects? Research around the world has described the negative effects of stress on the body. Linked to the release of the stress-hormones adrenalin and cortisol, stress raises the heart rate and blood pressure, weakens immunity and lowers fertility.

“What you’re looking for is a state of deep relaxation where tension is released from the body on a physical level and your mind completely switches off,” he says. You can only really achieve it by learning a specific technique such as self-hypnosis,  meditation, or neural brainwave training.”

Do Dreams Really Contain Hidden Truths?

You wake up after a dream of a plane crash, and you’re scheduled to board an aircraft later in the day for a long-awaited trip. Will that nightmare of a plane crash have an effect on whether you continue with your plans to fly?

According to a new multi-cultural study involving nearly 1,100 people around the world, you may not cancel your trip, but your dream will probably weigh as heavily on your thoughts as if there had been a real plane crash. The study suggests that people from many cultures believe their dreams are a window into the mind.

Do Dreams Really Mean Anything?
When Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, he introduced science to the complex and bizarre world of the human mind. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious.

The most common dream occurs in all cultures: Someone, or something, is in hot pursuit, and if the dreamer can’t escape, the consequences will be deadly. That dream usually means the person feels threatened or under attack, or is recalling a time when an attack was real.

Dreams Contain Hidden Truths
Researchers Morewedge and Norton of Harvard University wanted to determine if dreams actually influence our behavior or contain hidden truths. They conducted six studies in both Eastern and Western cultures ( United States, South Korea and India).

(1) 182 commuters in Boston reported that dreams affected their daily behavior. 68 percent said dreams foretell the future, and 63 percent said at least one of their dreams had come true. Participants reported that a dream of a plane crash would affect their travel plans more than a conscious thought of a crash, or a warning from the government

(2) 341 pedestrians were surveyed in Cambridge, Mass., and people who believed in the Freudian theory of the subconscious were more influenced by their dreams than were nonbelievers. But regardless of the theory of dreams they endorsed, participants considered dreams more important than similar thoughts while awake.

(3) 60 undergraduate psychology students at Rutgers University were asked whether they believed in God on a five-point scale ranging from definitely to doubtful. Not surprisingly, believers rated dreams in which God spoke to them as more meaningful than did agnostics. Also, not surprisingly, agnostics reported that dreams were more meaningful when God suggested that they should take a year off to travel the world than when God suggested they should take a year off to work in a leper colony.

The Role of Dreams in Our Waking Lives
Consistent throughout the study is the thread that dreams actually DO play a role in the waking lives of most people. They come from within and, thus contain hidden truths that could be useful in real life, or so most of us believe.

The study noted that, although dreams are unlikely to predict future world events, it is possible that they may provide some hidden insight in the way that people believe they do. Learn to control your dreams with lucid dreaming. Amazing!

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