Understanding Care

Care is a valuable and vital resource, more precious than people know.
It revitalizes you and acts as a soothing tonic for the human system.
The care we feel for others is also a powerful motivator in our lives. It
is simply one of the most important and essential aspects of being
human.

Care inspires and gently reassures us. Lending us a feeling of security

and support, care reinforces our connection with others. Not only is it
one of the best things we can do for our health, but it feels good—
whether we’re giving or receiving care.

Part I: What is Care?

Have you ever noticed that when you care for someone else, it has a
regenerative, uplifting effect on you? The experience is tangible. It
goes directly to our hearts. And it’s an experience we can pass on to
someone else.

When we care for someone, we often express our feelings quite

naturally by touching them. We automatically hug our friends or pat
them on the back. In conversation, we might touch their arm to
emphasize a point or share a joke. When we’re introduced, even to
strangers, we shake their hands—a moment of contact that makes a
connection.

Anyone can see the bounce in your step, the glow in your eyes or the
sheer happiness that emanates from you, when you’re feeling a core
heart emotion like sincere care. Although they’re not as visible to the

-1-
naked eye, the physiological effects are equally dramatic. Your body’s
health and vitality are directly improved while you are holding a feeling
like care in your heart.

A feeling like care, as well as other positive emotions like love,

compassion, non-judgment, forgiveness and appreciation, increases
the synchronization and coherence in your heart’s rhythmic patterns.
Coherent heart rhythms are good for the physical heart and the
nervous system. They also trigger hormones that are regenerative.
Coherent heart rhythms have a dynamic effect on improving brain
function. In essence, care is regenerative for both the sender and the
receiver.

The Power of Care

Think about the people in your life that had the most positive influence
on you. Perhaps it was a parent or grandparent, a teacher or a
mentor. In thinking about them and their influence on you, you’ll
probably see that it was their care for you that made such a difference
in your life.

Here’s an example that illustrates the power of one caring gesture. It’s
a story presented in the book The HeartMath Solution, by co-author
Howard Martin.

Happily entertaining himself with spit wads one day in fourth

grade, Howard sat smiling in the back of the room. "Before
too long, my teacher had had enough. She took me to the old
stucco wall at the back of the room. I think the wall was

-2-
 originally white, but by the time my class came along, it was
three shades of brown. The teacher handed me a small pail of
water and a rag and told me to start cleaning the wall that
was so encrusted with dirt.

"An energetic fourth grader, looking for an outlet, I tackled

the problem with both hands. An hour later I was still working
away. All my attention was focused on digging the dirt out of
the crevices in that rough, stucco wall.

"'You know,' my teacher said casually, 'if you work as hard at

everything in life as you’re working on that wall, you will be a
very successful man.'

"She wasn’t trying to boost my morale with exaggerated

praise or sugar coating. It was a simple statement, across the
board and sincere. An act of genuine care. I have
remembered it my whole life."

For many people, care only occurs at random. Something in their

environment stimulates a feeling of care. Perhaps it’s seeing an
adorable young child at the mall, watching a movie or talking with a
friend. You feel the emotion of care in relation to that event and then
the feeling subsides. If you don’t know how to cultivate caring
emotions, you have to wait until something outside you stimulates that
feeling again.

-3-
Caring is certainly more important and beneficial than that. Care
comes from the depth of our being—from the core of our hearts.
Activating the care in your heart is not simply a way to cheer yourself
up or boost your mood. Core heart feelings, such as care, aren’t just
pleasant sensations. They have muscle. Once you see the results,
you’ll understand why we say that, when properly directed, increasing
care can change our lives and perhaps the world.

At HeartMath, one of the things we do is teach people how to bring

positive, heart-based emotions like care into their lives as often as
possible—on demand—so they don’t have to rely on random events to
reap the benefits of these feelings. Learning how to activate positive
emotions on demand is an important skill that pays high dividends.
Cultivating more care can quickly facilitate your personal growth and
health. As you pass caring feelings on, you improve the lives of
everyone around you as well.

As HeartMath’s founder, Doc Childre, once said, “Care is love in

action.”

Part II: Care vs. Overcare

It is critical to learn the difference between care and what we call
overcare. We all know that caring for ourselves and others is an
essential part of a rewarding life. Unfortunately, caring can also be
stressful. When our care goes too far, it turns into overcare, the term
we use to describe a burdensome sense of responsibility, accompanied
by worry, anxiety or insecurity.

-4-
We’ve all heard the phrase “too much of a good thing.” That’s
overcare.

Have you ever had a slice of rich, creamy cheesecake that was so
irresistible you practically gobbled it down? You just can’t help having
another piece. But when that second piece of cheesecake hit your
stomach, you suddenly regretted it. You experienced the full, bloated—
maybe even nauseous—feeling of having way too much of something
good. Believe it of not the same thing can happen with care.

Since caring is closely associated with love, it’s hard to imagine that
you can have too much love or too much care, but it happens all the
time. If we become over-identified or over-attached to what we care
about, our care becomes overcare. Suddenly, instead of feeling the
wonderful feeling we started out with, we find ourselves worried and
anxious. The sensation is so unpleasant that it can even turn into guilt
and anger. Ultimately, our care, when not balanced, can become
draining instead of regenerative.

We’ve probably all known mothers who don’t feel like they are caring
unless they are worrying and anxious about their children. Years ago,
when Doc Childre was looking at his own life, he recognized that this
was also true for him. “The more I cared for my family, my friends or
my work, the more worry and anxiety I felt. What I cared about most
was giving me the most stress! ‘Why?’ I kept asking myself. It was
because I cared. And I saw that the same thing was true for most
people.”

