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I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger

I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues. The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the tools from HeartMath. Their "Transforming Stress" book has been a god send. It's not a get well fast type thing, but I've been practicing the sessions daily for a month now and am in much better control of my stress and anxiety. I have practiced Tai Chi, meditation, and visualization via NLP techniques in the past. I'm not a novice when it comes to the types of techniques that HeartMath teaches. However, the way theirs are structured are the most effective I've found for dealing with these issues. If you're going through hard times I highly recommend using their tools.

ddorian43 10y ago
Can you try kickboxing/muaythai/mma/boxing ? It requires physical & mental coordination, and is very taxing on your muscles and will leave you exhausted and in a state of ~high after training. Though don't do sparring if you're not completely ok.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  You can also get hurt though..
  - ddorian43 10y ago
    Don't spar then.
    - Chris2048 10y ago
      Many places wouldn't accept that. Do you just sit out that section?
      - ddorian43 10y ago
        They may say "come on, we'll go easy, it's not a big deal" but they won't force you or something. But if they do, or if they give an ultimatum,then those places/trainers suck. If you have valid reason to not spar and they still say "come on" leave the gym because it's not healthy.
        Chris2048 10y ago
        My place did suck then. And I did get hurt..
      - ddorian43 10y ago
        Usually the gyms I've been to, they spar only a full day/week so I just don't show up that day. Other times I just sit out and watch. Though that only happens when I don't want to, I've sparred many times.
vanderZwan 10y ago
Combine this with any form of endurance exercise to build red muscle for maximum benefits. It's been shown¹ that red muscle takes away kynurene, which is produced by stress, can enter the brain, and appears to be able to trigger depression and other mental health issues if it is at elevated levels for longer periods: > “Our initial research hypothesis was that trained muscle would produce a substance with beneficial effects on the brain. We actually found the opposite: well-trained muscle produces an enzyme that purges the body of harmful substances. So in this context the muscle’s function is reminiscent of that of the kidney or the liver,” says Jorge Ruas, principal investigator at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet. > The researchers discovered that mice with higher levels of PGC-1a1 in muscle also had higher levels of enzymes called KAT. KATs convert a substance formed during stress (kynurenine) into kynurenic acid, a substance that is not able to pass from the blood to the brain. The exact function of kynurenine is not known, but high levels of kynurenine can be measured in patients with mental illness. Recently the same research group also discovered that kynurenic acid turns white fat (the unhealthy type) into beige fat (more similar to brown fat, which is healthier). ¹ http://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-brain-from-stress-induced-depression http://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-brai...
- ccarter84 10y ago
  Thanks for the post and pointer, had not come across any stuff on red muscle etc before!
blubb-fish 10y ago
If I go through a tough time where anxiety is already impairing my life, sleep, communication then my first aid method is concious breathing twice a day for five minutes. It works immediately and levels down my stress significantly after about three days. You breathe slowly in for about 15 seconds, hold breath for about 10 seconds and breathe out for about 35 seconds - mileage may vary. For five minutes. The impact is not as fundamental and profound as with dedicated daily meditation but it does the trick and actually builds the basis required for actually sitting down and doing more subtle mental work. Cheers
- jontayesp 10y ago
  I wonder if the Apple Watch app is effective. You can set how many breaths you want per minute, but no option to hold a breath for 10 seconds like you mentioned.
  - mtw 10y ago
    It's a good first step but the app definitively needs improvement!
wodenokoto 10y ago
Link for the lazy: http://store.heartmath.org/Books-Stress-Solutions/transforming-stress.html http://store.heartmath.org/Books-Stress-Solutions/transformi...
snissn 10y ago
Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!
- sguav 10y ago
  When I was doing more physical jobs than now (also very stressfull), my collegues were amazaed at how I could handle the fatigue and anxiety that well without taking coffee. I still believe that actual abstinence from caffeine is the answer to many like issues
- nf05papsjfVbc 10y ago
  I second this. When I am under stress, the caffeine heightens the feeling of anxiety and on really stressful days, I can feel my heart pounding...
- criddell 10y ago
  If you love coffee and don't want to remove it from your life, try taking some L-Theanine with your morning cup of coffee. For me, it eliminates anxiety and jitters without tempering the cognitive benefits of coffee.
  - cJ0th 10y ago
    Or enjoy a cup of sencha or gyokuro which comes with caffeine and L-Theanine. It is a lovely combination indeed. :)
    - cypherpunks01 10y ago
      Cannot recommend this enough! Upton tea carries really a really good sencha called 'Japanese Super Sencha Kamakura' and their Gyokuro is brilliant too. Never hurts to carry around a few 200mg L-Theanine capsules though.
  - ccarter84 10y ago
    I got some theanine from a a bulk sit because it was cheap, but probably has a low portion of L-theanine vs D-theanine... may need to look into fixing that since the effects don't seem to be as good as when I tried Suntheanine...
edoloughlin 10y ago
I came across this article a few minutes before reading this http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listening-to-this-one-song-reduces-anxiety-by-up-to-65-percent.html http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listenin... 'listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in _their usual physiological resting rates'
- chillwaves 10y ago
  I prefer this version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBb3GxubAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBb3GxubAc
- randomflavor 10y ago
  This is even better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6EkXHu5AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6EkXHu5AI
- altm 10y ago
  This song brings more calm to me than Weightless did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_jySkFIK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_jySkFIK4
ephextom 10y ago
