Over the decades, I have tried many things to help me manage my flare-ups.

One of the very best things I've done, and continue to do, is to transform my stress on a daily basis. As a result, I am able to take inflammation vacations. It is also the reason why I have transformed myself into Auntie Stress - I want to share what works!

I have far fewer flare-ups (say that quickly five times in a row!) and, when I do, not only are they much shorter-lived, but I am better equipped to transform the pain.

Stress, our interpretation of the situations in which we find ourselves, activates the stress response: fourteen hundred chemicals flood our system, all designed to help us get the heck out of danger. However, the things that many of us stress over are not truly life or death situations - the ones our forebears faced when they faced lions, tigers and bears, oh my! Well, woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers.

We have inherited an ancient operating system which has worked well over the millennia. So well that we may be operating on a basis similar to the kid in the movie The Sixth Sense, only instead of seeing "dead people", it's an often unnoticed threat/perception that leads to: "I see danger, I see danger everywhere!"

Rather than being an acute, immediate response to danger, as was intended, the stress response becomes chronic; activating on a frequent and regular basis, based upon how often we are soaking in negative thoughts and emotions.

Those chemical changes contribute to the inflammatory response, especially when the "tap" is opened on a regular basis. Without techniques to transform those negative thoughts and emotions, your body is doing what it was programmed to do so very long ago, prep for fight or flight. Accordingly, it releases a cascade of chemicals designed to help you deal effectively with the situation, whether it is real or imaginary.

How to pack for your own inflammation vacation:

• Cultivate an awareness of how you are thinking and feeling.
• Learn what stress is and more importantly, how to transform it.
• Practice. Practice. Practice. This is easy to do since you are thinking and feeling anyway. Why not make it count?
• This is an enjoyable process, especially since the reward is an inflammation vacation.

When you are ready for a change, I'd love to take you through a de-stress program. It starts with the heart, goes to the brain and is felt and noticed within and without!

Begin with this exercise: Every Breath You Take