STRESS KILLS WAY MORE OFTEN THAN TIGERS!

An avid, and wise, FPL reader linked me to the Chopra Center website, and she said this to me: "The topic on Stress reads like you wrote it!"

Hey, maybe Deepak got the wording from me, or maybe I read his thoughts in advance because I've been using the exact analogy of the tiger for years. Either way, the Truth is the Truth, and everyone has access to it.

Here's the passage from Deepak:  

How the Body Works with Stress

Most of us aren’t even aware how much fear rules our lives, but our bodies reflect this truth. While fear is designed to be a healthy survival mechanism that triggers the fight-or-flight stress response when your life is in danger, the body can’t tell the difference between being chased by a tiger and having fearful thoughts about work, relationships, or money. Whether you’re about to be a tiger’s lunch or you’re having a fear-based thought about an imagined future, a stress response is activated, and the body is filled with stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine.

But here’s the real kicker. The body is beautifully equipped with natural self-repair mechanisms that know how to fight cancer, prevent infection, ward off heart disease, and retard aging. But these self-repair mechanisms are turned off every time the body is in stress response. This wouldn’t be a problem if your body was only in stress response once or twice a week, since stress responses are only meant to last 90 seconds beyond when the threat to your life is over.

But this is not what happens. Modern-day humans experience over 50 stress responses per day—most of them stemming not from real threats to your life but from thoughts about imaginary threats that will most likely never come true.

Really.