Archive for the ‘Stress’ Category

Mars Venus Coaching – The Oxytocin High on Mother’s Day

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

At Mars Venus Coaching we talk a lot about oxytocin and its many benefits. There’s nothing like the rush of oxytocin to fuel your day. As a mom, as a daughter, as a friend, as a business woman—it doesn’t matter what title is attached to your name as a female, what matters is knowing how to produce oxytocin for yourself. Recently, during one of the monthly stress seminar’s I present to both men and women in my community to help them understand how their physiology affects how they cope with stress, and how it actually increases stress for the opposite sex if you aren’t respecting and working with the differences…I had an aha moment. True, I had my mother-in-law in the audience, and one of her comments re-sparked what my purpose is as a Mars Venus Coach. Being that we’re just around the corner for Mother’s Day, as I was interacting with the crowd, I realized the greatest gift I could give to all mom’s in my world is: the gift of how to make your own oxytocin.

Are you familiar with oxytocin? Have you heard it called the love and nurturing hormone? Until recently, oxytocin was only thought to be produced when mothers were breastfeeding their babies. Recent studies now show women are capable of producing oxytocin on a daily basis. We just didn’t know that some of the activities we were engaging in do this, and some don’t. We know now what activities stimulate oxytocin production, and which ones don’t. Oxytocin is now known as a stress-reducing hormone for women. Why this fact is important, and how we can produce more oxytocin is a gift to spread to as many women as possible is the sad fact—we aren’t doing enough of these activities, and consequently our health, our relationships, our abilities to reproduce, our jobs, our children—they’re all suffering.

Men produce a different stress-reducing hormone—and it’s something we’re more familiar with hearing about: testosterone. However, there’s a couple of catches. Women produce testosterone too, however, it does little to reduce our stress. It actually impedes the production of oxytocin for us. And, guess where we make a lot of testosterone on a daily basis? At work—basically, whenever we’re competing, and being rushed from one thing to the next. In addition to testosterone production, we also have excess cortisol (the stress producing hormone, also known as the squirt of energy that helps us fight or flee a situation), that prevents us from properly producing enough oxytocin to keep stress levels low.

My mother-in-law during the stress seminar commented that she wished she knew this information early-on in her marriage and career. Knowing how to stimulate the levels of oxytocin in your blood CHANGES everything! Your waistline for starters—it will shrink. Your relationships as well—you’ll focus on the ones that help you produce more oxytocin, and less testosterone. Your happiness too—90% of the oxytocin you are responsible and capable of producing, you don’t need anyone else to do it for you. You can do it with minimal cost, or you could go all out cialis price online. The knowledge is what is imperative.

In our society we are now doing everything contrary to keeping the hormones in our bodies balanced. So, we need this information to help us re-focus on nurturing ourselves first. Nurture and love yourself first by doing activities that produce the love and nurturing hormone, oxytocin. Then, and only then, can you begin to take care of others, both in your family, with neighbors and friends, and also in your professional line of work too.

An easy way to identify if you are in a primed state to produce oxytocin is if you are feeling any of these feelings, then you are UNABLE to produce oxytocin. Identify one of these feelings, and then switch to an oxytocin producing activity to get the nasty cortisol and testosterone out of your system. Oxytocin decreases when you feel:

• Alone
• Ignored
• Rushed
• Overwhelmed
• Unsupported
• Unimportant

Another important thing to remember is if other people are demanding, requiring, or expecting you to do x, y, z for their benefit, then it is very difficult for oxytocin to be released…, because you are being rushed and unsupported. If you find that your kids, husband, friends, neighbors, family, co-workers, or customers are making you feel this way. What you have to do is then figure out a way to release yourself from being guilted into performing tasks for others. Sometimes all it takes is re-framing the situation for yourself. Other times you will have to be assertive and use your conflict resolution skills to take things off of your to-do list, or to negotiate and ask for their help in return for what you’re doing for them.

Activities that you can do to produce oxytocin for yourself are:

• Plan a special occasion
• Schedule a walk & talk
• Grow/make something
• Create a “Have Done” list
• Reach out to friends
Hire a coach

Activities you can do for the mom’s in your life to help them produce oxytocin are:

• Hug them 4x a day
• Leave them a note
• Take them out on a special just because occasion
• Give them a flower
• Notice, listen, & compliment them
• Give them a spa day
• Help them without being asked

Just remember—nurturing yourself and the mom’s in your life is not being selfish or frivolous. It is taking an active stance on the most important ladies in your life so they have lasting health and happiness.

Lyndsay Katauskas, MEd
Mars Venus Coaching
Corporate Media Relations

A Happier You

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
By Eckhart Tolle
Oprah.com   |   From the January 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
The greatest goal you can set this year is to make peace with your life, no matter your circumstances. These 10 powerful insights from Eckhart Tolle will get you started.

Oneness with All Life by Eckhart Tolle

  1. Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.
  2. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. There is the situation or the fact, and here are my thoughts about it. Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, “I am ruined” is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. “I have 50 cents left in my bank account” is a fact. Facing facts is always empowering.
  3. See if you can catch the voice in your head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind.
  4. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time—a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared with your face in a photo taken 30 years ago—yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment.
  5. Why do anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
  6. People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness. They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn’t have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have. And so they miss the deeper perfection that is inherent in life itself, a perfection that lies beyond what is happening or not happening. Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is untouched by time.
  7. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
  8. Equating the physical body with “I,” the body that is destined to grow old, wither, and die, always leads to suffering. To refrain from identifying with the body doesn’t mean that you no longer care for it. If it is strong, beautiful, or vigorous, you can appreciate those attributes—while they last. You can also improve the body’s condition through nutrition and exercise. If you don’t equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, or the body becomes incapacitated, this will not affect your sense of worth or identity in any way. In fact, as the body begins to weaken, the light of consciousness can shine more easily.
  9. You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing that goodness to emerge.
  10. If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace.

Exerpted from Oneness with All Life by Eckhart Tolle. Published by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copywright © 2008 by Eckhart Tolle