Now more than ever, scientific research is proving the fundamental role stress can have in triggering or aggravating a lot of psychological and somatic disorders. An article from a 1983 Time Magazine described stress as "The Epidemic of the Eighties." The article also said that stress is a considerable health issue. Indeed it is unquestionable that our world has become even more complex and stressful over the last 25 years since that article was written.

A lot of surveys indicate that almost everybody feels that they are subject to a lot of stress. Researchers in this domain estimate that 75 to 90 percent of the visits to PCPs (Primary Care Physicians) are related to stress.

Most adults say that their job is the main cause of their stress. The levels of stress have also soared in children and the elderly population because of several reasons including: Peer pressures that often push people to everything from cigarette smoking to alcoholism and drug abuse; the dissolution of religion and family values; growing crime rates; threats to personal safety; as well as social isolation and loneliness.

Stress can cause and aggravate conditions such as diabetes, ulcers, low back and neck pain, hypertension, strokes and heart attacks. This is because of the ever growing sympathetic nervous system activity along with the release of cortisol, adrenaline, and other hormones. Chronic stress is co-morbid with weakened immune system resistance. Stress can cause anxiety, depression, and its varied impacts on one's organs.

"Stress" is defined as follows by the American Heritage Dictionary: "To subject to physical or mental pressure, tension, or strain"

The following is the definition of "tension" from the same dictionary: "Mental, emotional, or nervous strain"

The following is the definition of "anxiety": "A state of uneasiness and apprehension, as about future uncertainties"

And the following is the definition of "depression": "The condition of feeling sad or despondent"

It defines "clinical depression" as follows: "A psychiatric disorder characterized by an inability to concentrate, insomnia, loss of appetite, anhedonia, feelings of extreme sadness, guilt, helplessness and hopelessness, and thoughts of death."

What we can be sure of is that our thoughts are the major cause of our feelings of stress, anxiety and depression. We could also say that, what we think about, and our attitudes and points of view about our experiences dictate what we feel. So if we can manage to alter our thoughts, attitudes, and points of view, we can eliminate our feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression and attain a better state of being.

Since the beginning of time, people have tried to find methods that would allow them to release stress. With the pharmaceutical industry there seems to be a pill for everything. For that the industry has developed a large array of sedatives from Valium to Xanax. If you choose to use drugs for relief, please make sure that you pay attention to the fine print and learn about the side effects, which commonly are, among others, addiction and dependency. Indeed these types of drugs attempt to treat the symptoms, rather than the cause. So if one stops taking them, the symptoms can come back.

A finer method to release tension, stress, anxiety, and depression is to work on the root cause, which as I wrote previously, is generally our thought processes. Now, here is some good news. Hypnosis is all about relaxing. The AMA recognized hypnosis in 1958 as an effective way to treat stress or stress related symptoms. However unlike pills, there are totally no negative side effects.

When you enter the state of hypnosis, you are in the Alpha level of consciousness. It's the daydream like temporary psychological state which we feel as we're just about to fall asleep at night. And we feel it another time as we awaken in the morning. There are hundreds of different ways to guide ourselves into this relaxed mood, from step-by-step relaxation to visual imagery to listening to hypnosis CD's.

Once we access the hypnotic state, we are able to communicate with our unconscious mind, which is the center of our feelings. And it becomes easier to acknowledge new ideas and points of view that will help us to reduce anxiety, or even avoid it completely.

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), which is a recently developed type of hypnosis, offers a lot of outstanding techniques for getting rid of stress. Perhaps the technique that works best is called the "swish" pattern - or the "flash" pattern. When you use the "swish" pattern, your unconscious will automatically use bad, stress producing mental pictures, as triggers for relaxing mental pictures. In other words, your stressors will automatically cause relaxation!

TO SUM UP Tension, stress, anxiety, and depression can be activated by our thoughts. So by changing our attitude and the way we resent our situation and what we've experienced, we can reduce these feelings at the root. Hypnosis and NLP are natural tools that make it possible to change our attitude and point of view to quickly reduce the source of our negative feelings.