Stress is a strange aspect of being human. Researchers who study stress understand what it does, but they don’t truly know what stress is. They know the effects that long-term stress has on the brain: it shrinks your brain — it literally shrinks it, causing memory loss, loss of clarity, loss of creative thinking, and the destruction of specific neural pathways. It begins to collapse your capacity to think critically. Prolonged stress on the body creates heart issues, constricted blood vessels, bowel problems, sleep problems, depression, and anxiety. In fact, stress is linked to all six of the leading causes of death in the United States. Even cancer has been linked to stress.

As I noted, researchers do not know what stress is. I believe the reason why is because it is different for each person. You have a specific set of stress factors that are unique to you. What stresses you may not stress me. You may notice this in the people around you, including your significant other. My husband and I, for example, have very different stress triggers. In addition, the way stress affects your body may not be the way it affects my body. So, there’s no one way that we can all handle or manage stress.

Now researchers have discovered that we can become addicted to stress. We find ourselves living in this modern world where we are overwhelmed, constantly mentally turned on, plugged in, overworked, and so overrun with tasks that some of us can’t seem to live comfortably without the stress. Without stress, some people report not knowing how to be and how to relax. How is this happening?

Our bodies fight stress by triggering hormones in an attempt to balance out the effects of the stress. These hormones are adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine. Too much cortisol can suppress the immune system, decrease libido, increase blood pressure and sugar levels, and contribute to obesity and many more unhealthy conditions in the body. Under constant stress, our bodies get used to these hormones, especially the high cortisol levels — and our bodies can begin to crave them, believing they need them to survive. As a result, we begin to add stress to our lives instead of extracting it. We no longer know how to de-stress. The body gets to a place where it just bounces back and forth between a state of some stress and a state of lots of stress, and it never gets to an unstressed state. No matter what a person under these conditions tries to do — meditation, exercise, extra sleep, reading a book, or gardening — their stress level never quite gets back to that healthy place they were in when they were younger.

I want to introduce you to a new way of thinking about this. Stress comes almost solely from your mind. Yes, you can feel physically stressed when your Internal Guidance System (IGS) is in the contracted, closed state. I believe this state is actually the foundation of what stress in the body is. Stress is produced by the mind when your thoughts are out of alignment, untrue, and not moving you toward happiness and success. When your IGS is expanded, it reverses the effects of being closed (that is, the effects of stress) on your body. When it’s open, it supports good health, mental clarity, and overall well-being.

It is your thoughts that create both the sense of contraction (stress) and the sense of expansion (relaxation). Your IGS is in charge of letting you know where you are in this cycle at any given moment. One of its purposes is to help you fully relax. How great that you have an inner GPS moving you toward being relaxed in life! When you feel an opening sensation in response to what you are thinking, you begin to reprogram your mind and remove the effects of the stress hormones. You then program yourself to maintain a stress-free environment mentally. Using your IGS is one of the healthiest things you can do for your body. It creates a healthy inner state of being that generates not only happiness but also good health.

Excerpted from the book Your Inner GPS: Follow Your Internal Guidance to Optimal Health, Happiness, and Satisfaction. Copyright © 2016 by Zen Cryar DeBrücke. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com

Zen Cryar DeBrücke is the author of Your Inner GPS. She is an internationally renowned teacher, speaker, and coach whose programs have helped people all over the world transform their personal and business lives for the better. Visit her online at http://www.zeninamoment.com.