One of the pages [1] on The HeartMath site references Dr Bruce Lipton. If you're interested in understanding more about the interplay between experiences, emotions, physiology and genetics, I can strongly recommend his book, The Biology of Belief [2], and his many interviews and presentations that can be found on YouTube. His research and writing focuses on the notion that subconscious beliefs are the major influence on our perceptions, which is why for some of us, experiences can trigger pathological health conditions like anxiety and depression, along with auto-immune illnesses and other chronic illnesses that result from chronic stress (which can include cardiovascular disease and other serious conditions). Inspired by this book, I've had great success improving my emotional and physiological health by undertaking practices that focus on subconscious beliefs. They all seek to achieve similar results to NLP (congruence, non-reactivity, etc), but I've found these ones to be more effective: - Self Clearing [3] - Holotropic Breathwork [4] - Dolores Cannon Hypnosis [5] All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously. I can also recommend Stoic Philosophy [6], but for me these practices are tools and systems that enable concepts from stoicism to be implemented most effectively. [1] https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-development/you-can-change-your-dna/ https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-dev... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousness-Miracles/dp/1401923127 https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousne... [3] http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/ http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/ [4] http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml [5] http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht [6] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practical-guide-for-entrepreneurs/ http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...
- tedks 10y ago
  >All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously. Yes, throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity can certainly kick the placebo effect into overdrive. If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions. This of course has nothing to do with the actual efficacy, it's just that you're selectively perceiving so as to confirm your pre-existing notions; when the object of all of this effort is your own mental state this can be confused with the technique itself being effective. In reality, people like being successful, and feeling like you are winning at one thing makes you more likely to think you can win at other things. Rinse repeat. Confirmation bias is lovely when you can weaponize it like this. The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.
nhaliday 10y ago
Alternative viewpoint: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-incoherent/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-in..., "HeartMath Considered Incoherent" Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.
- qznc 10y ago
  HeartMath sounds like a good base with a lot of esoteric bullshit thrown on top. Maybe breathing in a consistent rhythm to get a coherent heart rate variability (HRV) is the sole magic behind meditation, HeartMath, etc? Here is a good TEDx talk by Alan Watkins on HRV: https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 (there is also a part 1, but part 2 has the good demo)
  - cypherpunks01 10y ago
    The whole Heartmath thing seems to me like an exotic way to teach and practice consistent slow, regular, deep breathing (which is definitely worthwhile thing to learn!). I believe the "coherent" HRV curve they claim brings all these benefits is simply the effect of respiratory sinus arrythmia (why your heartrate decreases when you breathe in) while breathing at a very regular interval—the HRV curve just happens to be a good indicator of how regularly you're breathing.
Loic 10y ago
If you think like me that NLP means NonLinear Programming, in this context it means Neuro-linguistic programming[0]: "Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP has since been overwhelmingly discredited scientifically, but continues to be marketed by some hypnotherapists and by some companies that organize seminars and workshops on management training for businesses." Homoeopathy has also been discredited, the mind is full of corners the science cannot really explain. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
- mtrimpe 10y ago
  At its core NLP is basically little more than a notational system for mental processes which is a pretty hard thing to discredit scientifically. It's true that that most of the NLP community revolves around cargo culting a few of these processes though (which most likely indeed aren't scientifically valid.) Saying that that discredits NLP as a whole is roughly equivalent to saying a programming language is inherently bad because a lot of shitty software has been written in it though.
- dschiptsov 10y ago
  To be honest, the very first books - The Structure of Magic - are much better than later "practical" and manipulative stuff. The notions of "patching reality" - what we call today the Confirmation and Self-serving biases (deletion, distribution) and "framing effects" are correct in general. Programming, or what they call "re-framing" works to some extent, by "unlearning" some wrong concepts acquired through social conditioning and biased perceptions, by re-framing (transforming) them into more closely related to actual reality. Anchoring is already crap (but use of amulets and "things of power" is exactly this). So are the supposed correlations between looking patterns and modes of thinking (while naive people (children) some times show such correlations). The core ideas of early NLP, including re-framing, were nothing new. The prophets of old times seemingly did exactly this - they succeeded in re-framing of traditional views and beliefs. The later "technique" stuff, is nonsense. It apparently worked because hypocrisy, manipulations, reading and use of so-called body language are as old as humanity. Again, priests of any kind are famous practitioners of such manipulative techniques. Nowadays businessmen and politicians are using similar tricks, as if we are still in ignorant middle ages.)
alltakendamned 10y ago
I'm curious why you felt the need to deal with the stress through a new set of tools? You clearly already have a lot of skills for dealing with this kind of situations, namely meditation and Thai Chi. Why didn't you fall back to those?
TheLegace 10y ago
Wow thank you so much. I began reading Transforming Stress and in two days it has already changed everything my life. I have been going through post-traumatic stress and my abilities to concentrate and function have been crippled. Horrible panic attacks, painful migraines, irrational fear and despair are beginning to wane. I received the emWave2 today, best $250 I have ever spent. I am bringing up my coherence and the horrible chest pains have been going down in just 3 20min sessions of using the device. I might finally be able to program after all.

