Rest, Digest, Repair

In the last blog, we broke down the organization of the Nervous System and discussed the Sympathetic Nervous System, what it does and why. The flip side of the the Sympathetic Nervous system is the Parasympathetic Nervous System and to describe what it does, I’m going to twist the metaphor on you. Sorry.

So go back to the Newsroom in your mind’s eye and change all of the characters in it into little kids. The whole thing is a bunch of 4 to 7 year olds playing make believe Newspaper, in my head they are Muppet Babies (if you are not of the Muppet Baby generation try plugging in Little Rascals.) The Central Nervous System and Editor-in-Chief is Kermit, of course. His two right hand guys, the Peripheral Nervous System are the muscle man Fozzy and the Autonomic Nervous System is Scooter. Working under Scooter, we have the Sympathetic Nervous System which even though is only one guy, for the sake of my imagination he is double cast with Gonzo and Animal.

Now remember, whenever the Sympathetic Nervous System sees fit, it screams “STOP THE PRESSES!!!!!” And craziness breaks out. Everyone else in the room throws whatever they are doing into the air and starts working furiously on the new story.  

Imagine the mess. Muppet Babies pretending to be Newspaper people with Animal and Gonzo at the emergency lever. Who cleans up this mess? If you can remember you  80’s cartoons correctly, Nanny does. But we hardly ever seen Nanny in the cartoon. In fact she is just a voice and green stockinged legs, because she is a smart Nanny and she waits for the kids to fall asleep before undoing what they did. What is the point of following them around and picking up the flying papers and pencils until they are done throwing them around?

That is what happens with the Parasympathetic Nervous System. When the Sympathetic Nervous System is done, the body slowly goes back to it’s regularly scheduled activities and then, even later, when all the day to day stuff simmers down, it’s cleanup time. The body’s “rest, digest and repair,” mode kicks on.
Heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, all decrease, pupils constrict, and digestion kicks on. These are the conditions necessary for the body to heal itself.

An important aspect of the Parasympathetic Nervous System is that unlike the Sympathetic Nervous System it doesn’t have On switch. To be healthy we should spend at least as much time in a Parasympathetic state as we do in a Sympathetic one, but that is not usually what happens since we need to create the conditions for the Parasympathetic state i.e. all the kids need to go to bed. And once again, in our modern lives were are all under constant stimulation. Even things we think relax us, like trolling the internet, and watching TV are actually stimulants, and do not promote the Parasympathetic Nervous System.

So how do you help create the conditions for your body to turn on its Rest, Digest and Repair mode? If you are a do-it-yourself type, meditation, certain types of yoga, and other relaxation techniques will help, but if you feel like you are always stuck in go, go, go there are many modalities available at Cofrancesco Chiropractic and Healing Arts that can help you turn off your inner Animal and activate your inner Nanny. Chiropractic, Bowenwork, Reiki, Massage, Naturopathy all have ways of balancing out these two facets of your nervous system.

Fight or Flight

Last time we talked about stress and started to unpack what stress really is: a biological reaction to stimuli. Or the stress response, or Fight or Flight. So what actually happens when this response gets triggered?

Let’s imagine your nervous system is like a busy 1940’s black and white movie style newspaper. Your Central Nervous System (CNS) is the like the Chief editor. He is receiving information and sending out commands, he sees all, knows all, and is in charge of all (or so he thinks).
Your Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) are the two second in command editor types. One guys is a busy body in charge of all of the moving parts of the paper, and the other guys (the Autonomic Nervous System: ANS) is kind of quiet and doing all the stuff it takes to keep a paper going; paying bills, ordering paper and ink, making sure the thermostat stays at 62 degrees, etc. Each of these gentlemen have teams working under them. Everyone is very busy doing their thing, reporting back, keeping it moving.

Your Sympathetic Nervous system works for the quiet editor. He is the guy who spends his time looking for headline news and when he sees it, he bursts into press room and screams “STOP THE PRESSES!,” at the top of his lungs, and he has a handy lever to pull that actually does stop the press and puts the breaking news guys in motion before his boss, or his boss’s boss even knows what happens.

The breaking news guys are out the door, and the presses are at a dead stop, and the front page editors are already redesigning the Headlines before the ANS editor or the CNS big boss editor even poke their heads out of their offices.
In many ways the Sympathetic Nervous system is the most important guy in the room because he has ultimate control whenever he sees fit.

