My Successful Journey to Effective Stress Management

Part 1 of a Series
Survival Brain: Emotion, Mind and Behavior
Elements of a New Psychology

​My Successful Journey to Effective Stress Management
 
Welcome to the first step in exploring the human survival brain and how it makes stress management more effective. This is the beginning of a series of blog articles with the goal to create a better understanding of the human mind and the resulting behavior. Let me briefly explain why I am writing these articles.
 
Childhood trauma 
As a young child I grew up in a war zone. With that came a fair amount of early childhood trauma. As a result, my life wasn’t always easy. I kept searching for ways to ease the inner blocks and irritation which I really didn’t understand. Yet I succeeded in getting a wide-ranging engineering education which included ergonomics and process optimization. I built a career around improving business processes. My passion was to find the root cause of the situation and with that foundation find improvements which made a real difference.
 
After my retirement from this, my first career, I looked for ways to work on improving health and well-being, in part to continue searching for solutions for myself. Then in 2005 some friends convinced me to take a look at some new natural techniques, which they told me could work miracles. The techniques were called EFT for emotional freedom techniques. My rational engineering mind screamed “nonsense”. But I had to support my friends and watch a video demonstration together with them. What I saw seemed incredible and implausible. The simple rhythmic tapping on some acupressure points helped Vietnam veterans heal their PTSD within a few hours. These veterans had been hospitalized due to the severity of their PTSD for ten or more years.
 
Unbelievable but real 
I couldn’t quite believe what I saw but the people in the video seemed real and sincere. What else could I do now? I had to learn and try out the techniques myself. And despite my deep skepticism, the techniques really worked. My whole adult life I had looked for ways to get rid of this deep stress I was living with. Many of the things I had learned helped me better deal with the stress and the problems it created. But none of these earlier methods seemed to get to the core. But these techniques did! After five or six weeks of using them every day I felt like a new person.
 
Ever since then I’ve worked with the techniques myself and taught them to many individuals and groups. I improved the basic techniques and made them more usable in daily life. But one thing kept bothering me.

 

​Why did this deceptively simple set of techniques have such a profound effect on virtually all problems a human being could experience, both emotional and physical?

​Neuroscience to the rescue 
The official explanation by the founders of the techniques and the leading experts (footnote or reference) kept me in doubt. That explanation of acupressure energy meridians and the idea of an “energy psychology”, though innovative, somehow didn’t completely satisfy me. Based on suggestions from my mentor, Dawson Church, I looked into the three-brain theory of the early neuroscientist Paul MacLean. His discoveries set me on a path which seemed promising. Could neuroscience provide the root cause and explanation why these techniques had such profound and wide-ranging effects?
 
The four other neuroscientists who helped me the most in this exploration were Robert Sapolsky, Hans Selye, Joseph Ledoux and Neil Shubin.

• Robert Sapolsky’s work with stress and primates was an eye-opener. I learned about stress and how much we share with our primate ancestors.
• Hans Selye defined stress as the direct response to a threat of survival. That could explain why stress reduction has a profound impact.
• Joseph Ledoux introduced me to the “emotional brain”. The interaction with the other two brain regions strengthened the case for the three-brain theory of Paul MacLean.
• Neil Shubin provided the root causes for human brain architecture. His work showed how much human physiology is based on early evolution of animal life.

 
Now I had a strong theoretical understanding how the human neurophysiology came about. I gained a deep appreciation of why survival is the primary and most powerful driver of our behavior and existence. I knew now that stress is a direct result of our brain’s survival response and signals that it “thinks” our survival is in some way endangered. Using this scientific understanding together with my practical work experience, I finally discovered how the tapping techniques work and why they have such universally profound impact.
 
Future blogs about these discoveries 
This series of blog articles will be written with the help of my wife, a professor of mental health psychiatric nursing, who is my scientific advisor. Together we will address:

1. The Ancient Brain, how Homo sapiens obtained it, how it functions as a survival computer and what this means for our understanding of survival, stress and behavior.
2. The case for a New Psychology based on the root cause of the functioning of the three evolutionary components of the brain, the instinctive or reptilian brain, the emotional or limbic brain, and the thinking brain or neocortex.
3. The Rhythmic Tapping Technology provides important tools in two areas. First as a powerful research tool, to demonstrate the precise mechanism of the survival stress response. The second function is as a healing tool. It reduces unwanted stress directly and can be used to reprogram traumatic stress memories in the archaic brain.

 
These new concepts may sound a bit theoretical. But we will make these scientific explanations easy and fun to read. We’ll strive to relate them to personal wellbeing, reducing unwanted stress to feel better and be healthier than ever before.
 
Warm regards,                    Fred & Judy
 
Fred George Sauer, MS, MS Eng., Chief Stress Coach, Performance & Productivity Specialist
Judith Lynch-Sauer, PhD, RN, Scientific Advisor, Clinical Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing
 
PS: If you or someone you love has a deep stress issue to resolve, we would be happy to help. Our coaching has been highly effective for many people reducing stress in most situations. Check out our free initial consultation. As part of the coaching we train clients in the techniques. Then they are empowered to help themselves anytime and anyplace. You may also want to recommend our self-help book, which explains the brain science in easy terms and teaches the complete techniques.