Have you ever wondered why a panic attack often feels quite so horrifying? Well now we have the answer, because Australian and American scientists have proved what we’ve all long suspected: that high levels of stress can make us very sick indeed!

The new field of neuro-psycho-physio-immunology (what a mouthful!), is providing massive amounts of evidence which shows that our thoughts, feelings and behaviours all impact on our immune system and our general health.

What diseases are stress related?

It’s widely accepted that stress related diseases include sick euthyroid syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, type 1 diabetes, lupus, and even some cancers.

What you can do about it

Obviously the best thing we can do is to be aware of how important it is to have a healthy lifestyle with the right amount of work and play, social contact, nutrition and sleep, etc. But for some people things have gone too far and they suffer from a range of problems like depression, chronic pain, anxiety, panic attacks, post traumatic stress disorder, phobias, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

The problem for these people is that conventional treatments have not been very successful, with very low outcomes and often only temporary relief.

Good News

A new treatment method has recently been launched after over a decade of research with over 50,000 in-patients and out-patients throughout Latin America and Australia. This new method is called BMSA and works by actually knocking out conditioned responses associated with problem states like anxiety.

A Brief Example of BMSA

You can try it out for yourself very easily, as long as you promise you’ll pick something very minor to experiment on! BMSA should not be used with serious disorders except by qualified health professionals!

Simply think of something that would qualify as a “mild anger”. This might be the thought of someone who recently upset you, for example. How strong is your “mild anger” over this person and what they did? Use a scale of 10 to set a figure (10 out of 10 would be the maximum and would tell you this is too big for this experiment! 0 out of 10 would mean that you had no particular anger at all. Pick something that is 5 or less on the scale.)

Now as you think about this person and what they did, see if you can rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time (try very hard and definitely don’t let yourself be distracted!), and alternate this with imagining the scenario at the same time that you imagine your mouth is full of chocolate cake, or that you’re laying on a sandy beach, or that you’re rocking a baby in your arms (try all sorts of things, as long as you’re able to keep the thoughts of the person and what they did in your head!)

Keep this up for perhaps 5 minutes, and then quietly bring back the thought of the person and what they did. Is your “mild anger” still the same, or now, try as you may, do you find that it’s decreased or even disappeared altogether?

In a few days’ time, try think of this person and what they did once more. Was the effect permanent, or merely temporary? What could happen if you could eliminate all your emotional distress in this way?