A study by researchers in the field of gastroenterology found that IBS patients (i.e. those under a doctor’s care for IBS) had a statistically significantly elevated incidence of psycho-emotional disorders of one kind or another than people who HAVE IBS (or IBS symptoms) but who are NOT being treated by their doctors for IBS.

Isn’t THAT interesting?

Combining this study with the fact that IBS is a disease purely of the industrialized world raises a lot of questions about what exactly causes so many people to suffer from this often debilitating syndrome.

The medical community has long been telling us that IBS is a “stress-related illness” but unfortunately that’s about all they will say when it comes to stress-related illnesses.

The truth is, “stress” is a fairly ambiquous term, and it may be time to start identifying some more specific concepts that currently just fall beneath the umbrella of “stress.”

Going on a vacation is a source of stress! Does vacationing cause IBS??? (Well, some people DO notice gastrointestinal distress the first few days of a vacation, so…)

Let me clarify what I mean by a vacation being a stress… “Stress” most literally means any set of conditions perceived in which the mind/body complex determines some degree of possible or imminent threat that requires a response. And since we humans are “creatures of habit” actually anything that is outside our normal or expected experience is (as far as the subconscious is concerned) a stress. Even if we’re enjoying it!

So to say that “stress” is a cause or contributing factor in IBS is simply not therapeutically useful. Rather, I propose that we begin to examine what sorts of things an individual is focusing on, both consciously and subconsciously, as contributing factors to IBS. After all, this sort of internalization of “stress” is quite directly metaphorical, being all about what we hold and what we release and when.

Most of us are familiar with the dangers of stress - elevated blood pressure, digestive distress, decreased immunity, headaches and on up to serious illness. If we are to protect ourselves from this threat, we need to understand what it actually is and how it operates - in our emotions, our minds and our bodies. When we think of stress most people tend to think about being overworked and overextended, or having too many bills to pay. But stress is a complex mechanism that can be triggered in many ways. In actuality, anything that is outside of our normal expected routine is a source of stress, even if it is something positive! In fact, in biological terms, any change to which our bodies, tissues, organs or individual cells must adapt is a stress.

Have you ever gotten home from a vacation and thought, “Now I need a vacation?” Seeing stress from its wider definition, it’s easy to see how such a feeling comes about. Nice as it may be to get away from the office for a week, those action-packed days and nights in Vegas may still be perceived at some level as a stress. The key word here is “perceived.” Perception is the lynchpin that can be both the source and remedy of many of the stresses in our lives.

To better understand how stress is perceived, take your mind back in time - far back! Imagine it is several hundred thousand years ago- here we are, a bunch of primitive humans adapting handsomely to survive as well as we can. Our minds are already quite advanced, with complex memory, language and capacity to reason deductively and inductively. With this tremendous capacity to reason comes a wonderful survival skill - the ability to adapt our behavior in a predictive way. While other creatures do prepare for seasonal changes and adapt to the environment once it has shifted on them, we have this new capacity to speculate at what the most likely changes will be, and so get the jump on the changes by being ready. In order to do this, we must store and process vast quantities of information. As we begin absorbing all this data we need to be able to sort through it, and so we start to classify our experiences and inputs. The most general classification of experiences is as either safe or dangerous. This is because at the most basic level, the first thing we need to know about anything that happens, if we want the best chance of survival, is how dangerous the situation is.

It is this necessity for our minds to label experiences as safe or hazardous that is the ultimate source of so much of our stress today, and so this is a question of perception! These decisions about what is hazardous are usually not made by our conscious mind at all, but rather by our subconscious mind, for the sake of expediency (too much conscious processing is just too slow, and threat assessment needs to be as rapid as possible to keep us safe!) and so our conscious minds may have one outlook on a situation, but our subconscious mind might be working in another direction.

So if we don’t get to consciously decide what is a stress and what isn’t, how do we avoid or reduce the stress in our lives? Well today there are lots of techniques out there to help relieve the effects of stress - yoga, meditation, tai chi, hypnosis, exercise, breath-work etc. For some people turn to less healthy alternatives, like alcohol or just watching TV, but these tend not to provide as much benefit.

The answer is an ancient one, a simple one, an obvious one, and yet it seems for many people it is a difficult one. Though many mind-training techniques, like hypnosis, can alter the beliefs at the subconscious level directly, and therefore alter the perception of stress, the most straightforward technique to change the perception of stress is simply to chose to perceive differently.

What? How? What mystical secrets do I need to know to perceive differently? Didn’t that already fail in the 60’s?

Though there are many extreme ways to radically alter experience/perception (such as with hallucinogens or deprivation) these potentially harmful activities are not required. We all have everything we need within us right now! We simply forget. We forget, moment after moment, that we are choosing our perceptive focus. We decide what and how to perceive. Yes, much of this mechanism IS running by our subconscious minds, but still our conscious mind gets to choose its point of focus. This can seem very difficult when our subconscious is running a very emotional “program” for us about what we “should” be perceiving, but even in those moments, the choice is open to us if we simply remember that it is. What is required is setting a firm intention to remember that we are choosing our experience, our perception of our current situation, in each moment.

So, when it is three o’clock on a Wednesday and things are not going well with your account at work, and the boss is screaming and your client is upset and no one is getting the job done and everyone is blaming you- how do you feel? Do those conditions enter into your body in some way and release adrenal corticoids and put you into “fight or flight” mode? No, they don’t - you do that yourself. Your mind does this for you by labeling the situation threatening. And perhaps it IS threatening! Your livelihood is at risk! You might get fired! But consider this: does preparing yourself for physical combat actually help you here? Or does it rather cloud your judgment (physiologically, by shunting blood flow away from your high-thinking centers in your brain back to your limbic system for more rapid reflex responses!) and eventually exhaust you and perhaps even make you sick, and therefore less able to do your job?

