Emotional Freedom Techniques (or EFT as it is known) is a stress and emotional healing technique, which is based on a revolutionary discovery that violates most of the beliefs of conventional psychology. It contends that the cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system.

Essentially, EFT is a form of "psychological acupressure" - except that we don't use needles.

Stress is the "wear and tear" our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment; it has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action; it can result in a new awareness and an exciting new perspective. As a negative influence, it can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

If you have ever asked this question to yourself, it means that you definitely need stress management!

Personally I would advise you to practice a regular stress management program whether you are over stressed or not. This is because a daily relaxation session will help you feel refreshed and keep you recharged throughout the day and also improve your performance potential at work and at home.

It does amaze me sometimes when i meet clients in my practice who have never really known what it is like to deeply relax. I specialize in anxiety counseling and can only recall one person who came to me who performed a relaxation exercise daily. It is vitally important that anxiety sufferers establish a relaxation routine because the core of anxiety and panic disorder, as well as many other emotional issues, is an over-arousal of the nervous system.

Many people live with stress and anxiety based conditions for years with no relief. Maybe they have tried medications which really only camouflage the symptoms and dont really manage to get to the root of the problem. Some have tried the traditional therapies which will work to some extent. Techniques like cognitive-behavioral therapy can work quite well with
some people but there remains a high relapse rate for these approaches.

There are many, many forms of meditation today and as a practicing meditator myself I have researched and utilized many of the common methods in use. Now I originally started meditating as a stress reduction method, I was working as a nurse at the time and it was becoming obvious that my stress was increasing due to my workload and having to deal with various other
departmental issues at that time.

I thought I was just shy for years and years, no really I did. I never thought that feeling uncomfortable in new social situations was any more than that I would get tense and start to feel agitated every time I had to meet new people. Later on when I got married, yes I actually met someone who understood, it was quite daunting when my wife would return from work stating that so and so had invited us around to have dinner with them.

Why do we so often find it so hard to switch off and relax? What is it that makes us feel tense and twitchy just when we need to sleep or recover from all that hard work and stress? It seems that our own bodies are working against us at times - and in a way, they sometimes are.

As part of our neural equipment, the autonomic nervous system, which controls organs such as the heart, stomach and intestines, is made up of two even more specialised sections.

Stress is now the number one reason behind sickness from work and more than 70% of working adults have experienced stress at work in the past year according to the Gee Publishing Survey of 2006. Whether or not these statistics are true one thing is certain, we cannot expect our employers to provide everything we need to reduce or manage our stress. They are far too busy themselves.

In order to manage our stress and improve our health and gain more inner peace and a sense of control over our lives we must be willing to make a commitment to ourselves to manage our own stress levels because nobody else will monitor then for us. We may have to risk thinking and behaving in healthier and more empowering ways to live life optimally.