Literally millions of people are hospitalized and/or die every year due to stress related illnesses and an overall lack of stress management. Mental stress has a detrimental physiological effect, elevating blood pressure, heart rate, levels of harmful brain chemicals associated with certain diseases and mental illness, and a whole host of other bad things. Over time, anxiety and stress can be killers.

I don't like being fatalistic and scaring people into healthy behavior. However, it's unfortunate that most of us decide to take healthy steps only after some traumatic event like a heart attack, a stroke, or an anxiety attack. Then we make these healthy choices and incorporate these healthy things like exercise and meditation techniques and wonder why we didn't do it earlier. Making pre-emptive health choices can add years to your life, quality to your life, and pleasure to your life.

Stress Management and My Life

I am one of those people who decided to change his habits after a traumatic event. At the tender age of twenty-seven, I found myself wandering north on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan in the midst of a massive panic attack. My heart felt like it was going to explode and my mind raced to every negative thought possible. As I dropped to my knees, a complete stranger, thinking I was having a heart attack, called 911 and may have saved my life.

When I arrived at New York Presbyterian Hospital on the Upper East Side, my heart rate had reached 200 beats per minute and my blood pressure reached 200/180. Doctors were quickly able to ascertain that my problems were mental, and these problems were creating a physical response. Unmanaged anxiety and panic and stress had pushed me to this deadly point.

At the time, I did not believe that. In my mind, I was having a heart attack and my problem was clearly physical. How could my mind create this physical condition I was in? This made no sense to me. I wanted a pill, a drug, something tangible I could take to fix the problem. You have a headache, take some Ibuprofen. You have an infection, take some penicillin. That's what I wanted to hear.

After the Fall, A Stress Management Program Is Suggested

After six hours of panic attacks, I was able to regain some control. As I lay quivering on the hospital bed, my doctor had a conversation with me about stress management. My problems, he explained, could be eliminated if I created some sort of stress management program that worked for specifically for me. He also suggested seeing a therapist or a psychiatrist. It was his opinion, however, that good mental and physical health could be achieved without psychotropic drugs.

Upon leaving the hospital, I decided to see a shrink. I had no desire to go through that again. After one visit, my shrink wanted to put me on a powerful anti-anxiety medication and infuse that into my stress management program. This scared the hell out of me. Was I crazy? I never went back and I never bought the prescription. Instead, I did some research and discovered some things that would change my life in a profoundly incredible way.

I discovered that a very close friend of mine had experienced the same sort of thing years earlier. After her panic attack, she also did some research and began exploring meditation and exercise as a means of stress management. She had researched Zen Meditation, Transcendental meditation techniques, other deep meditation techniques, deep relaxation techniques, and a number of other wonderful things. She passed this knowledge on to me, and within a few months, my life was back in my hands. Since then, I literally enjoy life more every single day.