In your body, the Sympathetic Nervous System has direct pathways to your major organ systems and a superhighway to them as well, so the impulse doesn’t even have to take the slower route via the Spinal Cord. It is faster than thought.

So what does the Sympathetic Nervous System tell your body to do?
Increase heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration. Release adrenaline into the system along with extra glucose. Your pupils with dilate, your sweating will increase, and your digestion will slow down and/or stop. You will also need to go to the little boy’s or girl's room.

This is a super important skill because if humans had to think through every response to danger, we wouldn’t make it. We need the reflex, and fast action of fight or flight to survive. The problem is, for most of us we have a jumpy little guy for our Sympathetic Nervous System, and our modern world has far more stimulants in it.  Back in the days of the caveman the newspaper headline would read:
SAW A BEAR!
Now a days it reads:
ALMOST HIT A SQUIRREL!
GOT A MEAN EMAIL!
LOST MY KEYS!
WATCHED C.S.I.!
FOUGHT WITH MY BOSS!
DROPPED MY PHONE IN THE TOILET!!!!!!!
JUST READ A CONFUSING BLOG ABOUT STREESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!

What used to be a one line situation is a full on page. And believe it or not each of these things causes the the Sympathetic Nervous System to kick into gear.

The antidote? Stimulating the Parasympathetic Nervous system or the guy in charge of rest and digest. Maybe he is a soothing advice columnist or the the hippie who delivers lunch but that is for next time. 

STRESS!!!!

 
AaakK! Stress!

How did it get to be October already? The lazy days of summer are all over folks, fall is technically in full swing, and the Holidays (cue scary music) are hard upon us.

As we move into the spooky season it seems like a great time to crack a scary subject. Stress. We all have it, we all talk about it, but why is it so scary? Well, because it is a mystery. We all kind of know what it means, we all kind of know that it is not so good, but for the most part we don’t really know why. For example this is a definition of stress via Wikipedia (obviously the end all be all of information, duh):

Stress typically describes a negative concept that can have an impact on one’s mental and physical well-being, but it is unclear what exactly defines stress and whether or not stress is a cause, an effect, or the process connecting the two. With organisms as complex as humans, stress can take on entirely concrete or abstract meanings with highly subjective qualities, satisfying definitions of both cause and effect in ways that can be both tangible and intangible.

Well! That sure clears that up!

So for the next few blogs, we will look at stress, what it is, what it does both bad and good (yes some stress IS good). And what you can do about it.

For now, let us frame stress as a biological reaction as opposed to an amorphous blob (IT’S THE BLOB!!! RUUUUNNN!) The Stress Response is simply what happens in your body when you react to certain stimuli. The layman’s term for the stress response is “Fight or Flight.” That’s right, every time you feel that overwhelming “I am so stressed out” feeling” it is the result of your primal self protection mechanism.

The really scary part, is that we are basically always triggering the Stress Response in our modern life. Instead of being spooked a couple of times a day by a prowling saber toothed tiger or woolly mammoth, we get a little burst of the same biological activity when someone cuts us off in traffic, or when we can’t find out keys when we are late, or when our boss gives us the stink eye when we slink into the meeting 20 minutes after it started.

Next time we will go into what is happening in your body when your Stress Response gets triggered. Until then, try to notice what happens when you get those little hits of the stress response. Instead of just giving into the feeling of “stressed out” try to pick out the physical sensations that go along with it and see if you can’t pick out some of the things that happen in your body when you start to “get stressed.”

Dr. Lou will is holding weekly Workshops, many of which focus around Stress.  This week "Emotional Stress!" on Wednesday, 10/10/12 at 6:30 pm.  Come on down, you will NOT be disappointed!

Positive Affirmations

Back to that wily brain. With journaling, we can find out what we are thinking, and how that shapes us whether we know it or not. But did you know you can also create specific thoughts and change how your mind works?

So imagine that through journaling you find out that you keep thinking a negative thought, and that keeps you thinking other negative thoughts all the livelong day. Maybe your thought is, “I am no good at my job.” So you go through your day feeling crappy about yourself, hating your co workers, not standing up to your boss, and just being miserable for 40 hours a week because you are “no good at your job.”

You can’t quit, and they don’t seem inclined to fire you, so now what? Start working with positive affirmations. Give your mind something good to think about instead of it’s boring old, bummer thought. Find a phrase you can really get behind too, not something that just sounds good on paper.

