Science of Stress: Start The New Year Aware And Make The Right Life Choices

Why is it that some of my patients who are so health conscious and doing everything “right” when it comes to healthy behaviours – eating their organic fruits and vegetables, avoiding dairies, meat, processed foods, exercising daily, sleeping well, avoiding addictions, seeing alternative-medicine healers – are sicker than others who guzzle beers, crash in front of the TV eating junk food, pig out on barbecue and sleep five hours a night. What is the missing link?

What Science of Stress Has Taught Me

I have come to believe, and I have actually experienced in my own flesh that the purely bio-chemical physical realm of illness – the part you can diagnose from test and explain under the microscope, the part that benefit from exercise, diet and avoidance of toxins, etc. – is only one side of the coin. The science of stress constitutes the other side of the coin.

Whether my clients, or myself as a human being, manage to heal ourselves or staying sick, may have a lot to do with everything else that is going on in their life rather than with any health behaviour they might be following.

Instead of focusing only on health behaviors and spinal issues, I have learned from the science of stress and the use kinesiology to go deeper into my client’s personal life.

This might be the sort of questions I ask, which you might also want to ask yourself and possibly some of these will make you cry, as they usually do with some of my clients.

• Is there something keeping you from being the most authentic, vital you?
• If so, what is holding you back?
• What do you love and celebrate about yourself?
• What is missing from your life?
• What do you appreciate about your life?
• Are you in a romantic relationship? If so, are you happy?
• If not, do you wish you were?
• Are you fulfilled at work?
• Do you feel you are in touch with your life purpose?
• Do you feel sexually satisfied? Either with a partner or by yourself?
• Do you express yourself creatively? If so, how?
• If not, do you feel that there is something dying to come out?
• Do you feel financially at ease or is money a worry?
• If you could change something in your life, what would that be?
• What would you wish for?

My clients’ answer often talks to me more than any diagnostic tool would and reveal a lot of what is really going on.  They would even write a long list to the question “what is missing from your life?”.

I came to the conclusion, studying the science of stress, that these patients who were ill were deeply lonely, or truly hurt by their relationship with one of their parents or loved ones and could still not come to terms with it. They felt miserable in their current relationship, stressed about their work and finances or truly depressed.

When my clients answer these questions weeping, it has clearly nothing to do with the amount of vegetables or vitamins they are taking, although eating junk in front of the TV will surely not help.

On the other hand, I know people who are not so health conscious, far from it, their lives are filled with love, fun, purposeful work, sexual pleasures, financial abundance, creative expression and spiritual connections. They are HAPPY people. Their bodies reward them with good health.

So if your health is bothering you, I invite you to ask yourself these questions for the New Year to come.

What do you think might lie at the root of your illness?

What does your body need in order to heal?

Science of Stress: How the Body Reacts with a Toxic Thought

Let’s go deeper into the science of stress. Any toxic thought, whether real or imaginary, stimulates a reaction in your hypothalamus. Your lizard brain thinks you are in danger and stimulates a fight and flight answer activating the hypothalamic – pituitary – adrenal axis. Your sympathetic nervous system is on the go which shuts down your body’s self-repair and self maintenance mechanisms, your parasympathetic nervous system.

Stress responses are not supposed to be triggered all the time as your body is meant to be in a relaxed physiological rest most of the time.

The stressors of your life – unhappy relationships, work, financial stress, depression and anxiety – result in forebrain thoughts and feelings that constantly trigger the hypothalamus to create stress responses. Your mind knows it is just a feeling, but your lizard brain thinks you are threatened.

Feelings like anxiety, fear, frustration, anger and other negative emotions trigger the HPA axis. As mentioned, whether the threat you perceive is real or not, your body reacts: the hypothalamus is activated and releases corticotrophin releasing factor (CRF) into the nervous system. CRF stimulates the pituitary gland causing it to produce prolactin, growth hormone and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which stimulates the adrenal gland and causes it to release cortisol and adrenaline and noradrelanine. Secretion of these hormones creates a variety of metabolic changes. Your body is constantly in the over run mode, can’t relax or repair. Organs get damaged and the cancer cells we naturally make every day, which usually are destroyed by the immune system, are allowed to proliferate.

Each area of your life – social, work, relationship, spiritual, financial – will either relax you or stress you and this is perfectly logical and explainable based on the science of stress.

A healthy relationship elicits positive emotions of joy, hope and a sense of oneness leading to relaxation while an unhealthy one will create a feeling of guilt, unease, sadness, separation, fear of judgment, of deceit and flips the stress responses.

When you feel loved, supported, optimistic, “in the flow” in your family, professional or creative life, the relaxation response takes over the stressed one.

The sympathetic nervous system shuts off. The cortisol and adrenaline levels drop, the parasympathetic nervous system is on.

Disease is more likely to be prevented and even be treated in sick people. Your thoughts lead to self-healing. While loneliness, anger and resentment are not part of our inner self, the desire for connection and a sense of belongingness with family, friends and lovers is deeply hardwired into our DNA.

You can make the choice of controlling the science of stress to your benefit.

FOR THIS NEW YEAR, FIND YOUR TRIBE, FEEL LOVED AND SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PEOPLE WHO KNOW YOUR HEART, TRULY CARE FOR IT AND LOVE YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE.

You will reach a better health, step in your power and make your world and others’ a better one.