Stop and go traffic. Demanding bosses. Mortgage bills.

Stressors in today’s world lurk at every turn. An American Psychological Association online poll conducted in September of 1,848 adults found that one-third of Americans are living with extreme stress and 48 percent believe their stress level has increased during the last five years.

For some, a glass of red wine in the evening keeps stress at bay. Others might spend time practicing yoga or taking long walks.

When Diane Ball’s mind turns to looming deadlines and pressures at work, she takes a nice, deep breath on a count of five and exhales to the same count, all the while concentrating her attention on the area in and around her heart. The simple act of focused breathing restores balance to her autonomic nervous system, the portion of the system responsible for maintaining homeostasis in the body.

“This heart-focused breathing helps me get to a more neutral place,” Ball said.

Founded in 1991 and based in Boulder Creek, Calif., the internationally recognized Institute of HeartMath is dedicated to researching how stress manifests itself in the body and simple tools people can use to combat its effects.

As a certified HeartMath trainer at Delnor-Community Hospital in Geneva, Ball trains every new hospital employee the science behind the program and ways to manage their stress.

At the center of HeartMath is coherence — the state in which the heart, brain and nervous system are working. When stress is felt, it is represented in a jagged, chaotic heart rhythm that results in a low level of coherence. Smooth, rolling heart rhythms signal a high level of coherence and a sense of security.

“HeartMath is part of our employee orientation,” Ball said. “It creates a common language amongst employees. If a co-worker sees someone getting stressed, they can tell them to do some heart-focused breathing.”

Heart feeling, the act of summoning positive emotions while practicing measured breathing techniques, is also encouraged to create high coherence. This can be done by thinking of something joyful, like a pet or the memory of a past vacation.

“Heart feeling is something we have to learn because the very thoughts make us feel better, but after a while you don’t need the event,” Ball said. “You know what the feeling is without it.”

While both methods embrace the benefits inherent in positivity, HeartMath’s approach cannot be lumped into the same category as positive thought, the technique touted by many self-help gurus.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was all about positive thinking and I jumped on that and read all the books,” said Rollin McCraty, director of research at the Institute of HeartMath. “So you’re thinking ‘I’m going to get that car’ or whatever it is, but you don’t believe it. Positive thinking has benefits, but with positive emotions there are physiological changes.

“Emotions happen faster than thought,” McCraty continued. “The paradigm is that emotions are something that happens to us, but we have a great ability to regulate our emotions. By shifting your attention to the body, particularly the heart, you draw attention away from cognitive functions. By doing that, you shift your heart rhythm and help calm the system.” 

The brain has long been regarded as the epicenter of our internal workings, and while its importance should not be discounted, scientists with HeartMath have shown the heart to be one of the most important players in our emotional lives.

“We have thousands of more neuroconnections from our heart to our brain than the other way around,” said Woodridge resident Marinda Stopforth, a certified one-on-one provider of HeartMath. “We always think the brain is in charge, but the brain can’t work on its own and the heart can.”

When we experience stress, the body produces cortisol, a hormone that while necessary, can cause problems including suppression of the immune system, an increase in blood pressure and the ability to destroy brain cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain linked to learning and memory. Aging is another consequence of high cortisol levels, which explains why people look older and more tired when they are stressed.

“HeartMath is a technique that you want to encourage people to use more in the moment,” Ball said. “Usually when you try to manage stress, it’s after the fact. It’s something you do at the end of the day by reading or meditating. By then the chemicals have already been dumped into your body and done their damage. When our rhythms are incoherent and chaotic, it triggers alarm bells in the brain and then our critical thinking centers in the higher cortex don’t work as well.”

Conversely, a positive physiological shift increases the secretion of DHEA, our rejuvenating hormone. DHEA lies on the opposite spectrum of cortisol and reverses many of the negative effects of excess stress.

In September, CEOs and human resources directors from such companies as McDonald’s in Oak Brook and advertising and marketing agency Maddock Douglas in Downers Grove tried out HeartMath’s innovative programs and responded well to both the HeartMath premise and its methods.

“Companies are now seeing that stress is one of the leading causes of insurance claims,” said Debra Siena, a newly certified program trainer and vice president of product and business development for Proactive Partners, the Chicago-based supplier of these workshops. “HeartMath’s purpose is two-fold. It helps people in the moment be able to change their reaction to what previously would have been a stressful reaction and it really helps them be at peak performance.”

Delnor has enjoyed better business through HeartMath. The hospital’s turnover rate among employees who have gone through the workshop is between 5 and 7 percent in an industry where the standard is between 11 and 12 percent. The most notable reason for the low turn-over is that people are impressed that the hospital cares so much about their well-being, Ball said.

And she knows from her colleagues that HeartMath is truly helping people on every level.

“Folks tell me their stomach issues are better, they don’t get as many headaches and they’re talking better with their kids,” she said. “We have a tendency to think the day-in-day-out craziness is normal. We need to understand that it’s not.”