How Facing Reality Makes Our Minds Healthy by Robert Simon Siegel, MS
Author: Energy Joy – The Stress Fix
A literal reading of the words “mental health crisis” describes a horrific, catastrophic societal disaster where too many people have minds that are far too healthy. While we all should enjoy genuine mental health, such a misleading diagnosis mirrors a mentality mired in merely presenting problems while excluding pathways, knowledge and motivation for solution.
Indeed, today’s epidemic of psychological malaise in the world’s wealthiest, most advanced country should provoke attention. Anxiety’s exponential growth signals a cancerous disturbance in “The Force” or the field of mind we share in a consensual reality.
Statistics show severe stress damage to the proper functioning of our minds.
- 1 in 25 adults has a serious mental illness.1
- 60%-80% of primary care doctor visits are from stress.2
- 61% Millennials and Gen Z workers are stressed, anxious, overwhelmed and in danger of burnout at work – along with 40% of those over 35 years old.3
- 1/3 of Americans report anxiety or depression, a 300% increase from 2019.4
How do we make sense of such staggering statistics?
Let’s begin with the obvious: SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG. And it is society-wide if not global. We are missing the most fundamental understanding of our reality: biological intelligence.
Like all biological organisms, at every level of our being we are either evolving or devolving. Exquisite feedback systems continuously inform and guide our behavior to navigate in these two primary directions. Successful organisms value this primary feedback as their biological intelligence to both survive and prosper. This is reality.
A healthy mind is our birthright. Successful human evolution requires mental health to grow its top goals of health, joy and prosperity. Devolution grows disease as its clear warning sign that one is headed toward death and extinction. Devolution signals failure to adapt. This is true throughout the grand, but dogged journey of fulfilling our life purpose down to the tiny electron transport chain of our cells’ mitochondria that produce our body’s biological energy.
Devolution means we are using up all our life energy to stay immersed in battles for basic survival of mind and body. No energy is left for growing the by-products of successful evolution: health, joy and prosperity. This is reality.
No body engaged in battling infections, no forest combatting pollution nor any
cell fighting contaminating toxins can grow to its healthiest and most advanced
capacity when its life energy is fully engaged with fighting to simply survive.”
Allocating our limited life energy resources to evolve is the only option that functions to grow health, joy and prosperity. These are the real purposes for a mature and thriving human species.
Stress – whether we call it anxiety, tension, depression, overwhelm or panic – is our survival response. Stress is the feedback of our biological intelligence, signaling us to become aware of an opportunity – often a necessity – to correct course. Chronic stress is our body’s disease growing mode. Chronic stress signals a failure to effectively adapt and correct course. The feedback signals have either been misinterpreted, de-valued or entirely ignored. Devolution results. This is reality.
The longer we stay stressed, the more symptoms and illness develop into disease because our body’s limited energy resources are not being used to grow health, but to fight dangers and flee difficulties. There’s not enough nourishment left to even maintain health much less to prosper.
At every level our winning direction is to evolve by sensing, identifying, focusing on, valuing and choosing opportunities to prosper. Our losing direction is to devolve and deteriorate into disease, death and extinction by staying stuck in endless struggles of mere survival. We simply cannot prosper if we are using up all our physical and mental resources just to avoid danger. Stress is our survival mode, and we are now definitely stuck in it – as individuals and as a society.
To solve our mental health crisis, this must change. It’s time to evolve beyond survival.
Any one of these mental infections we call symptoms can subjugate a young mind into surrendering their natural optimism for joyous success in life. Inspiration is dissolved and replaced with chronic anxiety, overwhelm, depression and hopelessness. As the statistics portray, continuously navigating these combined challenges has proven to be debilitating even for more mature minds, especially with no signs of helpful wisdom from society’s leadership.
The myriad causes of these symptoms are easily identified, well-known and are imminently solvable, even if systemic. But solutions are too often held captive by needless politics and the sadistic determination to first insure financial profitability before “managing” anything to do with health. Absent a value system of higher ethics and morality, an actual cure may be considered hazardous to long term customer growth by those dependent upon sickness for their profitability. This is our reality.
But what is the nature of today’s mental illnesses of stress? Are they direct results of clear cause and effect with easily distinguished mechanisms of action? Can they possibly be independent disturbances, disconnected from life? Or like everything in Nature, might they have purpose as evolutionary guidance?
Is this crisis then signaling a necessity to escape from the prison of an entire healthcare system’s exclusive focus on pathology? Are these 21st century challenges forcing a new paradigm of higher awareness to burst through our confused mental soil and blossom into the sunlight of authentic, functional biological intelligence?
In other words, can we break free into real responsibility and build a body of practical knowledge, resources, tools and non-negotiable requirements absolutely essential to grow genuine positive health of mind and body?