But how can I choose in that moment to feel a different way? Well, here’s the trick- perhaps you can’t, because your subconscious is running the show at this point. But, even while the subconscious is doing its thing, your conscious mind is still present. It has just become conditioned to be submissive in this situation and follow along with what the subconscious is doing. What if you took a fraction of an instant and in that moment decided, just for this brief flash of time I am going to focus on how good it is to be alive and healthy, or to have a home, or to have a loving spouse, or whatever it is that brings you joy (perhaps even just the miracle of being conscious!)

The subconscious may still be running riot, but the conscious mind can place its perceptive focus on something else- and soon, even the subconscious must begin to release its perceptive hold on the situation at hand.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy! It’s a struggle at first. It is the warriors battleground. It is simple, but not easy, because the subconscious will continually bring the old view back, again and again, attempting to distract the conscious minds focus until it concedes again and goes back to sleep and lets the subconscious go on running things. But every time this happens, the opportunity is still right there to decided differently again. Choose your focus! Choose to be present in your perceptive focus. Choose positivity, and eventually, unavoidably, the stresses will lessen and vanish. And then, possibilities will begin to open - you will begin to connect with your true creative nature. Won’t that be nice?

Recently, a lot of clients have been coming to me because of fears, stress and anxiety about their physical health, their medical conditions or their medical treatments. First of all, my hat is off to the MDs that have been recommending their patients for hypnosis. Facing new developments in our bodies and our health can be an extremely emotional experience, and many medical tests and treatments, though necessary and often life-saving, can seem freightening when first described. Add to this the fears about what the possible outcomes might be, and you have a recipe for anxiety and stress.

The important thing to realize here is that when we are dealing with a health challenge already, the LAST thing we want to have happening in our bodies is a stress response! When the mind perceives stress (real or imagined) the Autonomic Nervouse System goes right into a sympathetic mode… what we were all taught as the “fight or flight” response. This hard-wiring of our nervous system makes a lot of sense for a primitive creature whose most probable cause of death is predation… but in our complex society it is a real burden for several reasons:

1) as already stated, the mind can’t distinguish a real threat from an imagined one, and in the same vein, cannot distinguish a psychological or emotional upset from a physical danger, hence this system is triggering all the time!

2) in “fight or flight” our immune systems actually become diminished! this is because the body is redistributing it’s energetic resources to other areas where more immediate threats could be dealt with (like heart and lungs and large muscles… of course, this is no help for those with heart conditions either, as it means increased blood pressure!)

3) in “fight or flight” our high reasoning capacity is also diminshed as more of the blood flow to the brain is shunted to the hind brain, the more animal, instinct-driven portions of the brain. So just when we need to think clearly, it becomes harder and harder to do so.

This last aspect is particularly relevant to the discussion of hypnosis to deal with these stresses, because many of my clients know perfectly well that they are in good hands, that their conditions are not that bad, that they need to remain calm and pay attention to what the doctors are telling them, yet all their conscious efforts don’t seem to help… they still end up with sleepless nights, and even panic attacks! What is happening? The conscious mind is efffectively cut out of the loop. The subconscious program is running,signalling DANGER, and the nervous system responds as best it knows how.

This is where hypnosis comes in! The truth is, just entering the hypnotic trance state does wonders for reversing this process on its own. The deep relaxation that comes along with a deep trance experience can (at least temporarily) relieve some of the neurochemical effects on the body of the stress it had previously been experiencing. The important thing to remember is to (funny as it may sound) avoid “personalizing” the anxiety. Many people come in with a “what’s wrong with me?” attitude, when in fact their nervous system is working perfectly! It’s just that the program is not appropriate for the circumstance… that’s more the fault of evolution than the individual. So letting go of the “I’m broken” idea and getting a little “hypno-rest” is a great start, but only that.

Most people who have real anxiety over their health have deeper issues involved, and many such folks would do well to also consider seeking the help of a psychologist or therapist, as HYPNOSIS IS NOT THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE, physical or psychological! (please remember that folks!) and for these people, the real question in easing the anxiety is “how deep are you willing to go?”

For many, it is the simple and human fear of mortality.

For others it relates to early life traumas.

It can even stem from Pre-Natal or Past Life trauma.

Regardless of the cause, the focus needs to stay on the solution. “What can I change today?” And often this is not as hard as it may seem. Anchoring peaceful, confident, grateful states gives clients a tremendous resource when facing unpleasant tests or procedures. Simply exploring the nature of the fear and giving that part of the psyche some other positive way of helping the situation, of knowing the client is paying attention and doing everything possible to maintain health and balance, can turn the whole view of the situation around.

Life and our health will always change and shift, and those changes will not always be the ones we would like, but how we respond to those changes does not have to be set in stone; does not need to be hard-wired. We can chose to face our circumstances with all of our resources open to us, with one foot always firmly planted in the joy of our very existence. Even pain itself can often be greatly reduced, even eliminated, just with the power of the mind, and interestingly enough, it’s usually a fairly pleasant experience to shift that focus!

The enemy is not the medical procedure, or the health challenge. The enemy is fear. And because fear is internal, not external, there is truly nothing to “vanquish” nothing to struggle against… there is only something to let go of…

Talk to your doctors. Find out all the information. Do everything you need to do for your health. And give your mind permission to be OK with it all! You’ve got nothing to lose but the fear.