By Milton Drepaul

According to an article in The Washington Post (April 4, 2006) though getting fired ranks as one of the events in life which causes greatest stress it seems that the constant fear of losing your job can actually damage your mental and physical health even more.

It appears that the unrelenting nature of the stress is linked more strongly to depression and health problems than actual job loss.

The constant stress causes a variety of problems generally starting with sleeplessness, which is itself connected to more health problems. Since the nineties there has been a growing trend of companies downsizing and merging.This could have major troubling health implications for North American workers.

While life events can trigger negative emotions there are things we can do to reduce the impact of these negative responses. We concede that our feelings are very complicated and fragile.It takes some effort to manage them.If we empower ourselves with positive emotions then we send positive energy to boost our immune system. This generally results in vibrant health.

The danger for most of us is that we live in societies which encourage dwelling on negative feelings. It's fine to accept and acknowledge that we will face challenges in life. How we respond to them determine not only our physical health but our emotional and spiritual well being. Wallowing in self pity and other negative responses can encode harmful emotions deep into our cell memories.

Our jobs are the major focus of most of the lives. There is tremendous potential for both risk and success. So although many studies show that periods of employment are detrimental to our health it is not a surprise that the worry of losing your job can be even more harmful to our health. In my counseling I urge my clients to watch what they say about their life.(Often I recommend the books The Game of Life by Florence Shovel Shin written in early 20th century and Happiness Is a Choice by Barry Neil Kaufmann).

It's quite astonishing how often we unconsciously manifest bad things in our lives. Many spiritual teachers have taught that we create self fulfilling prophecies by focusing on fears of what might happen. Therefore if you are constantly putting your intention on the fear of losing your job you increase not decrease the chance of it happening. In a perverse way you add your own energy to propel that event into being.

If on the other hand you take Stuart Wilde's advice in The Little Money Bible and choose to love your job and send love and light to your superiors,your company and your fellow workers you have a much greater chance that you will be happier and healthier.

Learning to deal with stress can be quite simple. Don't get me wrong I'm not advocating some chemical anti-depressant or long periods of costly therapy. I heartily recommend a simple to learn technique which I have been using on myself and my clients for the last two years. It's called EFT or the Emotional Freedom Technique (Created by Gary Craig-http://www.emofree.com). You can learn it in a few minutes.You may need the help of someone who has used it often to deal with hidden fears.