Category: brain health

A weird free hotel (that checked your BP every four hours – awake AND asleep): My recent experience of the NHS.

Tower to incinerate the waste at AddenbrookesHospital
Addenbrookes fixed my bimalleolar (broken ankle) very well

Happy 2020!

I’ve been away from my website for some time (some of which was under my control some of it less so).

I’ve been taking collagen most days especially while my broken ankle heals.

A bimalleolar fracture wasn’t talked about on the ward (many and fairly varied painkillers might have interfered with my memory at the time.)

Both bones in the calf required pins to stop the healed bones in the future growing unevenly. General anaesthetic and an operation (might also have got in the way of perfect recall). It was mentioned on the consultant’s rounds.

The discharge notes were far drier and used other long words.
This is the second week of my second cast (wasn’t mentioned).

Here I’d like to update a previous post about collagen. I hadn’t posted (my mistake) about collagen but ginger!

Both good for a body but in different ways.

With collagen we need to take vitamin C.

Preferably liposomal as it gets into our cells better than the traditional ascorbic acid (which can result in a gyppy tummy as the unabsorbed powder can leave the body quickly).

SO many processes are helped in a body that has enough vitC. Many processes won’t take place in a body deficient of vitC.

Discovering scurvy and it’s treatment helped modern day drug trials take shape!

With enough vit C the body makes energy better so working out ends up with energy getting produced and used better.

Vit C’s a good allrounder

It helps our bodies absorb iron, fight off disease by boosting our immune systems and hair and skin do well too. ODing on vit C I understand requires some determination!

I first started with collagen a few years’ back to keep my body feeling younger for longer.

Collagen works best and is best absorbed on an empty stomach (who knew?)

I’d been taking the powder sprinkled on my food (not being a smoothie fan) Collagen could minimise the menopause too.After after reading more about collagen I now have it b4 breakfast with green juice (no bananas) and liposomal vit C.

I choose the fish derived collagen out of personal choice rather than the beef derived sort but I believe both deliver a version of the jelly I I used to get from a homemade chicken stock using Sunday’s roast chicken bones?

Enhancing skin elasticity will hopefully ward off wrinkles but it didn’t work very well for my  easily snappable ankle!

I imagine that these two products together are doing for my bones what Lion’s mane mushroom powder might be doing by regrowing the damaged myelin in my brain and spinal cord.

With the help of ‘my IT guy’ (husband) I look forward to being in more regular contact.

The wonder of the NHS will form a future post

High Cholesterol… Says Who?

High cholesterol… according to what measure?

Don’t leave before you read the last few lines! My lipid profile was checked when I was going in for other blood tests at the doctors. The GP surgery pointed me to a website to read as I had ‘high cholesterol’. My level could be considered borderline high according to some measuring, apparently.

My cholesterol numbers are not at the bottom of the UK’s range, but also not at the top.

It seems there are a number of cholesterol measures to take into account and a number of ways to skin this particular cholesterol cat?

This is a UK page I found (the UK and the US seem to measure things differently).

High cholesterol… Says who? There are SO many opinions to hear. We need to decide who to listen to.

I’ve been to have a look at whether my cholesterol levels are fine or not?

We (the Western ‘developed’ world) started avoiding eggs and saturated fat after listening to flawed research in the 1950s!

What follows is a quote from the guy who got us throwing out the best part of an egg (the yolks) to save our hearts and cardiovascular system. In a 2004 editorial in the Journal of American College of Cardiology, Sylvan Lee Weinberg, former president of the American College of Cardiology and outspoken proponent of the diet-heart hypothesis, said

The low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet… may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, lipid abnormalities, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndromes. This diet can no longer be defended by appeal to the authority of prestigious medical organizations.

one of my favourite meals

I found this site very heartening (excuse the weak pun) in how it neatly debunks the heart health myths we’re peddled, daily.

