Tuesday, March 3, 2009

MS Stress: How can Stress-related Emotions Affect MS?

To those of us diagnosed with MS stress plays a major role in causing more severe and more frequent MS attacks, exacerbations and relapses.

Multiple Sclerosis is an autoimmune response, where the body attacks itself, resulting in damage to the myelin sheath, along the spinal cord or possibly even damage to the Blood Brain Barrier or BBB that surrounds and protects the brain. This can result in damage to either the mylein sheath or to the MS brain, which results in MS scarring or MS palques that results, that can be seen on MS mri test results.

A wide range of MS symptoms can result, which can vary from mild to more severe in intensity and frequency. Most cases of Multiple Sclerosis are characterized by MS exacerbations or MS relapses, which are often followed by MS remissions. During the periods of remission, the body is repairing the damage to the myelin sheath or to the brain.

MS research is revealing more about how the body works to repair damage to the myelin sheath and the BBB (blood brain barrier). MS stress adds to how severe and how often the relapses and exacerbations can become. If we can find a way to reduce our over reactions to stress, MS research is finding that this not only reduces our MS symptoms, this can acually help our bodies to start to produce more of the ms stem cells that can help to start to repair damage to the myelin sheath.

I have found that with my own case of Multiple Sclerosis, that the more I stress out about anything, the more this causes my nervous system to short circuit, making my symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis go totally crazy. I have tried many things, in an effort to find ways to reduce my reactions to stress. It has taken me a few years to find anything that really helps to relax my body and reset where my brain defines what is stress and what is not stress.

I have tried many kinds of meditation and many of them helped with reducing some of my Multiple Sclerosis symptoms, but not enough to make a big enough difference in how severe my symptoms often became. Within the last 2 years, I finally found a type of meditation that helps so much more with reducing my often extreme levels of MS stress that I sometimes feel all too often. This type of meditation also helps with reducing my stress-related emotions that actually cause my MS symptoms to become so much worse, that they would be otherwise.

If done consistently over a period of a few months, this type of meditation helps to retrain the brain to redefine what it considers to be stress. This really works for helping to calm down the over reactions of my MS nerve function problems.

Click on the link to find out more about a type of medition that works for -- reducing MS stress **

** This is a link to a site where when people go to this site and purchase, we receive a small referral fee. The only reason we are recommending this product is that we have found that it has helped us greatly in reducing our levels of stress and help to reduce the severity and frquency of Multiple Sclerosis through reducing the MS relapses to a much larger degree than any other meditation program that we have used before.

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