“These three main causes of illness, particularly stress, were first stated by Daniel David Palmer (the father of Chiropractic) in 1895 and it is still recognised today,” Dr Hinwood told Access.
The three T’s are broad reasons for people getting sick and chiropractors have long understood that chiropractic can help relieve havoc wreaked on the body and mind.
Dr Hinwood, who along with his business partner and wife Dr Judy Hinwood started out as chiropractors almost 40 years ago before moving to specialise in stress management, said we all need stress in our lives to survive - the kind of stress that makes you run from danger, for example.
It is the bad stress, that is, understress, overstress and distress, that harms and controls people’s lives.
“You can choose to be a victor or a victim but too often people like to blame others for their troubles,” Dr Hinwood said.
“And there are those who handle stress well over a short period of time. It depends on their philosophy of life.”
“Too many people are all about me, me, me and those who cope better tend to be helping others or wanting to make the world a better place rather than play the victim.”
Stress varies from vague feelings of that unsettled stomach before we have a job interview or we have a deadline to meet, to stress that stops us in our tracks and messes with our sleep, our happy relationships, our good work and our health.
But Dr Hinwood said it did take tenacity for someone to overcome some traumas- such as having, all through childhood, a parent calls you an idiot who would never achieve anything.
Physical trauma, such as being knocked over by a car, was accepted as a trauma that could harm health, but psychological trauma can be as devastating.
Nevertheless, Dr Hinwood believes that most people have the ability to change, to go from adversity to happiness.
“There are people who have come from very poor backgrounds to success, the rags to riches stories,” he said.
And those who do not succumb to negative talk about them.
When it comes to the workplace, Dr Hinwood stressed that there was “the unemployed and the unemployable”.
“Some people only want to participate on their terms,”’ he said.
But there were challenges when dealing with a “toxic” boss or colleague.
“When people are having trouble with bosses or colleagues, I recommend that they visualise bringing down a protective shield, or cylinder around themselves, when that person is around,” Dr Hinwood said.
Another problem with coping with life, is that we can be afraid of failure and yet failure can lead to success, as it did with Thomas Edison who had countless challenges along the way before “seeing the light”, as did the legendary Abraham Lincoln before becoming the 16th President of the United States.
Perhaps we should heed one of Lincoln’s famous sayings - “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
“We see parents these days who refuse to let their children take part in the NAPLAN (literacy and numeracy) tests because they don’t want them to fail,” he said.
The Dr Hinwoods run a public workshop The Stress to Strength Experience where people from homemakers to corporate CEOs come together for a weekend to learn how to gain mastery over stress and move into the calm. These people learn easy ways to move out of any ‘stress spiral’ that they are caught up in.
“Our purpose at Stress to Strength is to help you discover your way out of the stress-mess with simple, sustainable, self-care tools and strategies, and many excellent ones are on our website also,” Dr Hinwood said.
The Hinwoods have received humanitarian awards in Australia and the United States. They have published a series of practice management books for health care practitioners and a series of seven sought after books on mindset change in the You Can Expect A Miracle series available on Amazon.
The Hinwoods are available for speaking engagements, offering tools for business operators and executives to better cope with work stress in their Stress Management in the Workplace one-day workshop. For those in the caring professions, community organisations, teachers and others they present a very practical one day, The Stress Management Toolkit seminar.
Details:
The Terrible T’s
• Trauma can be physical - from accidents to sitting for too long - or mental when faced with long-term put-downs, or in 2016… losing your internet connection or your Smartphone.
• Toxins are what we put in our bodies that do us harm and man-made chemicals.
• Thoughts, ones that stem from interpreting life negatively, leading to mood swings, poor sleep, feeling down as thoughts are real forces.
