As President of the International Stress Control Centre, Cash Flow Diary podcast guest Dr. Kenford Nedd spends a great deal of time researching the physiological impact of happiness and stress. He treats patients from far and wide for anxiety, headache, pain, and stress disorders. The good doctor has worked with a wide range of individuals and even heads of state and the topmost executives of the world, teaching them how to control their responses to stress. In this eye- and brain-opening interview, Dr. Nedd gets to the root of stress and the illness it can create if we don’t learn to take control over it. In fact, he tells us that stress is at the root of about 95% of symptoms his patients have presented with over his career. When he realized that, he focused on helping as many people possible understand that stress is only the response we have to perceived difficulties in our lives. And that could be anything from traffic jams to full-blown negative life events! No matter what is going on with us, we can control our reactions with four simple steps in about 11 seconds! (Of course, the steps involved may be repeated as often as necessary.) Because stress is a physiological response mechanism, we are more powerful than we think when it comes to taking control of it during negative events… and sometimes when it’s simply a new experience that we must walk through. An entrepreneur’s life is full of stresses. Maybe a deal isn’t going exactly as planned, perhaps team members aren’t playing nicely in the sandbox, there might be a financial set back or any number of events. In life it’s the same. Lovers leave, jobs disappear, houses can be lost and, well, you name it. But we can absolutely change our reactions and responses to whatever might be going on in our lives. We can even embrace happiness during it all. This is critical to our health, because stress depresses our body’s ability to combat illness. It sends impulses to the heart, brain and other parts of the body that shut down the production of cortisol, a very important factor in combatting disease. So what does Dr. Nedd say? That we only use about 1/10th of 1% of what we possess in our brains, and that we have to pull from within to focus on changing our response to stress. We must tell ourselves that we CAN handle “it,” no matter what that “it” is. Stress affects our health, our memory, our mood and our ability to earn a good income. Since life is made up of a series of stresses and stressors, we better learn how to quiet the thoughts that create the stress reaction in the first place. As with anything worth learning, it takes practice, but Dr. Nedd gives us the blueprint in this insightful interview. To start with, he says we must learn to breathe and then focus internally while moving through the external experiences. Go into stress-combat training! Learn more about the four quick steps to managing stress and embracing happiness.