Even if we eat NO cholesterol our liver makes cholesterol, this is a good thing as we need it to make hormones that are essential for our wellbeing. that FACT is mentioned less on heart healthy websites!

I can’t help but wonder whether our increasing talk of stranger danger is keeping our children from exercising and being able to deal better with whatever we throw into our stomachs?

It’s being proposed that children from the age of 9 ought to have their cholesterol levels regularly checked?

It’s now been established that eating cholesterol has little if no bearing on the fat levels in our blood. Thanks go to Chris Kresser for the link further up.

Continuing to make low fat margarine and low fat other stuff, has created a mighty industry to keep up. You would have thought this would be especially tricky in the face of uncomfortable truth!

Eggs and butter REALLY don’t cause high cholesterol!

I repeat, dietary fat and cholesterol are not our enemy but we have a huge industry interested in keeping us misinformed.

 

I’ve been using coconut fat in place of butter. It has  an equivalent amount of saturated fat to butter but I have been reading recently that butter is a ‘safe’ dairy food. It doesn’t contain as many of the proteins that other dairy products contain? Our bodies can get confused

Since I was little I’ve not liked the idea or taste of consuming another species’ growth fluid (breast milk from another animal) but apparently, because butter is higher fat there’s little space for the rest of the casein I’ve been avoiding by ditching dairy.

I’ll talk about avoiding dairy in another post, soon. Here is another post where I talk about lots of things that go into how our bodies function.

This nutrition lark and high cholesterol (?) is not straightforward!

I refer again to the link near the top of the page which had a number of myth busting bullet points (Myth No.5).

People who have heart attacks have LOWER cholesterol levels than those who DON’T have heart attacks!

I’ve gathered, if we want to live longer then let’s not be concerned with cholesterol levels? On the other hand, our weight and an out of control insulin response to sugar (and everything that contains it) WILL contribute to heart disease and possibly a shorter life!

Adaptive Stress deserves exploration and Three is my Magic Number.

Adaptive stress can make or break us. Today, we’ll look at 3 low cost strategies to better deal with adaptive stress. I believe these 3 strategies help me look younger than I am. I aim to do them at least a few times a week .

Recently, I was visited by a physiotherapist who specialises in walking. I believe she gives talks about fall prevention to hospitals and social centres for the elderly.

How lucky am I?

Her workplace is about two streets from where I live. I aim to be walking to her for our next visit.

Almost the best bit about the appointment was being told I don’t look old enough for my age (She works with elders quite regularly so perhaps this is a regular intro for her to help her clients feel at ease?)

I choose not to think so!

But it got me wondering about a handful of the things I do regularly that might be keeping me looking younger than I am?

Three is the magic number for studying my youth prolonging dealings with adaptive stress

  • A minute’s blast of cold shower at the end of a regular, hot shower.
  • Restricting eating to between an 8 and 10 hour window every day.
  • Drink tea made from grated ginger, regularly.

An Exploration of thriving with Adaptive Stress.

Hormesis can be used to explain the body’s benefit from cold showers, skipping a meal now and then and taking freshly grated, ginger tea. It basically works from Neitzsche’s principal that ‘whatever doesn’t kill us makes us/our cells stronger!

Our physiology could be said to panic a little/adaptive stress but then finds out that cold water won’t cause death and so can be safely experimented with. Actually, the shock seems to wake me up quite well. The bracingness creates a huge boost of mitochondria. This adaptive stress (the powerhouses of our cells is responsible for an efficient conversion of energy/gives us our ‘get up and go’.

  • Our cells panic for a while in the cold and become flooded with cortisol to help us avoid an undefined ill. This redirects blood away from digestion and to our limbs for running away to better escape the undefined ill.
  • Restricting our eating to a smaller window of the day is another adaptive stress and gives our body a chance to focus on other essential processes. Everything we eat needs to be ‘read’ and assessed by our body. In this process it passes through the liver which takes time and energy. The liver, brain, heart and kidneys are the biggest users of energy if we live a relatively sedentary life.