The bottom line is: WE NEED AN INTERVENTION. Evolution demands corrective action. Let’s start with describing the actual goal that has been missing: mental health.
What is a healthy mind?
Because we are now immersed in fabricated environments of concrete, steel, plastic, chemicals and microwaves, we are far removed from the innately nourishing peace, harmony and healthy coherent electromagnetic fields of Nature’s intelligence. So now we need to describe what mental health is, and we must figure out how to produce the valuable functions a human mind requires for successful evolution: for growing health, joy and prosperity. This is our reality.
Fortunately, these abilities can be easily learned or “installed” into our being with a new breed of practical skills to better operate our body, mind and energy. From grade school children to university students, employees and executives, people need to upgrade.
For a mind to be healthy in the 21st century – and stay healthy – four fundamental abilities are necessary. Together all four move us out of survival’s debilitating package of stress, anxiety, fear and fatigue that trigger so much bodily disease. More importantly, these abilities are positively nourishing for mind health. Each is a health treasure that grows new brain cells, boosts immune strength and develops beneficial focus with greater presence of mind. Together they increase our access to creativity, insight, intuition and the innovative solutions now desperately needed to correct humanity’s course into healthy prosperity.
The first treasure is the ability to quickly feel calm. We do this by rapidly stopping our body’s stress factory, the HPA-axis, from going into and staying in the disease-growing physiology of “fight or flight.”7 This is the life-or-death survival response we casually call “stressed out”. Easily learned skills can move four major body systems from generating all stress symptoms into generating optimal health, and do so within six seconds so that no disease can develop from stress. I call this skill “Dynamic Calm” because it can be performed while walking, working, driving and computing.8
The second treasure is the ability to enter reality itself with the timing key that directly connects our awareness to where life is located within the time/space continuum: the present. When we move our focus into the nourishing aliveness of the present moment, away from the regrets of the past and the worries of the future, we clear the mind’s clutter and replace “thinking” with actively perceiving reality free of emotional baggage. We make use of the well known, limited mechanical attention capacity of our conscious mind to fill our awareness with perceiving the reality around us.9 This highly valued mental health ability is called “presence of mind”. Today few people can escape from the electronic rectangles that trap and restrict our perception, replacing awareness of external reality with illusional cyber-compulsions that use up our focus, our energy and our life.
The third treasure is the sustained ability to focus in the health-producing motivational direction of uplifting and out of survival’s disease-and-problem-generating direction of motivation. This cerebral cortex level use of our mind is how to stop mentally triggering the HPA-axis. Given that we have only these two primary directions of motivation, mental health requires being able to choose.
I call focusing in the uplifting direction the “Genius Focus” because it automatically grows neural pathways which improve and increasingly develop our access to the source of our creativity, intuition, insight, pattern recognition and ability to innovate solutions.10 These are all higher level functions of our mind beyond the sensory-based limitations of repetitive “thinking”. Wisdom traditions throughout history call this source our “big mind” or our “true self”. Connecting to this source is the practical activity that grows self-esteem, self respect and self love at the heart of a healthy mind.
Action can be inspired by a more thorough understanding of why the health benefits from fixing stress are so valuable, especially since they can be so easily claimed and enjoyed.
The HPA-axis, our hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands, is the stress factory that generates virtually all symptoms of stress.11 This mechanism perpetuates the “fight or flight” survival response at the heart of stress damage. While designed to give us short-term survival benefits of instant energy, focus and mobility during physical life or death situations, our minds have evolved to now trigger that entire response just by our thinking, even absent a real danger. Our mental activity itself has become a disease-producing danger to our health. This is reality.
This is why we need to learn how to steer our mental activity and its resulting neurological behavior into the focusing patterns of uplifting and out of the focusing patterns of survival. Steering our focus can prevent triggering the HPA-axis hundreds of times daily, which locks our minds into the disease-growing mode of stress, anxiety and depression.
Exercising our mind’s steering wheel moves us from survival’s unhealthy focus on things we want “less of” (fears, doubts, problems, worries, dangers and worst case scenarios) into uplifting’s healthy focus on things we want “more of” (joys, goals, values, pleasures, fun, meaningful desires and best case scenarios). Seemingly simple, this shift in focus has life-changing power, enormous depth and evolutionary purpose. Psychoneuroimmunology shows that uplifting’s healthy focus boosts immune strength, clearly indicating its superior use of our mental prowess.12,13,14
As we apply the Genius Focus to six main areas of our mind’s activity, we uplift these into optimal mental health.
- Self-esteem – the psychological prize. We discover the source of what is our true self-respect, self-confidence, self-esteem & self-love
- Internal dialogue – Our self-talk determines virtually everything about our reality plus our emotional, psychological and mental health. We can tell our self-talk how to uplift.
- Communication patterns – We create mutually positive interactions with others.
