Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Cortisol, Stress and EFT

In case any of my return visitors haven't noticed, I've changed the name of my website from "EFT for Spiritual Warfare" to "Renew Your Mind" ministry. I'll skip the long story for now, but I was going to shut the whole thing down when the old domain expired at the end of 2012. When I prayed about it, I didn't think that was the right thing to do, so I ended up moving to a new hosting provider and changed the domain name. The new domain name is primarily because I don't want to focus solely on spiritual warfare and EFT.

In the process I visited a site so I could find their contact information in order to ask them to update a link on one of their articles, which went to one of my articles on the old site. They had an article about a study that was to be published last year which showed that EFT lowers cortisol, a stress hormone. In fact it showed that it lowers it more than psychotherapy or no treatment; which were the other two methods tested on the group of 83 people. Cortisone is considered a stress hormone, which is important when it's needed in the short term. However, chronic stress along with elevated cortisol can cause a lot of problems. Some of those problems include problems with digestion and impaired memory.

In line with the digestive problems, I had personally noticed that I had a much easier time keeping my weight down when I was relaxed and well-rested. Since one of the things that cortisol does is elevate blood sugar, it may be that lowering one's stress level is at least as important as cutting down the carbohydrates or other methods some use for losing some weight. Possibly more important.

However, the biggest impact chronic levels of elevated cortisol may have in relation to one's weight is that of lowering metabolism. When I write about metabolism, I mean one's metabolic rate as measured by their body temperature. I have never been a fan of the 'calories in, calories out' way of thinking. I'm sure most of us know someone who can eat and eat a lot of food and not gain any weight. Yet there are others of us that eat very little in comparison and don't lose, or even gain weight. Those differences have a lot to do with your metabolism. When I found the article about EFT and cortisol, it was after I had found a health-related website called 180degreehealth. Matt Stone of 180d writes a lot about metabolic rate. So it would be interesting to look into using EFT in relation to helping to raise metabolism. I have discovered that certain food additives, as well as gluten, cause my body temps to go down. I have not yet experimented with tapping to increase temps, except that I do know from years of trying to tap on having a 'problem with wheat' that it doesn't work for me in that respect. I have used tapping to help with the frustration of trying to figure out my diet, however.