Our body decides (mostly thankfully) that it makes sense to keep our legs working ahead of our tummies digesting. Mostly, this is a good thing but not always please see an earlier post here. In times of action our bodies become less equipped to process lunch. There is some truth to ‘don’t swim straight after eating’ but it’s something we can experiment safely with on OUR own body.

To avoid the pitfalls of too much adaptive stress, there are a range of answers about what the optimal time for intermittent fasting is.

Women’s needs are different to men’s (we have different hormones and  fat deposition). Our processing of fat/energy is less forgiving than men’s who have a higher level of testosterone and, if chosen, are better suited to use energy and remain lean. Also, men aren’t built to potentially house developing babies. Women apparently won’t benefit fasting intermittently for longer than around 14 hours between meals without raising our cortisol levels high enough to promote  inflammation?

  • Grated ginger tea is another technique for keeping the body on its toes. I feel  this creates another, acceptable form of adaptive stress (hormesis).

Some types of stress are worth seeking out and can do us good. I wonder whether these tips/tricks/life hacks perhaps contribute to my body appearing younger than it is?

The image I’ve chosen to illustrate this post is of my neighbour. As he grows he gets more interested in the world around him. Just one way he is becoming better suited to cope well with adaptive stress.

Search High and Low

I watched an interesting show this morning on allfour (after forgetting to record it last night). I was expecting (perhaps wildly) a sharp focus on a new treatment or at least a Search High and Low ethos that perhaps didn’t involve further damage to an already damaged body.

The Search for a Miracle Cure

I’d read an article about arguably the UK’s most well known solicitor on his investigation into a treatment option. The Jewish Times (fleshed out a press release?) in the summer.

Very good at his profession to which Rupert Murdoch (News of the World closed thanks to Lewis’s court actions) and columnist Katie Hopkins (forced to say sorry!) can testify

Lewis said he wouldn’t go down without a fight against MS.

On the programme he didn’t appear to be considering the physical side of his being at all?
His long suffering partner helped him out so much he barely needed to move?

Perhaps having a career that involved lots of thinking and inhabiting the brain (whilst getting paid handsomely to do so) has helped him leave his body all the more?

In the show Mark Lewis wondered about stress playing a part in the progress of his disease. He seemed to be almost questioning whether anything as ‘simple’ as stress and emotion could have an effect on the functioning of his body!

After watching, I felt fairly sure that his somewhat chaotic early years had had a part to play in his body developing MS. Gabor Mate goes into this question very well in his book, When the body says No.

An exercise ball that is good to lie on the ground and rest your legs on whilst exercising them. Look on the page for further explanation.

In the programme he was hoping to get good results from a stem cell trial being carried out in Jerusalem. He needed to visit the country twice for two treatments (one was real and the other was a placebo). To keep the study resembling science it was ‘double blinded’ neither the doctors or the patients knew which injection into his spine was of stem cells harvested from his bone marrow on an earlier visit to Israel.

After the first treatment he was more mobile and wondered if he had the active injection of his stem cells. He was walking more easily, didn’t require a stick so quickly. His balance was better and life was easier all round.

6 months later when it was time for his 2nd injection he felt the first injection MUST have been placebo as the effects wore off after a time. Unfortunately we never found out how the 2nd treatment left him.

I think the solicitor was missing a trick.

Lewis didn’t appear to search high and low for help with his MS.

his body, all on its own  (functioning as the placebo) helped things work better without any active ingredient Joe Dispenza has written a very intriguing book You Are the Placebo which I mention in an earlier post.

The improved mobility could have been prolonged if he’d done some exercise to build up the muscles that have been inactive for a decade at least.

I don’t have the brains/doggedness to continue working as he obviously does but I do have the doggedness to not let my body go down without a fight.

A handful of sites  to continue our search high and low for healing from MS

  •  Bob and Brad (focussing on fall reduction for elders
  • a lady from Birmingham  working for Move it or lose it and looking at improving balance 
  • Trevor Wicken from the MSgym on facebook is under the age of 40 (unlike the others)

It’s not sexy or attractive

to be looking at fall reduction, but it can save us!