- Immune strength – Our mental activities, neurotransmitters and immune system benefit via understanding the field of psychoneuroimmunology
- “Big Mind” – The source of our creativity, intuition, innovation and brilliant solutions now needed for uplifting life on Earth and better navigating life
- Manifesting – As energy transmitters and receivers, we can more powerfully manifest what we most value in our lives by understanding how to best relate to the quantum energetic matrix of the Biosphere of Mother Earth.
Our evolution of health into prosperity – as individuals and as a species – depends upon nourishing the development of these neural pathways for uplifting. With practice we activate our creativity, innovation and insight by growing direct access to this essential source of our self esteem. When our creations, mental activities and courageous behaviors are guided by our life’s top values, true self worth and joy replace depression and well as anxiety’s confusion. Not knowing our personal top values and society’s top values destabilizes our consciousness because there is no rock solid foundation to guide decision-making. This is reality.
A fourth treasure, which the first three enable, is the ability to ultimately upgrade our biological energy source from survival’s adrenal glands that keep triggering survival’s stress emotions of fear and anger. Instead we activate the more potent energy source of health that rewards us evolutionarily with feeling our most prized emotion of joy whenever we want. I call this “Energy Joy”.15
This secret energy engine, known and valued by all ancient wisdom traditions with the sage advice to “open your heart”, is THE energetic key to successful human evolution. Because physics terms were not available in ancient times, poetic metaphors were often used to secretly convey the precise instructions to operate in energetic realms.
Quantum biology now can describe this uplifting energy source as the magnetic center of the electromagnetic field surrounding our body. Located in the center of our upper chest, when this energy source is activated it generates the feeling of joy – which we feel originating in this chest area.
The magnetic part of our electromagnetic field is likely the medium that allows our trillions of cells to communicate simultaneously. Nourishing this magnetic medium can provide new levels of optimal health. Strengthening this is a growing necessity in our new microwave-saturated environment that interferes with the subtle electromagnetic frequencies of healthy cellular communication. Its fuller activation is known to bring far grander abilities.16
We know that “everything is energy”. This includes health. Joy is the well-being that the energy of health manifests into an emotion. Joy uplifts our spirit and inspires us with the motivation to achieve our best Joy is a goal of successful psychotherapy and the result of genuine mind health.
Having instant access to joy is a game-changer for mental health’s required staples of confidence and optimism. With practice we can activate this evolutionary energy source to feel joy at will without our lives having to first be perfect.
These combined four abilities establish a solid foundation now essential for a healthy 21st century mind:
- how to feel calm in seconds and dissolve anxiety by operating our own HPA-axis
- how to enter the greater aliveness, mental clarity and emotionally neutral reality of the present moment, free of the stress from past regrets and future worries
- how to move the content of our mental activity into uplifting’s thoughts, feelings, intentions, experiences, interactions and values we want more of in our life
- how to activate the bio-energy engine in the magnetic center of our electromagnetic field so we can feel joy whenever we want.
Each of these mental health treasures gives immediate benefit and together provide genuine mind wealth. Each uplifts. Together they are powerfully synergistic. They activate our dormant evolutionary physiology.
Yet the most important “reason” of all for recognizing reality is at the very core of our well-being.
Everything physical is created and maintained by energy. It is time in our species’ growth that we grasp this fundamental nature of our reality: that life on Earth is energy-based and there are known principles of how energy operates. Our prosperity can be greatly accelerated – and swiftly so – by applying these principles.
This understanding becomes of paramount usefulness when we recognize that:
- we are transmitters and receivers of energy
- energy delivers information encoded into its frequencies17
- our intentions are the information encoded into the frequencies we transmit
- our biosphere is an interactive matrix of energies that “communicate”
- like attracts like energetically
Together these principles of energy describe how we influence our reality with the intentions our energy transmits into the biosphere’s interactive matrix as communications that organize energy to manifest into physical form.18,19
The ability to beneficially influence our reality by understanding how to operate effectively in our energy-based Biosphere has always been THE primary, original teaching of every true religion, every authentic spiritual path and every genuine wisdom tradition. It is now essential for humans to master.
Our personal electromagnetic field that surrounds our physical body is in constant “communication” with the sea of energy we live within.20 For example, our eyes translate frequencies of light into visual images we can “see” and our ears translate vibrations of energy into sounds and words we “hear” and speak to communicate.
As individuals and as a species we can beneficially apply quantum biology principles to communicate beneficially with the energetic “matrix” that is the interactive foundation of our physical biosphere itself. Prayers, ceremonies, affirmations, goal-setting, concentrated focusing and wishful thinking all utilize this interactive nature of our biosphere reality to communicate to “it” what we want to appear in our lives.
Just as cellphones deliver encoded tweets, texts, videos and phone calls, the specific information encoded within the frequencies we transmit and attract are those of our intentions, thoughts, feelings, speech and behaviors.
