Is stress making your life seem more and more hectic?  Perhaps it’s causing your performance to lag at work, leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day. Or perhaps your stress levels are creating problems in your relationships- with your co-works, children or even your spouse? You might even be wondering if you’re ever gong to get a handle on the stress in your life?

Or how about more serious forms of stress such as anxiety or depression, have they been creating more troublesome issues in your life?

Well, as a board certified cardiologist, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University, with over 25 years of experience in taking care of real people whose lives have been jeopardized because of stress, I’m here to tell you that stress doesn’t have to rule your life.

You can learn to manage, reduce, or even eliminate the feelings of stress that are hindering your performance.

Importantly, it doesn’t have to take months of therapy to find relief. You can quickly and permanently begin learning some useful skills that can create a positive impact in your life.

You know it took me many long years to find the techniques that I’m sharing with you today. And just like you I went through a time in my life where I wondered if I would ever be able to get control of the way my life seemed to be spiraling out of control.

It was a time when the stress got so overpowering that I found myself asking one day, “Is this all there is to life?”

So I began a period of intense soul-searching.  I read countless books, attended seminars and workshops trying to find a road to take me where I wanted to go.  I wanted to reach a place where I felt creative and was really making a difference in peoples lives.

It took many years, a great deal of contemplation and hard work to finally get my heart to the place where it felt totally connected, totally energized, and peaceful.  During this time I was lead on an incredible journey to my own heart.  It was a journey with twists and turns.  And one of the major turns was that went back for three years of Post-Graduate Training- learning special techniques for helping people connect to and heal their heart’s of emotional and psychological difficulties.  Because of this I found myself in a place where now I’m an expert on stress reduction.

So today, I want to give you just one idea to get you thinking in a new way about how you approach the stress in your life.   I want to discuss with you the topic- Why Your Heart Matters.

How many people think that the brain is really the center of who we are?  If you’re reading this and your hand is up in the air- you’re like most people.  Since the middle of the scientific revolution over one hundred and fifty years ago, it has been the prevailing idea.

However if you gaze back into history for three hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand years the understanding was much different. For most of recorded history, human beings have believed that the heart was in control of the human being.

They believed that the heart was really the center of who we are as a person.  And what I’m going to tell you today is that the truth may be somewhere in the middle.  New scientific research has shown that the heart plays a much bigger role in controlling what goes on in our body and in particular with our emotional health than has been thought since the scientific belief has held sway.

For example did you know that in and around your heart there are over 40,000 neurons, nerve cells?  And this is actually more than certain parts of your brain.  Indeed, your  heart actually has the ability to control your blood pressure and heart rate independently of your brain. It’s true. Science has shown that the human heart actually works like a mini brain.

Where this is important in stress reduction is that your heart can actually alter your stressful feelings, independent of the brain.   What science has shown is that if we can begin to bring the heart into a more rhythmic state a more peaceful state it can actually affect the physiology of the body.

It can change the biochemical and hormonal output of the body.  It can make your anxiety less troublesome.  It can even help you prevent illness.  So your heart has the ability to lower your stress, all by itself.   And this is why your heart matters when it comes to dealing with stress.

Now I’d like to talk with you about a skills that can help you eliminate your stressful feelings.  It’s a skill that I teach in my stress reduction training program 5 Simple Steps For Overcoming Stress Now. It’s called Tuning Into Your Heart.

Tuning IntoYour Heart is a method of bringing our awareness and focusing it like a laser within the chest region.  As we focus on our heart, we then begin bringing strong feelings of gratitude into our heart.  The Institute of HeartMath has shown that gratitude is a powerful force for calming the heart and putting the heart’s rhythm a coherent state.  I like to call this a harmonious state.  Just as classical music can have a calming effect, Tuning Into Your Heart can improve your physical state.  It can reduce anxiety, improve depression, and produce a sense of peace.

I have taught these methods to hundreds of people to help them improve their lives.

So I hope you have a greater understanding of Why Your Heart Matters.