I keep a browser window open for all of them to encourage me to exercise (I was never a big exerciser even before MS). I get far less exercise these days. I’m sure none of these guys will mind me pointing out that none of them are wearing a speck of lycra or encouraging us to ‘feel the burn.’ They do break down (in their own ways) what processes go into the art of walking.

A few years back I was meeting with a Feldenkrais practitioner who handily, lived a couple of streets away mentioned on these 4 different pages.

SEARCHING (a box at the top on the right of this site) is the best way to make use of these pages. I think my IT literate husband (thanks T) is probably one of my more recent helpers.

Apologies for posts up until now.

I found myself regularly on a search high and low for content: I wrote the bl**dy things!

I will get better at categorising! Thank you for sticking with me!

Dehumidifying to affect where we are now?

Probably this should be split into a larger number of posts? What for example does dehumidifying have to do with youtube updates?

I recently made an update to my first ever youtube clip. In the more recent update I’m moving around a bit rather than sitting in two locations that I’m mysteriously transported between.

I was able to move better back then than I am now.

I think my inner pessimist shines through when I act as if things are bad. It seems to be a recurring theme, showing up at various points in my life.

The following image was put at the beginning of my updated status report. My own little joke; as you can see I move about the same pace as a snail nowadays.

Keepin’ it real

This isn’t a great way to be portrayed and my first clip demonstrates that I wasn’t comfortable with showing my unsteadiness. I wasn’t used to being a little unsteady and so we’re left to wonder at the mysterious transportation between locations!

This time round (on the suggestion of my filmmaker friend, Toby) we are being a little more ‘authentic’ and honest.

I think it was a good call to make. In these clips I present myself in the best possible light (ignore my grubby hair). I talk about what I’d like to do and aim to do but there are still times when my aim is wide of the mark.

I’m not one of those people who believe there’s no such word as can’t because there patently is.

I’m also one of those people who think things are worth chipping away at because you never know, you might end up a few steps further along than when you started.

A change was better than a rest!

Like many people recently I went to visit family for a couple of days. In that time my whole body worked better but mostly my brain, nose and bladder. on getting back home things eventually returned to the way they were, my walking and thinking slowed and my balance worsened… noticeably. It may all be psychological and perhaps these effects were from visiting family but I don’t think so. I didn’t have a post nasal drip and my family don’t normally affect how my nose does or doesn’t run.

Dehumidify to address mould (it’s everywhere)

My next installment could be looking at harnessing the anti-inflammatory effects of proteolytic enzymes or questioning whether it’s worth worrying about candida (mould in the body) when we have condensation at home (potentially, mould in our environment)?

This link helped get me straight and the man’s midland accent is darling especially when being described by Americans in the comments below it! Some of the American sites addressing the ‘mold’ issue can be a little alarmist but the truth is, unknown damage could be happening to us where we live. Mostly this can be ok, especially if our bodies are working at their tip top best

I bought a HEPA filter after reading on a US site about the perils of mould and its effects on brain health (amongst many other organ systems) before realising that the best way to go at this was to get a dehumidifer to dehumidify or reduce the moisture in our house (we don’t have a tumble dryer so, since moving to a condensing boiler and away from an airing cupbard washing dries near the radiator).

I look forward to sharing with you how I get on with one of the two different types of dehumidifier on the market.

super quick

Planning isn’t a dirty word!

The title for this piece mentions the dreaded P word, planning. It helps point us toward an important aspect of the season…

Not just Christmas dinner timing; which accompaniments to accommodate the most ‘select’ eaters coming to stay or optimal christmas pudding creation time but also likely nap times for all generations visiting.

Planning and timing are for life not just for Christmas (but especially at xmas?)

The military I’m sure have an acronym using lots of P words about planning.  Some folk mention 5, 6 7 and more Ps!

