When you are on the verge of collapse, the point where you find it hard to keep up with all your schedules and commitments and you would like to schedule the whole day and try to see if it is possible... do the mental exercise.

Come on, imagine it. You would take a vacation without traveling, or you would grab a backpack and go around the world. You'd watch your favorite shows all day, or read until your eyes were tired, slipping guiltlessly into several naps throughout the day. You would change your routines, sleeping during the day and dancing at night, or the opposite: you would wake up before dawn every day with the clear horizon of dedicating yourself to your business, those you never had time to undertake before this new phase. You would visit the universes of your favorite people, with no end time, until they would start to blink because they would not have the privilege of changing their routine at will.

Or would you end up building the same life in the long run? The same commitments you worked so hard to get rid of? Maybe you'd do it an octave lower: a little less of this and a little less of that would probably be enough. In that case you wouldn't need to destroy everything, it would be more a matter of dosage.

Now another visualization: you go on the road in your favorite vehicle, car, bicycle, roller skates.... You don't have to arrive at any fixed time, no rush. You can stop to eat something on the way, you can get off to watch the cows, get wet if it rains, or stop until it stops. After a while, you will spontaneously get into your cruising speed, which you will maintain most of the time. You tend to stabilize at a certain speed, because that saves effort: a constant pressure on the accelerator, or a rhythmic movement of the arms and legs, or a breathing and pulsations that trigger a body rhythm. Of course, you can modify that monotony by proposing to go faster or slower, but there is also something economical and easy, pleasant, in surrendering to it. It is an equation that works for you at that precise moment, considering the millions of variables.

How much room is there in your life for you to move at cruising speed?

More on this subject in the free book Viva mais e melhor, by Professor DeRose and in O método DeRose e a gestão do stress, by Joris Marengo.

In our understanding, stress is the psycho-organic state produced by the mismatch between the individual's potential and the challenge they need to face. Stress is the consequence of the psychophysical effort to face the obstacle. To manage stress, we try to increase the practitioner's energy, so that their potential rises and they can face the challenge from top to bottom.

Stress in itself is not a bad thing. Without it, the human being would be vulnerable and would not be able to fight, work or create with the necessary energy. What is bad is the excess of stress or the lack of control over it.

Between one psychophysical alert and another, the person would be able to recover from this state of extreme organic and mental tension. For this, it would be necessary that there be less frequency of the state of tension or, then, specific techniques to minimize the resulting generalized fatigue and that produces a chain reaction of secondary effects such as heart attack, high blood pressure, migraine, insomnia, depression, nervousness, drop in productivity, hair loss, herpes, digestive problems, ulcer, gastritis, sexual impotence, back pain and the worst of all health problems: the doctor's bills!

Just reduce stress to also alleviate all its effects, which, otherwise, would hardly yield to a definitive solution. They would be merely palliative measures or a masking of the symptoms.

The DeRose Method has in its collection several efficient resources to reduce stress to healthy levels. This opinion is shared by a good number of doctors who recommend this method to their stressed patients.

For this reason, there are many entrepreneurs, executives, artists and liberal professionals who seek, in the DeRose Method, the extra dose of energy and dynamism they need, but, at the same time, the control of stress.

Ninety percent of people feel the effects of combating stress already in the first session of our method. Our techniques and social activities stimulate oxytocin, which is a hormone produced in the hypothalamus. With its stimulation, levels of cortisol (stress hormone) decrease in the body.

From the pocket book Stress
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books

One day, I went to the dermatologist to have him analyze my hair loss, and he said, It's stress. And it was no use explaining that I am the least stressed person he has ever met. I work at what I love, I wake up whenever I want, I decide what I want to do, I have a wife who is a sweetheart and we never argue, my secretary takes care of everything for me... in short: I have no stress at all. But the dermatologist continued to think that the hair loss was due to stress and not testosterone.

Some time later, I went to the cardiologist to control my blood pressure, which was a little high, and he pontificated: It's stress. And it was no use explaining that my father had high blood pressure, so the first suspicion should be genetics. He continued to think it was the supposed stress.
On another occasion, I went to the gastroenterologist to see if we could locate the bacteria that I had certainly brought from my many trips to India and that was causing abdominal cramps. He told me: This is stress. And it was no use explaining that, with 25 years of traveling to the Himalayas, it was inevitable that I had brought bacteria, protozoa and a whole zoological garden of microorganisms different from ours. He continued to think that the cause was stress.

One day, I hurt my back practicing Aikido. I went to the orthopedist and, as soon as I declared that I had back pain, he told me, based on his experience: It's stress. And it was no use explaining that the cause had been trauma. He persisted in saying that, regardless of the impact on the vertebrae, stress was associated with back pain.

But the most incredible thing was when, years later, I went to the dentist with an abscess in a tooth and the dentist immediately said: It's stress. Recent studies have proven that stress triggers abscesses and all sorts of inflammations, including cancer, because it lowers the body's resistance.

What is the conclusion?
The conclusion of the cases above is that, whatever your problem, the trigger may have been stress. You may have viruses and bacilli in your body that would never create any problems if there was no decrease in immunological capacity due to stress. This is the case of the herpes virus, which is there quietly until you have an episode of stress: immediately the nasty blisters start to appear on the lips or on the genitals. You may have a genetic predisposition to cancer, but it would never develop if there was no decrease in the body's resistance.

From the pocket book Stress
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books