For example, just telling yourself that you are awesome at your job probably won’t work. You have to find something you can believe right off the bat. Like, “I am a sponge and learn new things everyday.” or “I thrive on challenges,” or “I am constantly improving.”

Find something that turns you on, or maybe somethings, and once you find your affirmation it does two tricks for you. The first is that when you say them to yourself in the morning it sets the groundwork for your day. “I thrive on challenges,” is way more fun than, “I am no good at my job.” So you go out into the world ready to overcome mountains and molehills with ease and zip.

Secondly, when that old though pops in, you squash it and repeat your positive affirmation. “I am no good at my job,” can be replaced with “I am constantly improving.” Improving feels good. Being no good at something feels like a dead end.

Taking the time to change your thoughts is a powerful and simple tool. Choosing what to think is literally choosing how you live. Pretty neat, huh?

The Power of Journaling

Have you ever wondered what your brain was up to when you aren’t paying attention.

Your mind is always thinking, and more often than not it is thinking the same thing over and over and over again, however, that thought process is below the surface of all of the things we know we are thinking to get through the day.

Think of your mind as a cluttered desk. On the surface you have all of your day to day stuff. To do lists, routine tasks, the stuff you think you should do but never remember to get to, random tidbits like paper clips and rubber bands, leaky pens, today’s newspaper, and a few reminders that you have already forgotten about.

Looking at that pile of busy-iness, no one could really decipher what your job is, or even what you do each day.  They would have to dig a little deeper to find out. For example, if you organized and scooped off that very top layer, underneath, you might find the big desk calendar filled out with important dates, meetings, birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones in your weeks and months. You would get rid of the newspaper and maybe just keep the article that struck you, the random sticky note reminders would get dealt with or thrown away leaving only the most essential.

On this level we see what informs the rhythms of your day.  But what you really do, is in the desk. The neatly organize files, the notebook with your goals, your company’s mission statement, the real meat of what drives you lies well beneath the clutter. Its the stuff we never look at but tells us what to do and how to do it.

So back to journaling.

Journaling is like organizing your desk. Your journal is where your write to clear away all of the scattered surface thinking, and figure out where it goes, or if you need it at all. Regular journaling uncovers the second layer of thought so you can see what shapes the patterns that you keep repeating. When you write the same thing or the same thought everyday, you can be sure it is part of what drives you. Journaling is also a way to open the desk and really dive into what makes you tick. Your dreams are in there, your goals, your values, your beliefs. The very scaffolding around which you build your life.

And what is the point of uncovering all of this underlying stuff? If you see it, you have a choice in the matter. All that stuff on the top of the desk is just mindless matter until you look at it, and decide to keep it, change it or toss it. And the same is true for the stuff in the brain. The only trick is that in both cases you have to be able to look at it first. And since thoughts don’t handily print out of your ear, you write them down. And then decide.

So what is going on in your mind that needs to be tossed or changed? Get to writing and find out!

Feel free to comment, and share.

What is your switch?

How many times have you noticed that you aren't living the life you want to live?  Maybe you are in pain, or out of shape.  Perhaps you are unhappy, and don't like your job.  What are the things you do to make yourself feel better, that don't really make you feel any better?  Do you eat junk food, watch junk TV, or fritter away hours of your life on the internet?

What would it take to get you to change your life?  What is the switch that you need to flip to make you live your life exactly the way you want to?

It is different for everyone.  For some folks, poor health and pain push them to turn their lives upside down to get well, and stay well.  For others, it may be a picture from a birthday, or high school reunion that makes them cut out the donuts and add in long walks.  Sometimes it's just a mtter of opening your eyes to the obvious, like smoking is unhealthy and will not, in fact, get you what you want out of life.

Have you flipped your switch yet?  Have you started living up to your greatest potential?  Or are you still groping around in the dark, looking for the motivation to change?

In either case, we at Cofrancesco Chiropractic and Healing Arts are here to support you to the fullest. Call us for a Chiropractic adjustment, a Massage, see our Naturopath, receive a Bowen treatment, or Reiki session, and leave with the tools and energy to get better,
and be better.

Beginning in September, we are offering evening Workshops to help educate and inspire you on your path.

What is your switch?  How can we help you Get Well?  How can we help you Stay Well?  Feel free to comment.