Stress Management:
"You Push Me Past My Threshold, Baby!" or "Your Stress Management Threshold and How You Can Raise It"
By Bill Harris
Director, Centerpointe Research InstituteI've been mulling over the following ideas about stress management for many months, and I finally thought it was time to share them with you.
What finally prompted me to put these ideas down on paper was new research information regarding stress and early life trauma, and the fact that this new information confirmed something I've intuitively felt was true for many years, based on my observations of thousands of Holosync® program participants. Quite frankly, I think this may well be the most important Special Report I have written. I hope you will read it carefully, thoughtfully digest what it contains, apply it to your own personal situation, and occasionally come back to it.
I'm always trying to fine-tune the models I use to describe how the Holosync® sound technology affects the brain, and therefore our personal growth and evolution. As you probably know, models and theories are only as good as their ability to describe reality and to predict what will/should happen in a given situation. One of the most gratifying things about my "discovery" of Nobel Prize-winner Ilya Prigogine and his description of how complex systems evolve and grow has been to watch this model successfully predict pretty much everything that happens as we use the Holosync® technology on a daily basis to push our brains to reorganize at higher levels of functioning and higher levels of awareness. (See the East Meets West article on the web site, Support Follow-Up Letter #2 which is sent via snail mail to all new participants, or The Management of Evolutionary Change book that comes with the second level of the program for more information about Prigogine's work and how it applies to what we do at Centerpointe.)
I honestly have not seen any response to this technology that does not make sense within this model of change. This, of course, has led me to greater and greater confidence that this theory accurately describes reality, and that we can rely on it to predict what will happen as we use the Holosync® sound technology and move through The End® program.
I don't want to give an extensively detailed description of Prigogine's work here, as I have done so in several of my other writings, but I will briefly summarize the high points, since they are pertinent to the main points I want to make in this Special Report.
(When I use the word "system" below, remember that physically, emotionally and mentally you are a system and that system obeys all the laws discussed below just like any other complex system.)
We start with the Law of Increasing Entropy (the second law of thermodynamics), which states that all things tend, over time, to break down and become less ordered - unless energy is added in some way. This is one of the most basic laws of the universe. It has been scientifically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt and has been accepted by the scientific community for over a hundred years.
Systems that maintain their orderliness instead of breaking down, or even become more ordered (as happens with human beings), do so because they have the ability to get rid of entropy by dissipating it to the environment. But each system has an upper limit of how much entropy it can dissipate, based on its degree of complexity: the greater the complexity of the system, the greater the amount of entropy it can dissipate.
Since each system (or, for our purposes, each person) is really an on-going flow of energy, this upper limit of how much entropy can be dissipated puts an upper limit on how much input the system can handle. As long as the input level does not exceed the ability to dissipate the resulting entropy, everything is fine and the system remains stable. When this upper limit is exceeded, however, the entropy that cannot be dissipated instead begins to build up in the system. As this happens, a breakdown of order begins and the system becomes increasingly more chaotic.
If this continues, at a certain point, which Prigogine called a bifurcation point, the system either totally breaks down and ceases to exist as an organized system or, more often, spontaneously makes what is known as a quantum leap, reorganizing itself at a higher level - one that can handle the input that was too much for the old system. The most important characteristic of this new system is its ability to dissipate more entropy to its environment and therefore handle more input from the environment.
I have been developing a theory for several months that is an off-shoot of this Prigogine/chaos theory view of looking at change. The prevailing view in personal development circles is that if you are traumatized, especially in childhood, you then have all this "stuff" buried in the unconscious mind that is causing all kinds of problems for you and that this "stuff" needs to come up to the surface and be "healed."
I'm not so sure any more that I think this description reflects what's really happening.
So here's another way to look at this subject. Every person has a threshold for how much they can handle coming at them from their environment (including their internal environment). If that threshold is exceeded by whatever is happening in that environment, they begin to feel stressed. If things continue in the same manner long enough, they eventually become overwhelmed. When people begin to feel stressed, they begin attempting to cope with the feeling of stress in various ways (most of which actually don't work) they learned while growing up.
My contention is that all the neurotic, addictive, obsessive/compulsive, dysfunctional, etc., etc. feelings and behaviors that send us to therapists, personal development seminars, self-help books, and all the many other ways we seek help, are all attempts to cope with being in an environment that gives us more input than we can handle.
Another way to look at this is that people who have been traumatized in some way have a lower threshold for stress than do other people who are able to handle their environment more easily.
