And hello to you. How are things? There seems to be a lot of stress around at the minute,

and it would be nice to mitigate some of the effects of that. I've talked about how enough times in the past,

and I will again, maybe a little bit today. But I wonder if you know why minimizing stress is so important because something to bear in mind is that

your mind and your body are deeply connected. Stress in your mind is going to have an effect upon

your body. There was a story doing the rounds recently about the new leader of the Green Party, Zach Polanski.

Before politics, he was a hypnotherapist and once claimed, probably with a nudge from a cheeky journalist who was just looking for an article, that hypnotherapy could help increase breast size.

And to be fair, he's not the first person to try and get media

attention with a wild idea to boost his business, but can hypnotherapy do that? In short, no. And in

long, absolutely no. But it got me thinking, because although it isn't true, the idea that our mindset can influence our body is massively.

In fact, stress, for instance, isn't just a mood.

It changes your body.

Migraines, eczema, IBS, heart palpitations, these are all aggravated or even caused by chronic stress.

And yet we still say things like, oh, it's just stress, as if that makes it any less serious.

But the truth is, your brain doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's

imagined. Think about a nightmare. It gives you a pounding heart. The sweats pour it out of you,

but you're safe in bed. But your thoughts are powerful. And it works the other way around as well.

If you relax your body, slow your breath, release tension,

your mind starts to follow. They're not separate. It's a loop, a feedback system.

There's actually a field of research called psycho-neuroimmunology. Try saying that with a mouthful of

obnobbs. And that studies how our thoughts and our

emotions impact our immune system. And it's not fringe woo-woo science. It's well documented.

Like a study that found that people who practiced daily gratitude had lower levels of inflammation

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