Luckily we don’t all need to become soldiers to take on board some of their advice:

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Whatever plans we get set up, know that we can’t control the world but it’s still going to be ok!

  • Family are likely be happier with our presence than our presents even after uber agonising over which perfectly chosen gift to get.
  • Don’t pile challenges unnecessarily in the way.
  • Be realistic about what we can fit into the allotted time and space.

I was helpfully pointed toward this post as a way of highlighting how to keep ‘control’ of Christmas. Whilst I appreciated the sentiment, I felt it sometimes missed the point? Using the word ‘control’ I believe is misguided and leads to potential upset further down the line?

  • I don’t consider my life is best equated to a busy mum of four who seeks comfort in dipping into chocolate from the fridge.
  • We all have schedules but most with a chronic condition learn fairly soon that schedules aren’t always kept… and again, that’s ok.
  • Ultimately, none of us have control over our lives (MS or not). The sooner this is acknowledged the sooner we can concentrate on now.

Perhaps I have a whiff of Bah Humbug about me? It feels a little like Christmas has already been here too long and we’ve just past the first week of December!

I know it may not sound like it but I DO actually love Christmas. I’ve been buying bits of presents online for the last month or two whilst trying not to include this gifting faux pas, a Walkman, a Pager and a couple of cassette tapes.

Even with my plans I’ll still be panicking nearer the time that I have more gifts to feel like I’m buying.

I’m trying to ask myself what’s most important about the season and to put limited energy in the right direction.

It’s a new feeling to get used to: I no longer make NO plans in the belief that things’ll just work themselves out. Perhaps, rather boringly for the rest of my family I’m getting timings set up to visit them in the runup to Christmas which is taking longer than it did when I could drive myself to visit them.

santa's planning too

But, I don’t think I’ve entirely wrung the joy out of Christmas. It has taken on a different shape compared to my party seasons just 10 years ago but like many others also reluctantly shifting their own expectations we seem to exist quite well in the space where forethought used to be ‘not the done thing’.

I think it’s time to change this… Who’s with me “PLANNING IS PREFERRED”… Let’s take it one season at a time!

Pleiotropic… what?

Pleiotropic, this word explains why the posts on this site are a little scattered and not yet bundled into nice easy sections.

It’s not just because my brain hasn’t felt sharp enough to turn on a concise, subject dividing sixpence recently!

Also, life isn’t neat and tidy: Everything is interconnected!

what does pleiotropic mean?

Dr Tom O Bryan defined pleiotropic for his followers a few years back… multi-pronged essentially. Wellness and healing take time – they don’t happen overnight. this makes them unsexy and unlikely to grab any headlines. Can you imagine for example?

Extra, Extra, Read All About It:

“Woman makes her life a little bit better by doing a bit of exercise every day, improving sleeping habits, finding a hobby, connecting with friends and eating real food.”

it’ll barely fit on one line for a start!

This whole site is about going at making life a little bit better. Whether you are a person with diagnosed illness or just knackered the whole time and feel like the sparkle has gone from life you will find a post that could be of use. It’s tricky to find the line between being preachy about what we know deep down will be good for us (decent sleep and relaxation) and providing posts of actual use.

This recent link from an employee at the NIH (US National Institute of Health) touches on why we all have to be our own doctor. The institutions around us on the whole don’t make their best profits from well adjusted, healthy customers. It’s not in the food industry’s interest either to encourage us to skip a meal every now and then.

There are many ways we can get life flowing a little better, only one of which is food. Another life improver is exercise: choosing a type that fits into our lives makes it more likely we’ll keep up that New Year’s resolution that fails every year by around March!

I believe the pages on this site can help to make life a little bit better.

It’s perhaps not a huge claim but one that is achievable and when we achieve one thing then we feel more positive about tackling another thing and another…

Marginal improvements are still improvements!

A series recently aired on the BBC, Doctor in the House illustrated this multi-pronged approach to living a better life by living life a little bit better.

