I wonder how it would change your life if you knew you could teach your body to heal, just like as a baby you taught yourself how to walk?
Dr Steven Hawkins (Chiropractor)
Many people are unaware that we can actually ‘teach’ ourselves how to heal. It might interest you to know that we can do this by working with our nervous system. Our nervous system connects us to our world and enables us to interact with it and respond in the best way. A true friend, it is surprising how often its wellbeing is overlooked. When our nerves sense it is cold outside we might decide to put a jumper on, if we don’t like what we taste, we might decide to spit it out, if we feel love from someone we might give them a hug, if we get a fright our heart races. This all happens through our nervous system. You may be surprised to realise that when you taught yourself how to walk, how to talk and how to read you did all this through your nervous system too by making and strengthening new pathways. I would like to introduce you to a very special part of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system. It has two special branches essential to your healing. They are called the sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways. Put simply the sympathetic acts like an accelerator and the parasympathetic like a brake. So the accelerator increases your heart rate when you’re running and the brake slows it back to normal when you stop, or so it should… What many people don’t realise is that we can teach this part of the nervous system to help us heal, just like you taught yourself how to read. And it’s an exciting and effective way of fast-tracking your recovery to health.
Here’s how it works…
It is commonly agreed that the world we live in is stressful. Its fast pace forces us to put our foot on the accelerator more often than we would like. A bit like training a muscle, this strengthens the pathways of the sympathetic system and they become hardwired. Our heart rate goes up, our digestion switches off and our immune function shuts down. We go into a state you have probably heard of – ‘flight or fight’. The more we step on the accelerator, the more we teach our bodies to be stressed. We get locked into the habit of being ‘stressed’ without even knowing it. It is interesting to know that computerised assessment can show that even when we feel calm, we may not have switched this pathway off. This highly acidic state when left ‘on’ damages our health – heart disease, hypertension, inflammatory diseases such as arthritis and fibromyalgia, digestive disorders – recent media articles reveal research even linking this with cancer. In short, keeping our foot on the accelerator makes us sick. (It may interest you to know that some people in order to cope with life actually do the reverse and put their foot on the brake and can’t take it off resulting in conditions such as ADD, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder).
I wonder what you would say if you knew you could see this happening real time on a computer screen? Welcome to the wonderful world of biofeedback. You may be surprised to know doctors have discovered computerised assessment can predict risk factors for a heart attack up to six years before it happens! I wonder what that would mean for your life…? In just 12 easy minutes, you can see for yourself how heavily your foot is on the accelerator or brake and how easily you can swap between them. Being able to swap appropriately is the key. The assessment is called a Stress Response Evaluation. And if you don’t like the state your health is in you can fast-track your healing by using this information to teach your body to strengthen the parasympathetic pathway - also known as ‘rest and repair’ or you can help yourself to break out of a depressed state by relearning to jump on the accelerator. Just like teaching yourself to walk really. And you know you’ve already achieved that! It’s that easy. And you might be interested to know that this is the very same technology NASA uses with its astronauts to help them train to withstand the stress of space travel. And it’s available here at INT.
So when you are ready, you too can teach your body to use your own internal resources, your nervous system, to help yourself heal. It’s comforting to know we all have this ability to heal our lives. Many people don’t realise the answers truly are within…