ddorian43 10y ago

Can you try kickboxing/muaythai/mma/boxing ? It requires physical & mental coordination, and is very taxing on your muscles and will leave you exhausted and in a state of ~high after training. Though don't do sparring if you're not completely ok.

Chris2048 10y ago
You can also get hurt though..
- ddorian43 10y ago
  Don't spar then.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    Many places wouldn't accept that. Do you just sit out that section?
    - ddorian43 10y ago
      They may say "come on, we'll go easy, it's not a big deal" but they won't force you or something. But if they do, or if they give an ultimatum,then those places/trainers suck. If you have valid reason to not spar and they still say "come on" leave the gym because it's not healthy.
      - Chris2048 10y ago
        My place did suck then. And I did get hurt..
    - ddorian43 10y ago
      Usually the gyms I've been to, they spar only a full day/week so I just don't show up that day. Other times I just sit out and watch. Though that only happens when I don't want to, I've sparred many times.

vanderZwan 10y ago

Combine this with any form of endurance exercise to build red muscle for maximum benefits. It's been shown¹ that red muscle takes away kynurene, which is produced by stress, can enter the brain, and appears to be able to trigger depression and other mental health issues if it is at elevated levels for longer periods: > “Our initial research hypothesis was that trained muscle would produce a substance with beneficial effects on the brain. We actually found the opposite: well-trained muscle produces an enzyme that purges the body of harmful substances. So in this context the muscle’s function is reminiscent of that of the kidney or the liver,” says Jorge Ruas, principal investigator at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet. > The researchers discovered that mice with higher levels of PGC-1a1 in muscle also had higher levels of enzymes called KAT. KATs convert a substance formed during stress (kynurenine) into kynurenic acid, a substance that is not able to pass from the blood to the brain. The exact function of kynurenine is not known, but high levels of kynurenine can be measured in patients with mental illness. Recently the same research group also discovered that kynurenic acid turns white fat (the unhealthy type) into beige fat (more similar to brown fat, which is healthier). ¹ http://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-brain-from-stress-induced-depression http://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-brai...