A Venn diagram of seeking wellness

 

positivity, because you’re worth it!

It’s been a kind of a busy season including the most recent piece in my health and wellbeing puzzle which involved a welcome shot of positivity… and an overnight stay in den Haag last month.

Most if not all the posts in this blog from the last year and more, address something in life which can be adapted or adjusted to make our life a little bit better.

Life hacks?

Hardly, as I lack the dedication to attach scientific rigour to things I’ve found out and chosen to share with anyone that’s interested.

Looking online; reporting on hacks would appear to be a mainly male pursuit, or perhaps they’re just the ones that better broadcast their results?

part of the integrative journey

Anyway, speaking to the dutch therapist and walking away with a stack of his handwritten notes has left me googling quite a lot!

…”And then I discovered the PADs.

Well, I didn’t discover them, of course — they’ve been known for decades — but what I learned in my little sabbatical from corporate science here at Atlas is that autoimmune disease is caused by autoantigens.

Duh, you say.

But that statement has more content than your typical tautology. Autoantigens are active participants in the initiation and development of autoimmunity. After all, breaking tolerance is not a trivial thing — we have elaborate mechanisms to make sure that it doesn’t happen. So you need to produce autoantigens in sufficient quantity and context to prompt your immune system into performing an unnatural act. Then, over subsequent years and decades, you have to continue to produce autoantigens to mature the immune response to the point that it becomes clinically relevant. Once disease gets going, autoantigens are the raw fuel for the inflammatory cycle that sets up in target organs, and they drive the formation and deposition of immune complexes, which account for much of the morbidity and mortality in patients.

So, yeah, autoantigens are kind of a big deal. What if you could stop the body from producing them? What if you could deprive the immune system of its inflammatory fuel?”

 

PAD inhibition, just one amongst a stack of other scribbles from the dutchman,

integrative to the max

led me to the quote above which is the most rational description I’ve seen for contracting a variety of chronic conditions and explains the relative lack of effectiveness of immunomodulators

I feel like I’ve been given a lifeline! Having a condition that people don’t seem able to treat effectively can ultimately be quite lonely. The consultation with a Dutchman left me feeling more optimistic than I have for a long time.

I believe that positivity, now bathing my body’s cells in place of state engineered defeatism is as much of a boost to my health as any amount of exercise and personalised physio. In the next few posts I’ll go further into what I’ve been told and found out, including breathing exercises and eating plenty of good fats, no stuff from packets and a little less than a kilo of veg a day!

 

stress and pedalogate!

My lack of speed in getting a post out allows me to refer to stress and pedalogate and roll a couple of subjects together that I think are related.

One of them has a more English sensibility to it and the other is global in its appeal. Both, I feel are worth thinking about a bit more thoughtfully as human beings.

The first is Pedalogate! The British media had a field day when the newspapers were full of stories that highlighted some of the NHS’ more surprising expenditure.

Our national Health Service was paying for leisure activities (instead of questionably effective pharmaceutical treatments?) for some patients with various types of long term illness. At the bottom of this post will be a link to an article from the Daily Mail. Our chances to experience escapism should never be looked down on. whether through a James Bond movie, a good book or creating imaginary worlds!

escapism pure and simple a snail has a trail of light

My recent researches investigating psychoneuroimmunology have included the findings from the endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930s. His groundbreaking work looked into the effects of stress on the immune systems of lab rats.

His General Adaptation Syndrome examined an organism’s ability to take stress in its stride.

As an exquisitely balanced organism we’re designed to be resilient  and thrive under fire from the slings and arrows that life has in store for most if not all of us.

The breakdown of this bouncebackability happens over long term exposure to a stressor.

It seems this crucial piece of research that is now coming back into prominence hasn’t necessarily been taken to heart by the wider public?

At best, the wide ranging effects of stress seem to be paid lip service to.

But ultimately the research points toward this: We can affect how our body functions by how we think!

