63KB Real Audio file (AM radio quality) or a 
688KB .WAV file (CD quality).
Recent developments in Behaviourial Psychology promise the possibility of a new drug-free approach to the problem of stress management. Behaviourial Psychologists have long treated autonomic responses; counter-conditioning anxiety, phobias and other psychological conditions which are characterized by increased autonomic arousal. The sweaty hands, dry mouth, cold feet, tense muscles and accelerated heart rate of the fearful flyer and anxious dental patients are familiar physiological manifestations of the anxiety response.
Counterconditioning procedures not only reduce the subjective experience of what the psychologist calls anxiety or stress, but also modifies its physiological manifestations. When the patient learns to reduce his anxiety, he is also learning to lower his blood pressure, slow down his heart rate, reduce the tensions in his muscles, increase the blood flow to his extremities and in other ways control the activity of his autonomic nervous system.
It was with the realization that these behaviourial procedures produced physiological side effects with important implications for physical medicine that attention turned from anxiety to stress from neurosis to psychosomatics. Many if not all stress related and psychophysiological disorders involve autonomically innervated organs, and consequently many psychosomatic disorders have been demonstrated to be amenable to stress reducing behaviourial procedures. Biofeedback, hypnosis, deep muscle relaxation and other methods have been used to treat migraine headaches, muscle spasms, essential hypertension, P.V.C., angina, spastic colon, Raynaud's syndrome, sympathetic reflex dystrophy and many other physical disorders associated with sustained autonomic arousal.
Stress control took on new importance as studies began to indicate that disease processes such as diabetes, arteriosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases and other physical disorders might be manifestations, to the point of end organ pathology, of chronic sustained autonomic activity. Other studies suggested the involvement of chronic autonomic arousal with the exhaustion and breakdown of the immunological response and the production of carcinogenesis.
It would appear that it is no longer sufficient for health care professionals to simply educate patients about stress. It has become necessary to develop practical methods of controlling and reducing stress. While many of the behaviourial procedures have produced impressive results under controlled laboratory conditions; generalization of results into the real world, compliance with time consuming regimes, availability of specialized equipment, and other practical considerations have in the past usually limited treatment to the lab or clinical office.
This is now no longer the case. A drug-free product using a behaviourial methodology has been in use in Canada for several years. Initially sold only in drug stores, and used in the offices of Health Care Professionals and Clinics, StressFree is now available directly through this site.
StressFree uses an audio cassette treatment which is psychologically designed to reduce stress. It employs indirect suggestion and visual imagery to induce a therapeutic relaxation response which reciprocally inhibits sympathetic autonomic arousal. It is a classical conditioning procedure, counterconditioning stress with a relaxation response which is physiologically incompatible with stress. StressFree represents a new development in a continuous process of applied behaviourial research. It demonstrates an evolution beyond the relaxation tape where passive compliance during the process and the failure to utilize classical conditioning produced transitory and short lived results. By incorporating biofeedback and classical conditioning techniques, StressFree becomes 'Psycho-Active'. It creates a psychological process which actively conditions and reinforces the relaxation response, with repeated use facilitating the conditioning effect.
Listen to a sample of the tape as a 63KB Real Audio file (AM radio quality) or a 688KB .WAV file (CD quality).
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