ccarter84 10y ago
Thanks for the post and pointer, had not come across any stuff on red muscle etc before!

blubb-fish 10y ago

If I go through a tough time where anxiety is already impairing my life, sleep, communication then my first aid method is concious breathing twice a day for five minutes. It works immediately and levels down my stress significantly after about three days. You breathe slowly in for about 15 seconds, hold breath for about 10 seconds and breathe out for about 35 seconds - mileage may vary. For five minutes. The impact is not as fundamental and profound as with dedicated daily meditation but it does the trick and actually builds the basis required for actually sitting down and doing more subtle mental work. Cheers

jontayesp 10y ago
I wonder if the Apple Watch app is effective. You can set how many breaths you want per minute, but no option to hold a breath for 10 seconds like you mentioned.
- mtw 10y ago
  It's a good first step but the app definitively needs improvement!

wodenokoto 10y ago

Link for the lazy: http://store.heartmath.org/Books-Stress-Solutions/transforming-stress.html http://store.heartmath.org/Books-Stress-Solutions/transformi...

snissn 10y ago

Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!

sguav 10y ago
When I was doing more physical jobs than now (also very stressfull), my collegues were amazaed at how I could handle the fatigue and anxiety that well without taking coffee. I still believe that actual abstinence from caffeine is the answer to many like issues
nf05papsjfVbc 10y ago
I second this. When I am under stress, the caffeine heightens the feeling of anxiety and on really stressful days, I can feel my heart pounding...
criddell 10y ago
If you love coffee and don't want to remove it from your life, try taking some L-Theanine with your morning cup of coffee. For me, it eliminates anxiety and jitters without tempering the cognitive benefits of coffee.
- cJ0th 10y ago
  Or enjoy a cup of sencha or gyokuro which comes with caffeine and L-Theanine. It is a lovely combination indeed. :)
  - cypherpunks01 10y ago
    Cannot recommend this enough! Upton tea carries really a really good sencha called 'Japanese Super Sencha Kamakura' and their Gyokuro is brilliant too. Never hurts to carry around a few 200mg L-Theanine capsules though.
- ccarter84 10y ago
  I got some theanine from a a bulk sit because it was cheap, but probably has a low portion of L-theanine vs D-theanine... may need to look into fixing that since the effects don't seem to be as good as when I tried Suntheanine...

edoloughlin 10y ago

I came across this article a few minutes before reading this http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listening-to-this-one-song-reduces-anxiety-by-up-to-65-percent.html http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listenin... 'listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in _their usual physiological resting rates'

chillwaves 10y ago
I prefer this version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBb3GxubAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBb3GxubAc
randomflavor 10y ago
This is even better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6EkXHu5AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6EkXHu5AI
altm 10y ago
This song brings more calm to me than Weightless did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_jySkFIK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_jySkFIK4

ephextom 10y ago

One of the pages [1] on The HeartMath site references Dr Bruce Lipton. If you're interested in understanding more about the interplay between experiences, emotions, physiology and genetics, I can strongly recommend his book, The Biology of Belief [2], and his many interviews and presentations that can be found on YouTube. His research and writing focuses on the notion that subconscious beliefs are the major influence on our perceptions, which is why for some of us, experiences can trigger pathological health conditions like anxiety and depression, along with auto-immune illnesses and other chronic illnesses that result from chronic stress (which can include cardiovascular disease and other serious conditions). Inspired by this book, I've had great success improving my emotional and physiological health by undertaking practices that focus on subconscious beliefs. They all seek to achieve similar results to NLP (congruence, non-reactivity, etc), but I've found these ones to be more effective: - Self Clearing [3] - Holotropic Breathwork [4] - Dolores Cannon Hypnosis [5] All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously. I can also recommend Stoic Philosophy [6], but for me these practices are tools and systems that enable concepts from stoicism to be implemented most effectively. [1] https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-development/you-can-change-your-dna/ https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-dev... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousness-Miracles/dp/1401923127 https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousne... [3] http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/ http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/ [4] http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml [5] http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht [6] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practical-guide-for-entrepreneurs/ http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...

