Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress

When asked what surprised him about humanity the most, The Dalai Lama replied: 

“Man. Because he sacrifices his health to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health… He lives as though he is never going to die and dies having never really lived.”

The key to better health lies in recognizing and addressing whatever is creating stress within us, which can be quite a task in today’s day and age. There are many types of stress: everything from the physical (like accidents and illness), to chemical (like caffeine and alcohol) and environmental (like pesticides and herbicides) to emotional (family tragedy, second mortgages and single parenting).

All stress knocks the body out of balance and a combination of all those things creates chronic conditions.

Looking at the lifestyle many of us are running with today, Dr Libby Weaver says, “it’s not the physical threats like a tiger coming at us that is creating stress, what leads us to creating adrenaline and cortisol today are things like caffeine and our perception of pressure and urgency”.

Like many, my day used to begin with an email inbox full of stress and pressure and urgency. When I wake up and see my day as difficult, or that everything is urgent – whereas, maybe in reality two things are urgent – I put my body in sympathetic nervous system dominance (essentially the flight or fight response).

This elevates blood pressure, directing blood away from the digestive system to the peripheral limbs ready for ‘flight’. And while the body has two types of fuel it can use, glucose or fat, in that state it can only use glucose. Apparently many of us have lost the ability to use our body fat effectively as a fuel because we are always running on glucose due to stress hormone production.

Nick Polizzi (of the Remedy series I dived into in Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing) asked why it is that our society is so unhealthy – physically, mentally and spiritually? Why are more people addicted to painkillers and antidepressants than ever before? He asserts the truth is startlingly simple:

We humans have forgotten how powerful we truly are.

I can attest to this. I recall going to our local doctor’s surgery as a child, a place that had multiple family physicians available to see patients with their day to day ailments. The doctor was someone we held in a position of trust and respect, this is who we would go to for answers when we had more than a common cold.

As a kid I had many of the typical childhood illnesses, like chicken pox and mumps, but generally I was considered to be in quite good health. In my teenage years I’d been physically very fit as a competitive swimmer, so the doctor’s surgery wasn’t a place I frequented often.

This changed in my early twenties. Fresh out of university, floundering to find my path in life, I was working three jobs and entertaining a rather unhealthy relationship after having had my heart broken the year before.

One day, as I was taking a bus into town to meet my boyfriend, all of a sudden I felt as though my heart was going to burst through my chest. This was accompanied by a vice like sensation around my head, I thought I was going to pass out and tried to focus on my breathing. Desperate for fresh air, I got off the bus and began to walk the four or five miles to my destination in the city.

Despite this episode occurring over a quarter century ago, what is marked in my memory is having to lie in a cold dark cupboard (in my boyfriend’s office) for two hours, feeling totally ill, while his boss had him work overtime on an urgent issue before he was allowed to leave. Once home I promptly crawled into bed and stayed there for a number of days vacillating between horrible chest pains and throwing up, which I now reflect upon as a reaction to the distress I’d experienced.

Back in the early 1990’s, panic attacks were synonymous with silly overreactions to something someone said or did, certainly they were not seen as an actual condition causing very real physical symptoms that a doctor would diagnose.

Trips to the doctors surgery resulted in several courses of antibiotics, the chest pains being taken for some sort of chest infection, which then resulted in several bouts of candidiasis treated by anti fungal medication that only served to exacerbate the condition – probiotics were not something seen as anything other than woo woo at this time and not widely available.

There was no internet to use for research in those days, and I found myself at the rather small section of self help books in the library. As a result, I tried an anti-candida diet, which was pretty grueling back then as the range of non-standard healthy foods available was fairly limited.

One of the books I read was by Dee McCaffrey, an organic chemist who had found her way back to health by cutting refined flours and sugars from her diet. Aside of the now well known data on refined sugars and flour, one of the things that always stuck with me reading her story was that she had been one of the scientists in the USA who had come up with the iconic food pyramid.

But the food pyramid the scientists had come up with had been practically inverted by the government in its final publication. Having always pooh poohed the idea of conspiracy theories as the domain of those with overactive imaginations, this was probably one of my first wake up calls that business – money – often runs this modern world, not the best interests of its people.

Ultimately I found my answer to overcoming panic attacks after a psychiatrist finally diagnosed them and then I happened upon a fantastic book by Christine Ingham called Panic Attacks in a grocery store pharmacy. Once I understood the anatomy of what was happening and how to switch out of flight or fight mode by invoking the parasympathetic nervous system, I was on the road to recovery.

