Mind And Body Are One

We always hear about our mental health and physical health or mind and body, but I want to encourage you to shift that thinking. At the same time, you are more likely to experience allergies or even autoimmunity, which occurs when the immune system attacks your own healthy cells. This is because stress dysregulates the immune system, making you vulnerable to viruses that can trigger autoimmunity, and it turns on your genetic predispositions to autoimmunity. Digestive issues begin to develop, along with imbalanced hormones, depleted neurotransmitters, and less optimal immune function. Let’s stop for a second. I want to further dissolve the concept that your mind and body are two separate entities. They are one interconnected system. However, it’s important to recognize that communication also occurs in the opposite direction, from the bottom up, so to speak. The vagus nerve is the main part of the parasympathetic nervous system and is known as the longest nerve in the body, stretching from the brain down to the digestion system. It is essentially a superhighway, containing over one hundred thousand nerve fibers, with signals going back and forth with vital information. That is why the gut is considered the second brain and is a regulator of so many functions in the body. The more your brain perceives stress, the more it affects your gut.

The Sky is Crying

The more your gut is stressed, the fewer enzymes it produces, the less able it is to digest your food, the fewer nutrients you absorb, the more the gut bacteria become imbalanced, the more severe leaky gut, and the more stress is communicated back to your nervous system. There is no way to determine what came first, the brain or the body, so to speak. It’s like the chicken and the egg debate. My response is always Yes! It’s all happening in your one human body, so it is most definitely all related. From an anatomical and physiological perspective, we think of our hearts as pumping blood throughout our bodies and returning it to our lungs to get more oxygen. At the same time, when we think of a heart shape, or send a heart emoji, we are thinking of the emotion of love. But it turns out that our anatomical hearts are involved in communicating emotions and stress to our brains and vice versa, also via the vagus nerve. Think of how your heart races when you feel excited or stressed. Knowing this, you can choose activities that purposely send calming signals along these pathways. These same activities can increase the hormone oxytocin, the love hormone, which slows the heart rate and protects your heart from stress. As your heart rate decreases, so does your stress response. By understanding the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve, we begin to see how interconnected our bodies are.

Keep On Growing

Not only that, but we can also see how they correlate to the ancient system from India of understanding the human energy centers, known as chakras. The seven main chakras are the root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown, corresponding with the major nerve networks and glands producing hormones in our bodies. We need them to be in sync and flowing in order to feel well. Now, let’s take a good look at adrenaline. Adrenaline doesn’t fluctuate with the circadian rhythm the way cortisol does. It is pretty steady throughout the day and night, unless, of course, your stress response is triggered, in which case it spikes and then returns to a baseline level. Adrenaline is active in the nervous system, acting as a neurotransmitter that stimulates activity, thoughts, and actions. Adrenaline, as we’ve discussed, also acts throughout the body on the blood vessels, heart, and muscles to get you moving and responding. You need it for daily activities, exercise, thinking, moving, and even breathing. You wouldn’t want to live without adrenaline, yet when there is too much or too little at any given time, it can make you feel like you are completely out of sync. The neurotransmitter dopamine converts to norepinephrine and then epinephrine. Next, norepinephrine and epinephrine are processed further to small molecules called metabolites, which can be eliminated in your urine.

The Greatest Reward

The process is essentially a cascade within your cells, converting one substance to the next. This cascade requires certain nutrients, including magnesium and B vitamins, and is genetically unique. Some of us process adrenaline more quickly and are more likely to become depleted. Others process adrenaline slowly, and while they can still become depleted, more often their adrenaline levels will remain higher than optimal way after the stress has cleared. Knowing your adrenaline level and how your body handles it is critical for stress recovery. High adrenaline tells you that you’re in stress mode. If it continues, it won’t matter what else you do, because stress mode will be working against you. It’s essential to help your body get out of stress mode and get adrenaline back to a healthy level to give yourself the best chance of creating resilience to stress. Developing awareness of and resilience to stress is one thing. But it’s another thing to believe that you’re a superhuman performer who can withstand stress at all costs. It’s true that, based on studies, stressing about stress doesn’t help any situation.14 But ignoring the fact that you are living in a human body that responds to stress is also just as harmful. Only by accepting the ways your body responds to stress as real and natural, and then understanding that the symptoms you experience are actually signals from within to make changes, can you realize that your stress response has become dramatically out of balance. Only then, after gaining the clarity of sight needed to heal, can you learn how to harness stress to empower yourself. Getting out of stress mode, adjusting your choices and priorities, and feeling great start with understanding how you got into stress mode in the first place. This hidden factor also shows up differently in each person.