tedks 10y ago
>All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously. Yes, throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity can certainly kick the placebo effect into overdrive. If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions. This of course has nothing to do with the actual efficacy, it's just that you're selectively perceiving so as to confirm your pre-existing notions; when the object of all of this effort is your own mental state this can be confused with the technique itself being effective. In reality, people like being successful, and feeling like you are winning at one thing makes you more likely to think you can win at other things. Rinse repeat. Confirmation bias is lovely when you can weaponize it like this. The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.

nhaliday 10y ago

Alternative viewpoint: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-incoherent/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-in..., "HeartMath Considered Incoherent" Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.

qznc 10y ago
HeartMath sounds like a good base with a lot of esoteric bullshit thrown on top. Maybe breathing in a consistent rhythm to get a coherent heart rate variability (HRV) is the sole magic behind meditation, HeartMath, etc? Here is a good TEDx talk by Alan Watkins on HRV: https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 (there is also a part 1, but part 2 has the good demo)
- cypherpunks01 10y ago
  The whole Heartmath thing seems to me like an exotic way to teach and practice consistent slow, regular, deep breathing (which is definitely worthwhile thing to learn!). I believe the "coherent" HRV curve they claim brings all these benefits is simply the effect of respiratory sinus arrythmia (why your heartrate decreases when you breathe in) while breathing at a very regular interval—the HRV curve just happens to be a good indicator of how regularly you're breathing.

Loic 10y ago

If you think like me that NLP means NonLinear Programming, in this context it means Neuro-linguistic programming[0]: "Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP has since been overwhelmingly discredited scientifically, but continues to be marketed by some hypnotherapists and by some companies that organize seminars and workshops on management training for businesses." Homoeopathy has also been discredited, the mind is full of corners the science cannot really explain. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

mtrimpe 10y ago
At its core NLP is basically little more than a notational system for mental processes which is a pretty hard thing to discredit scientifically. It's true that that most of the NLP community revolves around cargo culting a few of these processes though (which most likely indeed aren't scientifically valid.) Saying that that discredits NLP as a whole is roughly equivalent to saying a programming language is inherently bad because a lot of shitty software has been written in it though.
dschiptsov 10y ago
To be honest, the very first books - The Structure of Magic - are much better than later "practical" and manipulative stuff. The notions of "patching reality" - what we call today the Confirmation and Self-serving biases (deletion, distribution) and "framing effects" are correct in general. Programming, or what they call "re-framing" works to some extent, by "unlearning" some wrong concepts acquired through social conditioning and biased perceptions, by re-framing (transforming) them into more closely related to actual reality. Anchoring is already crap (but use of amulets and "things of power" is exactly this). So are the supposed correlations between looking patterns and modes of thinking (while naive people (children) some times show such correlations). The core ideas of early NLP, including re-framing, were nothing new. The prophets of old times seemingly did exactly this - they succeeded in re-framing of traditional views and beliefs. The later "technique" stuff, is nonsense. It apparently worked because hypocrisy, manipulations, reading and use of so-called body language are as old as humanity. Again, priests of any kind are famous practitioners of such manipulative techniques. Nowadays businessmen and politicians are using similar tricks, as if we are still in ignorant middle ages.)

alltakendamned 10y ago

I'm curious why you felt the need to deal with the stress through a new set of tools? You clearly already have a lot of skills for dealing with this kind of situations, namely meditation and Thai Chi. Why didn't you fall back to those?

TheLegace 10y ago

Wow thank you so much. I began reading Transforming Stress and in two days it has already changed everything my life. I have been going through post-traumatic stress and my abilities to concentrate and function have been crippled. Horrible panic attacks, painful migraines, irrational fear and despair are beginning to wane. I received the emWave2 today, best $250 I have ever spent. I am bringing up my coherence and the horrible chest pains have been going down in just 3 20min sessions of using the device. I might finally be able to program after all.