“Stress is a killer – literally. Like a stealth fighter, stress hormones home in on the body’s immune system and impair its ability to fight illness, while the hormone cortisol attacks neurons in the brain’s learning center, the hippocampus. Some people think that stress pushes them to produce and to be more creative, but the truth is that chronic stress dumbs down the brain and leaves us vulnerable to sicknesses, making us less productive over time…
In the next minute, you can perform a stress-defying maneuver, and you can do it one breath at a time. Your stress doesn’t have to spill onto others who happen to be in the line of fire. Working with the breath is an ancient and highly effective stress-management technique. It takes advantage of the body’s natural wiring and lowers blood pressure and pulse and respiration rates. Also, by causing the abdominal cavity to press on the vagus nerve, a cranial nerve that connects the gut to the heart and the brain, the breath helps the gut release serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter into the bloodstream.”
Donald Altman, in “One Minute Mindfulness”
For more information about this book visit Amazon.
Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in May 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