What, then, is responsible for this "lower threshold"? I believe that when people experience some kind of trauma in their upbringing they do not mature in the same way as they would have without the trauma, and part of this lack of normal maturation is a failure to develop a "normal" threshold for stress. These people are bothered by aspects of their environment more often, and to a greater degree, than these same things bother people who have not suffered the same degree of trauma. Because of this, these people are more frequently exhibiting their own personal coping behaviors (and experiencing the uncomfortable feelings that go with them). These include anxiety, confusion, withdrawal, depression, anger, plus all kinds of neurotic behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, sexual acting out, eating disorders and even more severe problems such as personality disorders and psychosis.
A recent article in Psychology Today, "Stress...It's Worse Than You Think," discusses this increased sensitivity to stress:
"...we can become sensitized, or acutely sensitive to stress. Once that happens, even the merest intimation of stress can trigger a cascade of chemical reactions in brain and body that assault us from within."
Psychologist Michael Meaney, Ph.D., of McGill University has said: "What happens is that sensitization leads the brain to re-circuit itself in response to stress. We know that what we are encountering may be a normal, everyday episode of stress, but the brain is signalling the body to respond inappropriately."
Everyone, it seems, has a built-in gauge that controls our reaction to stress, a kind of biological thermostat that, when working properly, keeps the body from launching an all-out response literally over spilled milk. Sensitization, however, lowers the thermostat set-point, according to psychologist Jonathan C. Smith, Ph.D., founder and director of the Stress Institute at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
"Years of research," says Seymore Levine, Ph.D., of the University of Delaware, "has told us that people do become sensitized to stress and that this sensitization actually alters physical patterns in the brain. That means that once sensitized, the body just does not respond to stress the same way in the future. We may produce too many excitatory chemicals or too few calming ones; either way we are responding inappropriately."
Another researcher, Jean King, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical Schools, believes that when certain stresses occur during developmental periods may be more damaging than stress suffered at other times. "The psychological events that are most deleterious probably occur during infancy and childhood - an unstable home environment, living with an alcoholic parent, or any other number of extended crises...What we now believe is that a stress of [great] magnitude occurring when you are young may permanently rewire the brain's circuitry, throwing the system askew and leaving it less able to handle normal, everyday stress."
This, of course, is where all the various coping behaviors and feels begin to pop out, causing all the various life-problems that lead people to therapy and other personal growth/personal development solutions and stress management techniques.
Traditional approaches for dealing with all of this have always seemed to me to be symptom-oriented, including the prevailing therapeutic methods I mentioned previously dealing with the so-called unhealed "stuff" "down there" that must be brought to the surface and healed; or the increasingly popular method of using drugs that will "retune" the neurochemical system in the brain (though I'm not a fan of drug therapy, it can certainly be effective and sometimes is a welcome emergency alternative to the suffering caused by the symptoms themselves).
But as I have administrated The End® program over the years, a more basic and more effective solution has occurred to me: what if we could raise the threshold at which these dysfunctional feelings and behaviors are triggered? If this could be done, these feelings and behaviors would fall away because they would never, or at least rarely, be triggered. The new and higher threshold where these feelings and behaviors are triggered would be reach less often or perhaps not at all.
As those who have been in The End® program for any length of time and who have spoken to me on the telephone or read my writings know, I firmly believe that when we are exposed to the Holosync® sound technology it brings about the whole Prigoginian process of change described at the beginning of this article. The technology slows electrical brain wave patterns, which causes electrical fluctuations in the brain that the brain cannot handle as it is currently structured (in other words, the system experiences input beyond its ability to dissipate the resulting entropy). In response, the brain reorganizes itself at a higher level to create a new structure that can handle this input. It is in this process that the threshold for stress is raised.
This is the reason why people in this program have such dramatic positive changes and why all kinds of neurotic and dysfunctional feelings and behaviors fade away as people progress through the program. It explains why people in the program often successfully go off their depression medication after ten or twelve months, or why problems with anger or anxiety disappear, or why a whole list of other complaints fade away as people move through the program. These responses are all coping methods gone awry, and once coping is no longer needed (or needed less often) because the system is no longer so easily stressed, the coping strategies are called into play less and less often.
I see the Centerpointe program and Holosync® technology as a very effective method for undoing the traumas that caused the threshold for stress to be set too low in the first place. This method attacks the problem at the root and bypasses the short-term treatment of symptoms. By pushing the nervous system to reorganize itself at higher levels of functioning, we give the person a second chance at creating a more normal coping system that does not rely on coping through dysfunctional feelings and behaviors.
In fact, after completing several levels of the program, participants typically begin to develop what might be called a "super-normal" coping system, where very little bothers them. Life zooms to and fro around them, but they remain an island of serenity in the center of it all and life becomes more than just coping, leaving room for exploration, fun, vision, creativity, and the making of dreams into realities.
Be well.
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