Some of you know that I am the Chief Content and Oversight Adviser to the Dr. Phil Show, and have seen me occasionally as an expert guest on the show. A fascinating event took place recently as I was taping the show featuring my new book, The Stress Answer, that I would like to share with you. Before you ask, the show is scheduled to air October 1 and you can witness my discovery.
The book is about self-help techniques to help rid yourself of what I call “brain stress storms.” These brain storms are what I observe when the brain goes into a chaos, usually triggered by stress. I define brain stress storms as those states in which your stress is so high as to prohibit rational thinking and produce circular thinking patterns. When you are in this state you can’t problem-solve or resolve issues.
On-Stage Learning
In these cases for the show, I was emphasizing depressive brain storms, where the QEEG brain scan depicts the frontal lobe as being remaining in a very low frequency, or energy, as well as the left temporal lobe. This is a signature pattern I often see in people with lethargic depression. The way I usually interpret this pattern is one of poor planning, prioritizing, and organizing abilities, as characterized in frontal lobe dysfunction. There is also the typical symptom of no joy or pleasure seen in anything, similar to the low frequency in the temporal lobe.
The main feature of the part of the book is to find ways of energizing these areas, which can be seen in following QEEG scans correlated with resolve of the depressive storms. In this case, I was showing some ways of changing the brain frequencies, and changing the brain storms so you could find better ways of resolving the depression problems rationally. For example, I use different breathing techniques, sonic stimulation, movements, physical exercise and posturing, along with numerous other techniques.
As I was preparing for the show I asked the producer to make available a number of items for me to demonstrate. As anyone would realize, there is a strict time element to television and things have to happen fast. You can’t take more than five minutes, usually 15 seconds, to “show” anything. As a quick thought I asked the producer to make available some flowers with strong fragrances. I asked for roses, Lavender, Honey Suckle and Lilac flowers.
As I was working with the guest, who was having extreme stress with her husband being out of town (military) and the many worries and stresses of managing three children, I started with a relaxation breathing pattern of long, slow breaths. She was getting relaxed, but was taking too long. So I pitched a blossom of the Lavender and held it close to her nose. The results were immediate. She exclaimed, “It works! I am totally free of my worry trap. Will it stay?”
I assured her that the program usually required more steps for complete management, and she accomplished the first step quickly. But in reality, she had accomplished what I wanted to demonstrate with this one exercise. Not only were the film crew amazed, I was as well.
As the news in the production office spread through the staff (who are very stressed people), the flowers were being passed around. Everyone was becoming very relaxed and destressed, discarding their brain traps by the dozens. It turned out to be a great experiment, validating flowers as a powerful change agent.
Common Sense
This insight for flowers as a de-stressing agent is not as foreign to us as I thought. What else do we do when our spouses are angry with us but to buy flowers? Yes, they can be seen as a gift, but flowers are not your best long-term investment because they dry up within days. The multi-trillion-dollar perfume industry productions are based on the same fragrances noted in this method.
My thoughts are that we probably have bypassed ancient remedies a long time ago in favor of the new tech industries, but we have to be reminded that diseases, both mental and physical, were treated successfully long before antibiotics and modern surgery of the twentieth century were even dreams. In fact if you believe anthropologists’ literature, such a Sagan’s Health of Nations, health care only has made significant steps when the environmental conditions were cleaned up, such as sewage and air quality. But this is not a war against modern medicine, but whether a renewal of ancient truths and how nature offers us solutions to our stresses if we would only look, listen and smell. It sure is cheaper.
