* teaching people how to recognize effective meditation by making them aware of periods during sessions of meditation when their brainwave patterns slow (see the last section in this chapter, on meditation) Increasingly, biofeedback is being used to treat emotional disorders in conjunction with both psychotherapy and medication. It is one of the ways available to us to enlarge the range of our conscious control over ourselves and our lives. {215} RELAXATION TRAINING _Primarily a coping strategy to help people continue to function in an environment of stress._ The pervasive phenomenon of stress is the hidden epidemic of the United States and other highly industrialized countries. It is associated with high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, strokes, ulcers, colitis, and a host of other physical conditions. And severe stress endured too long leads to emotional breakdown. All physical materials can be loaded or stressed to a certain point beyond which they distort, snap, fracture, or break. Stress loads human beings physically as well as emotionally. Any change--whether for good or for ill--is a stressor. As human beings, we are not simple engineering materials that form simple cracks or breaks, and when stressful events are strong enough, we begin to crack or break in ways that are considerably more complex. Physical disease, emotional disorders, and mental illnesses are the cracks or breaks that occur in human "material." Statistics show that common forms of severe stress _do_ cause us to break. For example, compared with others the same age, ten times more people die during the year following the death of their husbands or wives. In the year after a divorce, ex-spouses have an illness rate twelve times higher than married people the same ages. In addition, chronic anger, anxiety, and depression appear to weaken the body's immune system, increasing the likelihood of serious disease. Individuals do, of course, have different emotional breaking points, but we know that prolonged high levels of anxiety erode a person's psychological integration. What results is "nervous breakdown"--a term that is vague and means little more than a blown fuse due to emotional overload. The aftermath of such an overload may leave a person with depression, anxiety, and the inability to function "as usual" for a considerable period of time. Relaxation training, along with the other therapies discussed in this chapter, is an antidote or prevention for human breakage brought about by excessive stress. The central belief on which relaxation training is based is that you cannot be tense and anxious if you are physically very relaxed. {216}