The economy. Health care. Global warming. War. Mortgage payments. Weekly food bills. Gas. Car payment. Tuition. How are my parents doing? How are the kids doing? How is my marriage doing? Time for friends. Time for exercise. Time for healthy eating. Time for vacation. Am I living the life I was meant to live? Am I happy?

Yes, we live in very stressful times. The current economic and social climate, along with many other events or circumstances, can create anxiety and stress—the feeling of being unable to get out from under it all.

Since the early 1900s, practitioners in the fields of biological science and psychology have had great interest in understanding and managing stress. In 1914, Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, described the theory of the flight-or-fight response, an innate physiological survival mechanism in which the body prepares to fight or run when confronted with a perceived threat.

Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine, created the "Social Readjustment Rating Scale"¹ to find if they could quantify an individual's level of stress and correlate this to physical illness. This scale has been used worldwide, and the results have held steady across culture and gender.

In the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, each life event is assigned a number that reflects the relative amount of stress the particular event can cause. In order to estimate the cumulative stress, add up the numbers corresponding to the events that have occurred over the past year. Studies show a modest correlation between the number of stressful events experienced in the previous year with illness in the present year: heart attacks, broken bones, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, tuberculosis, complications of pregnancy and birth, and so on.²...