Survival is thus a frequency package that attracts its similar frequencies to energetically form our physical reality. Knowing that “like attracts”, manifesting and creating means we have a marvelous opportunity to be responsible for the content of the frequencies we are transmitting and attracting into our lives. This is reality.
The way we fully change our reality for the better is to change our survival-creating frequency package into that of uplifting – as individuals and as a species. Again, since we have only these two choices, the choice should be clear. The practical tools to choose a better reality are the above four treasures.
Of course we can pretend that we don’t need to take any action because the mental health crisis will magically solve itself, or that the political class and their corporate sponsors will suddenly become authentically committed to building an optimally healthy population.
But we claim the abundant gifts of our biological intelligence by acknowledging reality.
The good news is that we can more easily prosper as individuals, as a society and as a species. We simply fix stress, choose healthy uplifting and feel joy.
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Psychophysiologist Robert Simon Siegel, Author of ENERGY JOY – The Stress Fix shares his experience as a stress specialist in medical centers and corporate wellness to solve stress and bring a practical understanding of ‘energy’ from ancient wisdom traditions into stress physiology. Robert’s clients have included CEOs of multi-national corporations, a sitting Governor, police chief, physicians, nurses and people from all walks of life. Robert works with health professionals and organizations including: Chevron, USA, NBC, Providence Health Systems, Port of Seattle Police Dept., Pritikin Longevity Center, King County WA, Washington Athletic Club & TRW.
Robert’s new book is called Energy Joy – The Stress Fix. His articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications like: CAPITAL: Business & Finance Magazine (Middle East edition)and QI: The Journal of Eastern Health & Fitness. The New England Hospital Assembly gave him their Blue Ribbon honor at Mt. Pleasant Hospital for the stress management department he directed.
Robert presented a panel on FIXING STRESS at the 2015 Health and Productivity Forum in San Francisco for Integrated Benefits Institute. His prior books include: Six Seconds to True Calm: Thriving Skills for 21st Century Living and a sci-fi thriller called Thieves of Eden, which he plans to make into a movie.
References
1 https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm
2 Workplace Stress Management Market Global Market Report 2023, Research and Markets. Reported by Perna,
Mark C. Why It’s Getting Harder For Young Professionals To Stay Mentally Healthy, Forbes Magazine, Feb 8, 2022.
3 Aditi Nerurkar et al. “When Physicians Counsel About Stress: Results of a National Study,” JAMA Internal Medicine.
2013;173(1):76-77. doi:10.1001/2013.jamainternmed.480.
4 National Center for Health Statistics, 2020-2024
5 ibid
6 Siegel, Robert Simon, THE STRESS FIX, Solving Today’s Primary Cause of Physical & Mental Illness,
White Paper for CEOs, CFOs, HR Executives & Benefits Directors, unpublished, 2024.
7 Guilliams, Thomas G., Ph.D., The Role of Stress and the HPA Axis in Chronic Disease Management,
Point Institute, 2018.
8 Siegel, Robert Simon, MS, Energy Joy – The Stress Fix, BookBaby Printers, Penn, 2023.
9 Miller GA. The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information,
Psychol Rev. 1956 Mar; 63(2):81-97.
10 Siegel, Robert Simon, MS, Energy Joy – The Stress Fix, BookBaby Printers, Penn, 2023.
11 Guilliams, Thomas G., Ph.D., The Role of Stress and the HPA Axis in Chronic Disease Management,
Point Institute, 2018.
12 Solomon, GF; Kay N.; Morley, JE; Endorphins:A link between stress,emotions, immunity, and disease,
In Plotnikoff NP, Faith RE, Murgo AJ, et al (Eds):
13 Pert, Candace B, Ph.D., Molecules of Emotions, Touchtone, NY, 1999.
14 Kiecolt-Glaser J, Glaser R: Psychological influences on immunity. Psychosomatics1986, Sep;27:621-624.
15 Siegel, Robert Simon, MS, Energy Joy – The Stress Fix, BookBaby Printers, Penn, 2023.
16 Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World,
Avery, Penguin Random House,New York, 2016.
17 Popp, F.A. and Cohen, S. Biophoton emissions in the human body, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology
B: Biology, 1997, 40: 187-9.
18 Rosch, Paul J., MD. editor, Bioelectromagnetic and Subtle Energy Medicine, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group,
Boca Raton, FL., 2015.
19 Presman, A.S. Electromagnetic Fields and Life, Plenum Press, New York, 1970. In Ho, Mae-Wan: The Rainbow
and The Worm: The Physics of Organisms, 2nd Edition,World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte., Ltd., Singapore, 1998.
20 Wolff, Milo, Schrodinger’s Universe: Einstein, Waves & the Origin of the Natural Laws, Outskirts Press, Parker, CO,
2008.