How huge is that?

Sitting in a pedalo on a lake and feeling nature around us can help us to think more clearly.

A pedalo trip could give the patient a brief respite from the situation they’re more than capable of getting themselves stuck in by repeating negative thought patterns.

Being given the chance to leave our everyday existence allows us breathing space and the chance to get a bit of distance on a situation that, if we’re off sick from work we could probably benefit from!

This autumn has involved taking apart some of my own negative thought processes some of which go back decades and I hope now I am aware of them, I will be able to examine and change my situation?

The article in the Daily Mail

an explanation of the image (I don’t have one of a pedalo) but its creation represents my efforts at escapism which gives me the chance to take me out of myself, get a bit of distance and think more clearly.

Stressors

Today’s post is suitable for those with MS and those who live in the world, generally. Stress is everywhere and it’s worse for us all than we might at first think.

Apologies Shakespeare for paraphasing the start of Sonnet 43:

Sress, how do we love thee? let me count the number of ways (in no particular order)

  • Sugar causes our body to make changes (normalise elevated blood sugar) to get back to a level  playing field (homeostasis). This requirement of extra chemical processes is a stress on our body. Although as the last chocolate brownie post said, if we consciously choose sugar enjoy the experience that can come from it (breaking sweet bread together).
  • sugar, is just one of the addictive substance which all present a psychological aswell as physiological stress for us: We’re no longer choosing that last cookie/insert preferred naughty but nice poison here. Instead we’re in the grasp of something we have no control over.
  • Lack of control in all sorts of arenas can cause our bodies stress.
  • Lack of sleep: I started this post in my head whilst lying awake unable to find sleep. I’d done all the ‘concentrate on your breathing’ and ‘watch intrusive thoughts drift past on a waterway of calm’ but the waterway of calm was more of a babbling brook and had the potential  to reach rushing, Niagran proportions.
  • In this age of 24hr rolling news, with its wails of heightened terror alerts and tales of impending doom every day our body and brain can be forgiven for being in a state of constant arousal. This is fine for short bursts, it allows us to do the living of life.

stressors come in all shapes and sizes.

Our brains can get stuck in the fight, flight or freeze mode (deadline brought forward or an altercation with someone from work are our modern equivalents of a sabre tooth tiger).

Unfortunately, this gives us a permanently elevated cortisol level.

When these stressors come into our life the sympathetic nervous system throws out cortisol as if our lives depended on it. The body can’t spend any time in ‘rest and digest’ mode. Food doesn’t get digested effectively and nutrients aren’t absorbed. Our body is ready for the ‘off’.

These somewhat avoidable states of stress also use up our store of various B vitamins which can further impact on our body’s ability to cope with stress…

Essential maintenance gets pushed to the bottom of the body’s priority list, including essential, unpanicked functioning of our immune system. If we’re stuck in this mode for extended periods of time the immune system can start going a bit postal. Some argue our increased stress levels are contributing to the increase in auto-immune related disorders.

 

When the parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, our body can start spending time and energy repairing and protecting itself.

Both these nervous systems are part of the autonomic nervous system. (We’re a complicated little kit of no instructions, aren’t we?) Mostly, the ANS is in charge of stuff so we don’t have to consciously think about it: like when to start panicking, breathing, sweating and when to get roused into anger or lust.

Stuff we don’t need to have much control over.

But some of it… we can shape.

The jolt of coffee feeling that cortisol produces (a release of adrenaline accompanies caffeine and contributes to many of the cells in the body getting focused. They are undistracted and better able to prime themselves for flight); This feeling can become quite addictive. I’m curious myself whether this might explain some of the interactions in our lives that seemed to erupt from nowhere?

Are some of us addicted to that caffeine free, self produced little buzz of hyper-alertness?

How can we get our bodies under the parasympatheic nervous system’s shielding wing?

Look out for the next installment which explores some of the strategies to get to that calm, healing space most of us visit briefly most days.