In the docu-series Transcendence, Dr’s Bruce Lipton, Libby Weaver and Joe Dispenza remind us of some of the fundamentals for keeping our bodies in a good state of health. They tell us that 90% of illness today is based on lifestyle and stress, not genetics.

“Optimal health is based on the perception of the mind. If I open my eyes and see someone I love, the brain releases chemicals related to love like dopamine/pleasure, oxytocin/bonding, and vasopressin/making you more attractive, growth hormone. So when a mind perceives love, the chemistry from your brain enhances vitality.

The same person, if they open their eyes and see something that scares them, will release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that affect the immune system (cortisone, norepinephrine, and cytokines). When we are in fear, the stress hormones shut down the immune system.” Dr Bruce Lipton

Dr Libby Weaver finds one of the most common things people get stressed about is the fear of letting people down, of how other people see us. This is certainly a pattern that I adopted in childhood. As I talked about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling I keenly felt my mum’s angst and stress in ordinary day to day life as she was parenting.

Like most kids, I learned to recognise the signs around this and wanted to smooth things out, bearing in mind kids depend on the adults around them for survival. This would obviously be more marked in abusive households but, since we are all human and experience a gambit of emotions, I suspect it happens to a certain extent in all households.

Dr Joe Dispenza also talks about indoctrinated fear as a major cause of stress, “be afraid of criminals, be afraid of terrorists, be afraid of drugs” …. and so on. Since stress shuts down our blood vessels in the conscious part of our brain, effecting less intelligent decisions, essentially this renders us powerless. And as long-standing British Member of Parliament (1950-2001) Tony Benn once said “Governments do not want a healthy, intelligent population because they are difficult to control.”

“When you turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, now you are headed for disease” says Dr Joe Dispenza. No organism can live in emergency mode for extended periods of time. Chronic conditions require lifestyle changes. I can totally appreciate this if I take my panic attacks as an example. I had to change the way I thought and the way I felt, and that required me to become conscious of how unconscious I was.

Dr Libby Weaver explains the effects of chronic stress from a physiological standpoint:

Phase 1 – High adrenaline creates a lot of inflammation which is the beginning of most degenerative disease.

Phase 2 – To keep you alive the body has to damp down that inflammation; cortisol elevates (its job is to slow your metabolism to get you through a famine). So clothes get tight, you diet (confirming the perceived famine), which slows your metabolism further and melatonin levels go down (you’re not going to want to sleep because your body thinks it has to be on guard).

In this mode, it’s not a time to create, imagine, learn, open your heart, or go within, it’s a time to run, fight, hide; so people naturally cling to their fear, worry, wherever is perpetuating the stress. Our attention is ‘out there’ where the perceived threat is, we obsess about time.

I quickly learned to get myself out of flight of fight mode as soon as I became aware of it (and still do today in any stressful condition). I would start to focus on my breathing, slow it down, take belly breaths and extend my exhalation; this invokes the Parasympathetic Nervous system – this is our rest, digest, repair and reproduce system. From here our body works more effectively, it’s also able to use body fat as a fuel, simply because it’s getting the message via the body “it’s safe”.

Another thing we can do is to take micro breaks throughout the day. At the traffic lights, instead of checking social media, become breath aware. While waiting for the kettle to boil, the lift to arrive etc, check in with our bodies. Regular meditation, though, is the best way to increase awareness (read Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success).

As well as making lifestyle changes, eating better, exercising, getting out in fresh air, and spending more time with loved ones to name a few, there are also methods like tapping (also known as EFT Emotional Freedom Technique) to reduce stress.. 

Dr Josh Axe talks about how certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. Emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

He goes on to say emotions of frustration and anger are toxic to the liver. Grief, sadness and depression affect your colon and lungs and also your immune system. Anxiety and nervousness affects the heart, small intestines and nervous system. Worry affects the spleen, pancreas and stomach.

Taking care of the emotional aspect of health is vitally important, as discussed in Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey. This premise has been known in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. As I mentioned in that previous blog, I personally like Lise Boubeau’s Your Body’s Telling You: Love Yourself and Annette Noontil’s The Body is the Barometer of the Soul to help me fathom what is going on in my body from a thought pattern and emotional standpoint.

I believe it’s time for us to start reclaiming personal dominion over our own bodies. Our body is far wiser than our mind, and it is always trying to communicate with us at a level of absolute authentic need (unlike our mind). All in all, there is a lot you can do starting today to take ownership of your health and ensure you have a healthy relationship with life’s stress.

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