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Now more than ever, scientific investigations are proving the primary responsibility of stress in causing and aggravating many psychological and physical disorders. A cover story from a 1983 Time Magazine described stress as "The Epidemic of the Eighties." It also mentioned that stress is our major health problem. Indeed there is very little doubt that our world has become more and more complicated and stressful over the past twenty-five years since that article was published.

Many surveys show that most adults have the impression of being under a great deal of stress. Researchers in the field estimate that 75 to 90 percent of all visits to primary care doctors somehow have to do with stress.

Most adults say that their job is the major reason of their stress. And stress levels have also increased in children and the elderly population for reasons including: Peer pressures that often push people to everything from smoking to drug and alcohol abuse; the wearing away of family and religious values and ties; increased crime rates; threats to personal safety; and last but not least social isolation and loneliness.

Stress contributes to problems such as diabetes, ulcers, low back and neck pain, hypertension, strokes and heart attacks. This is due to the increased sympathetic nervous system activity along with a high level of cortisol, adrenaline, and other hormones. Chronic stress is co-morbid with weakened immune system resistance. Stress can be responsible for anxiety, depression, and its numerous impacts on the body's organs.

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

"Tension" is defined as follows: "Mental, emotional, or nervous strain"

It defines "anxiety" as follows: "A state of uneasiness and apprehension, as about future uncertainties"

And it defines "depression" as follows: "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."

One thing is for sure, our thoughts are the first cause of our experience of stress, anxiety and depression. To put it into different words, what we think about, and our attitudes and the way we view our experiences create our feelings. So if we can find a way to change our thoughts, attitudes, and points of view, then we can eliminate our feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression and attain a more positive state of being.

Since the beginning of time, people have looked for methods for releasing stress. The pharmaceutical industry seems to have a drug for everything. And to that end the industry has produced a wide array of anxiolytics from Valium to Xanax. If you choose to utilize drugs for relief, please make sure that you are aware of the side-effects by reading the fine print, which commonly are, among others, addiction and dependency. Unfortunately, these types of drugs attempt to cure the symptoms, instead of the cause. So as soon as one stops taking them, the symptoms can come back.

A more appropriate method to get rid of tension, stress, anxiety, and depression is to try to cure the root cause, which as I wrote previously, is usually our thought processes. Now, here is the good news. The very essence of hypnosis is relaxation. The AMA recognized hypnosis in 1958 as an effective method of treating stress or stress related symptoms. And unlike pills, there are absolutely no undesirable side effects.

When you are in hypnosis, you are in the Alpha level of consciousness. It's the daydream like temporary psychological mindset that we feel as we're about to fall asleep in the evening. And we feel it once again when we awaken in the morning. There are a lot of different ways that we can guide ourselves into this condition of tranquility, from step-by-step relaxation to visual imagery to listening to hypnosis CD's.

When we access the hypnotic state, we are able to interact with our unconscious mind, which is the seat of our emotions. And it becomes easier to accept new points of view and ideas that can help us to eliminate anxiety, or even avoid it in the first place.

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), which is a recently developed type of hypnosis, has various excellent techniques for dissipating stress. Maybe the technique that works best is called the "swish" pattern - or the "flash" pattern. When you use this technique, your unconscious will automatically use bad, stress producing mental images, to create relaxing mental images. Otherwise stated, your stressors will now cause relaxation!

TO SUMMARIZE Our thoughts can activate depression, anxiety and tension. So if we change our attitude and point of view towards our situation and what we have lived, we can eliminate these feelings at the source. Hypnosis and NLP are natural tools that allow us to change our attitude and point of view to quickly eliminate the source of our negative feelings.