It's normal for everyone who is dealing with Morgellons Disease, skin fungus, Collembola, skin mites, and so on to ignore the impact of stresson their lives and their physical condition. Stress affects everyone of us every day whether we have skin parasites or not. However, when there's no medical support, no family support, no insurance, no financial aid, and you're pinned to the wall and about to lose your job or career, your home, and have gone through your savings, on the impact of stress on your body is magnified.

Now let's add a plethora of emotions. Raise your hand if you HAVE NOT felt isolated, anger, frustration, depressed, uncertain, confused, and so on. I knew it, your hand didn't budge. All of these emotions are a call to action. Unfortunately, the action is often a total blur and undefined. Emotions like anger and frustration are high energy and can be short termed and subside. Emotions like depression, uncertainty, confusion, and isolation are low level emotions and are 24 hrs a day, 364 days a year until they are resolved. And, they often have dramatic impact on the quality of your sleeping.

Where does stress enter into this picture? As I stated, these emotions are a call to action. The emotions are in response to a threat which is a threat to your ego--your status quo. Whenever your intelligence senses a threat--high or low level, it prepares your body to fight or run from the threat. A high energy emotion such as anger results in a high level of activation like being confronted by a pit bull. It can kick you into a full fight or flight reaction releasing epinephrine (adrenaline),  norepinephrine (noradrenaline), cortisol, and so on. What happens is that your breathing becomes shallow, rapid, and upper chest. Your muscles tighten. Your sweat glands activate. Blood flow is directed to the organs and away from the extremities. Digestion stops. Blood pressure goes up, and, believe it or not, your IQ drops and creativity is greatly diminished.

These hormones stay until they are used up by either expending energy by physically fighting or running from an assailant. The problem is that physically fighting or fleeing from what contributed to the anger is inappropriate so you're stuck with the hormones circulating through your body. Cortisol does a lot of things, one of which is it to increase your blood sugar. And higher than normal levels of blood sugar is something you do not want. Remember, sugar feeds both Morgellons and Collembola.

This is a double whammy. The hormones contribute to all kinds of stress related illness such as headaches, muscle pain, hypertension, panic and anxiety, and so on. And it doesn't stop there. Sweep these high energy emotions "under the rug." and they contribute to heart conditions, cancers, auto immune disorders, and so on. The other part of the whammy is that they feed your skin parasites.

Low energy level emotions like confusion, depression, uncertainty also contribute to low level activation of the nervous system resulting in a low level of the same stress hormones circulating through your body. While they may not result in headaches, hypertension, muscle tension, and so on, they are much like waiting for bad news that you just don't know how bad it will be. You don't know whether it will be a small resolvable problem or require you to lose your home. Again, you're partially activated to fight or run and again, there's nothing to fight or from which to run and you're left with these same hormones keeping your on guard often resulting in poor quality sleep which in turn can lead to disastrous health problems.

Bottom line: if you know nothing about managing stress, you'll be totally at the effect of it. The more you know about how stress impacts your body and what you can do to offset it, the longer and healthier you'll live and be. If you search for stress management techniques, you'll find a plethora of them. However, the first defense against the unhealthy effects of stress is your breathing which, by the way, is usually the first thing impacted by the stress response. 

Deep breathing is done by slowly breathing down through the lungs into the abdomen below as you push it out to accept all the air and at the last moment slightly expand your chest. As you slowly exhale, you pull in your abdomen and pushing the air out and then let your chest gently collapse. If you hear yourself breathing, you're breathing too fast. Typically, it's five to six breadths a minute.

There are many exercises you can use, but this is the basic one. After you get addicted to deep breathing, you may want to do cadence breathing which is on my CD--Abdominal Breathing. The challenge is to remember to do the deep breathing as you won't hear the announcer on the radio reminding you to take deep breadths between the songs he plays. No, it's up to you to remember.

A great place to position a reminder is in your rear view mirror. Write "Deep Breathing" on a post it and post it on the bottom of the mirror. Every time you look into the mirror, you'll be reminded to start deep breathing. How many breadths do you take? Answer: Breath deeply until you get distracted so it might be two, five, ten, or twenty or more. You can't take enough of them. Join our Sunday call and receive a $5 credit in our new on-line store simply for sharing your experience with deep breathing to manage stress.

Another reminder can be your smart phone. I've attached an image reminding you to take deep breadths as your wall paper. Again, every time you look at your phone, take your deep breadths.

In summary, deep breathing is the first step and if you want more, my stress management site has CD's for meditation, hypnosis, Jacobsonian (muscle relaxation), autogenic vascular relaxation, self hypnosis, visual imagery, affirmations, chakra meditations, and CD programs for a whole host of health issues.

Personally, since I know first hand the challenges that skin parasites pose, I'm very happy if everyone masters and makes deep breathing a habit. You can get a bit fancy and as you exhale, you can smile and repeat to yourself, "leave my body out of it" Smiling creates hormones to counter the stress hormones and "leave my body out of it," is a command for your brain to handle the stress with your intelligence and creativity and avoid getting your body prepared to fight or run (the stress response). This is called the QR response which is credited to Dr. Herbert Benson.  Click here to enroll in a free stress management program.

What about the emotions? Again, they are a call to action. When you offset the stress of them with deep breathing or any other technique, you can learn to embrace the emotion, feel it, experience it and actually benefit and learn from it to release creativity to solve the problem as explained in a recent update, Managing Emotion to Get Your Life Back from Morgellons.