-5-
Doc coined the term overcare to describe the kind of care that creates
stress. Overload, overwhelm, going overboard—all these terms mean
too much to the point of falling over. That’s overcare. Ironically
enough, it starts out with the best intentions. Overcare occurs when
the unmanaged mind turns our genuinely caring intentions into a
mental and emotional drain.

The draining cycle begins as we over-identify with a situation, an

issue, or a person we care about—in other words, we identify too
much. We begin to overcare and want to see things go a certain way.
We get over-attached to how we want things to turn out. As a result,
we’re less able to let go and we become obsessive.

Once overcare takes hold, it can bring about just the opposite of what
we wanted. We get fired instead of promoted. The person we wanted
to be closer to avoids us. And we’re astonished. After all, we cared so
much!

Learning to care without the drain of overcare is about balance,

walking a fine line. Balanced care paves the way for intuition. Overcare
eats up the pavement, and then we don’t have a road to travel on any
more. That’s why we don’t get anywhere.

Care is such a wonderful feeling to experience because it provides a

conduit for our spirits to express themselves in the midst of our human
existence. The more we truly care, the deeper we will come to know
ourselves and the others we care about. This provides the key to
unlocking our potential and making it real. Learning the difference

-6-
between care and overcare holds an important key to becoming our
“real self”.

Finding Balanced Care

Genuine, balanced care is regenerative to our bodies and minds, and
can help us adapt to situations or see what common sense things we
can do. Genuine care can motivate us to help a religious, political or
social cause with balanced and intelligent attitudes and contributions.

Overcare, on the other hand, can turn us into obsessed crusaders.

Overcare never results in any real solutions to a problem; it can’t. It
siphons off our original caring intentions and passion, then decreases
our ability to find solutions. In fact, people who say they care about
the same issue often get into conflict with one another about what to
do, because they’ve plummeted from the balanced state of care into
overcare.

Here’s a simple question you can ask yourself from time to time. “Is
what I am caring about adding quality to my life or is it adding stress?”
Once, you’ve answered that question, you want to be on the lookout
for overcare. It’s through managing overcare that you can come back
to center and regain balanced care.

Keep in mind that balanced care is not some placid state that lacks
drive and passion. Balance is a dynamic place in the heart that allows
us to flex through stress and stay resilient under pressure. It builds
emotional stamina and opens our minds to more options.

-7-
When overcare stacks up, our capacity to handle challenges or see
clearly diminishes. By releasing our overcare, we prevent stress from
building and we increase our creative capacities. Then we can enjoy
the fruits of wholeness by renewing genuine care. Our hearts can
guide us in this process, so we can express our care without letting its
regenerating warmth and reassuring power slip away.

Why Eliminating Overcare is Important

Curiously enough, when overcare exists in one area, it usually results
in a lack of care in another area. It’s like squeezing a balloon at one
end so that it pops out at the other end. This lack of balance in care is
causing much of the increased stress and burnout we see in individuals
and society today.

In a condition of chronic imbalance, small incidents—like being late for

an appointment, waiting in traffic, or standing in line at a store—can
trigger heightened states of worry and stress. In fact, it’s often the
smallest things that cause the biggest stress. The problem is that
these little things can stack up until “one last straw breaks the camel’s
back” and we have a mental or emotional crash or health crisis.

Millions in our society today are caught up in overcare about the world.
With terrorism, economic uncertainty and global warming, it’s hard not
to move from care to overcare about what might happen next. We tell
ourselves, “How can I not care about that!” You can care, but overcare
won’t help. It squelches clarity, incapacitates people, induces panic
and dilutes creative thinking.

-8-
Just watching the news at night can drive people into overcare. Before
they know it, they’re railing at the president, crying over the horrible
abuses going on around the world and sinking into a fearful state of
uncertainty. An evening of news and overcare is enough to send
people to bed emotionally drained!

While all these human emotional reactions are understandable and

there’s nothing wrong with them, our mature intelligence tells us they
need to be managed. We need to come back into balance, to our
deeper heart values. The intelligence we need, in order to return to
genuine care, is a harmonization of feelings and thoughts that brings
us emotional balance and intuitive common sense. If we use our
feelings to open our hearts and find heart balance, we can bring our
stressed-out overcare back to a balanced, heart-warming state of real
care.

No matter what the situation, it is vitally important that we learn how

to manage our mental and emotional energies. We need these skills so
we can adapt to the unpredictable events going on all around us—
whether they be natural disasters, social upheaval, or personal
turmoil.

Whatever happens, we will eventually have to adapt anyway! Overcare

only lengthens the adaptation time and prevents us from thinking
clearly. The sooner we can get back to a balanced state of care, the
better off we’ll be. Balanced care saves us energy and shortens the
time it takes for us to find new possibilities. Understanding the

-9-
purpose of adaptability and how to sustain it is extremely important in
this era of rapid and unpredictable change.

Living in Balance
Learning to identify your overcare will not only start to free you from
stress; it will also give you new direction on how to enhance your life
and unfold who you really are. As you cut through overcare, you’ll
bring yourself back into balance and connect with your heart
intelligence to express genuine care.

The core heart feeling of genuine care will create an inner security that
adds to your energy and results in joyous living. Life will have
enhanced value and positive meaning for you. Hope will appear once
again on the horizon in areas you saw no hope. As you unfold new
potentials hidden within your heart that you didn’t know was there,
you will become more of who you really are. It’s not our love,
compassion, appreciation or care that squelches hope, but the
tendency to allow these core heart feelings to become compromised by
overcare.

The wonderful thing is that, once you relinquish overcare in even one
area, you’ll suddenly find that it starts to unravel overcare in many
other areas at the same time. This experience comes with a
tremendous sense of freedom and hope. And with new hope comes a
renewal of energy and passion for life.

-10-