The most important lesson I have ever been taught to date, is to listen to your body. I don’t practice medicine, but what I did come to find, did drastically change my outlook on life. Who knows, maybe it will resonate with you too, maybe it will peak your curiosity to consider change, to become more aware, to think outside of societal conditioning of western living.
In the United States, we are conditioned to believe that stress is a necessity of day to day living, that it is the norm. And though stress is a commonality of our day to day living, the question remains at what cost? From what I have understood, stress often comes from three primary sources: physical stress, chemical stress and emotional stress. Understanding how negatively stress interactions with the human body is pivotal to understanding our own self and inter workings. It’s amazing really, when you think about the human body, for it is an elaborate system that is designed to completely heal itself, to defend off dangers and rejuvenate. Though more times than not, we as a society are ignorant to just how damaging emotional stress is to our wellbeing and accept it as a necessary evil. What we fail to see though, is when emotional stress is present, your mind literally tells your body to go into fight or flight mode and puts your entire immune system in a compromised state. A state that often becomes chronic because we fail to recognize the cause of it, or eliminate said cause.
Look at it like this, quantum physics proved that what we thought we knew about physical beings was an illusion, that human beings are not made up of a physical being per say, but entirely composed of energy which can be broken down to the very DNA inside us. And energy is what fuels our mental health, and our mental health is the intelligence that operates through our nervous system. So naturally the adversities that cause harm to our mental health will inhibit our overall health too. Needless to say, the longer our lives are filled with stress, the more you will see your body react.
It was once explained to me that the energy that you are mobilizing from your flight or fight response takes from your immune system, from your gut, and from your centers and behaviors so that the energy can be prioritized to your muscles to fight for survival purposes. Ultimately what this means, is that all of the energy is being taken and drained, leaving the body with less energy and resources to repair itself for what the mind has perceived as a grave threat. Now think about how long our lives have maintained such levels of stresses, the combinations of stresses and how our body reacts.
It makes sense though, doesn’t it? Couldn’t that be reasonable? To think that most of our ailments and diseases are often started in forms we never really considered before? Or maybe you have. Now, I am not going to say, that medicine isn’t a pivotal part of aiding in any ailment, I am merely trying to suggest that healing the root cause is far more curious than we think. Modern day medicine is a necessity, however, we should do well to remember that medicine treats the symptoms, and often comes with adverse side effects of their own.
What I am suggesting here, is to listen to your body when your body “speaks” to you; when something changes, when you feel tired, depleted, anxious, or any abnormalties that cause discomfort. These are the moments in which you should stop to assess not only the physical ailment, but the root of the problem. When traced to the core root of fight or flight, you’ll understand the perceived cause that the body goes into defense against stress, against depletions of sort. More times than not we fail to associate the root cause, which can often tied back to a stressor that we have incorporated into our lives.
“When it hurts – observe. Life is trying to teach you something”
Anita Krizzan
The reality of it, is we allow certain situations in our lives that became toxic, and those toxins then transform to physically ailments after so much time has passed. Your body is physically trying to warn you, but we often try to treat the symptoms rather than the source. Look at it this way, what use to be fight or flight in primitive days is not the same as modern day stressors that cause our mind to go into fight or flight mode. Your mental health is arguably the most important health you have, for everything is derived from it. The thoughts your mind create trickle into the composite of your being; thoughts that are often fueled by stresses. Think about the word disease, it literally translates to dis-ease. Now think of what ease is, and what it means to you and how it applies to your life.
Do well to care for your mental health just as vitally as you care for your body. Understand that stress comes with heavy costs and there’s an illusion in the facet that our lives have to be composed of stresses. Above all be mindful of the connections of stresses as they adversely apply to your body.
Just Janke 