For those of you who have been living on Mars and don’t know what “The Secret” is all about, let me break it down for you.

The basic premise of “The Secret” is that there exists a universal law known as the “Law of Attraction”.

The Law of Attraction states that over the course of your life, you will attract into your life the things that you think about the most and with the most passion.

More specifically, “The Secret” instructs that the best way to make use of the Law of Attraction is to daily visualize in your mind’s eye the things, events, people, whatever that you want to attract in your life.

You then combine that visualization with a strong emotion of passion, joy, and enthusiasm.

It is claimed that this is the most effective way to manifest in your life that which you want but don’t already possess.

The people who write to me usually want to know if and how they can use “The Secret” as a tool alongside THE STRESS VACCINE™ in their struggle against extreme stress and stress-related illness.

First, understand that “The Secret” is merely the most recent attempt to repackage what is already very old news.

William Walker Jackson was using the term “Law of Attraction” to discuss this exact same concept as early as 1906 in his book “Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World”.

Jackson’s writing drew on older visualization practices that were popularized in Great Britain and America during the Western Esoteric Revival of the 19th century, which in turn had their roots in even older ideas imported from the Continent.

Second, understand that the Law of Attraction has come to form the backbone of the modern self-help movement.

Pioneer Maxwell Maltz articulated his own spin on the concept in his 1960 best-seller “Psycho-Cybernetics”, a classic text within self-help circles.

Even modern-day success guru Tony Robbins makes great use of similar themes throughout his products in the context of his writing on NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming).

But the real question is … will it work for extreme stress, anxiety, and depression?

Will visualizing yourself every day in a stress-free, calm and peaceful place, combined with strong emotions of passion and joy, eventually allow you to realize this in reality?

The short answer is NO.

And quite frankly, doing what I just described above can actually cause a lot more problems that it solves!

Look, if you could create on command “feelings of passion, joy, and enthusiasm” on command, you wouldn’t be suffering from anxiety and depression, would you?

What most of the new age self-help gurus don’t tell you is that for visualization practices like those advocated by “The Secret” to work correctly, you need a solid foundation in mental concentration and focus.

Those of us who suffer from stress-related illness have a particular problem with thoughts and emotions that seem beyond our control.

Without that foundation you will inadvertently and inevitably imprint upon the subconscious all sorts of unintentional thoughts and desires which have absolutely nothing to do with, and are often just the opposite of, the goal you initially wanted to accomplish.

It’s like throwing fuel on a fire.

And at the end of the day “The Secret” ignores the fundamental law of genuine stress management, that stress is the body’s response to change.

There is some good information presented in “The Secret” – particularly the emphasis on developing and maintaining a spirit of “gratitude” in your life.

And visualization practices can be used to achieve profound results, but only once a proper foundation in mental concentration and mind-body connection has been forged.

If you’re interested in building that foundation, check out my book THE STRESS VACCINE™ - it’s all spelled out there in abundant detail.

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