Stress is recognized as the number one killer today. The American Medical Association stated that stress was the cause of 80 to 85 percent of all human illness and disease or at the very least had a detrimental effect on our health.
 
Stress speeds up your entire system and produces conditions in younger people that are more commonly associated with growing old. Virtually no part of your body can escape the ravages of stress.
 
Stress increases heart rate and blood pressure. It changes the inner lining of our blood vessels, making our blood more likely to clot. Stress may change the way cholesterol is handled by our blood vessels and, in doing so, may increase plague formation.
 
Every time when an executive is under excessive stress he is manufacturing the blockages as a result of coronary spasms. But stress management lowers risk of heart disease and reduces stress. Adding stress management to routine heart disease treatment might lessen some patients' long-term risk of complications.
 
A 5-year study of men with heart disease showed that those who went through 4 months of stress management training were less likely to need a heart procedure such as bypass surgery over the study period. Overall, few of the 94 men in the study had a heart attack, and only one died.
 
But in the study's first year, two men who received only standard care had a heart attack, while none in the stress reduction group did. And despite the added cost of stress management training, patients in this group had lower hospitalization and physicians' costs over 5 years than men in the standard care group did.
 
Costs in the exercise group were similar to the stress reduction groups. These finding confirm the benefit of Stress management training to usual medical care, and indicate that such training is associated with fewer adverse cardiac events and less medical expenditures.