Common Sense: Do Your Own Research

Life is a constant circle between the brain and the body. Most people in the medical field will tell you that so I probably couldn’t list all the people I may be quoting or copyright infringing. I am not a doctor of any kind although I do have a lot of college behind me and a significant amount of life too. I have done research, however not for this book, more for myself rather than anything else. According to most people I am about to enter middle age and I am running into a considerable amount of medical problems which seem to have slowed me down. Sound familiar. This where the body and the brain circle comes into the picture.

When you are in young life your body seems to have an endless amount of energy that every cosmetic company, plastic surgeon and diet pill would like to tell you they have in a bottle. The fact is that they can probably change the way you look or the outcome of the path that you are on; however, they can’t make any permanent changes for you and your brain. You can pop the pills or have the tuck, you can even have lost cells replaced to remove the wrinkles but they will come back. Companies have made a ton of money because research shows we want to be young and active again. Facts show that our bodies can’t do it.

As we get start to get to that point in our lives that our bodies start to tell us to slow down our brains just don’t want to agree. Just like when you were little and you mom said no to the candy, our bodies say no to our active lives our brains still want it. This is the circle of the brain and the body.

Despite the fact that they are connected they don’t always agree with each other and I am not the first person to ever say this. From the beginning of history there has always been interest in how the mind controls the body. Take the cases of people who have been paralyzed by fear. Our natural instinct is to run or fight back, but in these cases, what happened?, nothing. The brain said run or fight back and the body flat out said “No.”

The most important thing to know about this connection is that your brain and your body need to communicate. You need to know what is going on in there and how it works. I have had anatomy and physiology and microbiology, I understand how my brain communicates with my body. But still I am going through all of this middle aged lack of communication. The thing that I just figured out is that its normal. Just like trying to learn to walk, your brain has times in its life that your body just doesn’t want to cooperate. Welcome to middle age.

I have always said that when I start over the hill I would grab a branch and hang on, well, I am. Let’s see if I can catch you on the way. First of all, find your circle. Let your brain stop for a few seconds so that you can hear what you body has to say. Start doing some research on your own. When I started my research into some of my symptoms I found a website that talked about menopause. I started reading and panicked. It said that when a woman goes through menopause or starts to have symptoms that it she has usually lived half of her life span and that she is on her way down hill. Well, I was only 37 years old that meant that I would only live until 74years old and that I was never going to feel young again. I was depressed. To me that meant that I was done. I had raised kids since I was 17 years old and I would never have that fun time to myself when they were grown. I would never be sexy again or be able to enjoy any golden years. Then I read on and found out that the whole article was written by a man. All of the sudden I realized that this man had never experienced menopause, giving birth or menstrual cycles and couldn’t possible know, even with all of his research, what I was going to go through. It taught me to take research and articles with a grain of salt. Not everything will apply to me. It may sound like the same symptoms or sound like what I am going through but it doesn’t mean that I will end up how they tell me I will. The only reason to find out if anyone else is feeling what you are feeling is to give you a community and let you know your not alone. Research is done and there are solutions, but people make mistakes and there is more than one solution. They say cancer kills you but there are people who have survived it. These are the kinds of things you need to look for, survivors. Just remember not to give up though you may be the first to voice it or look for it, but there will always be someone out there who needs to hear you.

Listening to your brain/body communication is the most important thing to start with. Don’t panic if it takes a while, it probably will, the body is pretty stubborn and the brain hates to listen. Just take the step to realize that they are not communicating. The body usually lets you know with pain, or any disruptions, like hunger, thirst, constipation. Like the old doctors used to tell you, if you crave it your body probably needs it.

When you are doing your research and your brain starts talking to your body don’t listen to those crappy statistics. Everyone will find some statistic that they fit under but the only problem is that we are all different. Not everyone can do the same diet and loose the same weight. Let me tell you about my Twins, they are 11 years old right now. They were conceived together, born together and raised together. They eat the same foods and do the same amount of exercise. They are fraternal so they did come from two separate eggs and had two different embryonic sacs. One is 4ft 11in, weight 89lbs and has breasts, the other is 5ft 2 in, weights 89 ½ lbs and has no breasts. On has hips and curves and the other has nothing. One has thick hair, one has average. One is excelling in school with a learning disability, the other one is average under her ability. One is good at sports and is very coordinated and the other one isn’t. One can sing, one can’t. Same Father, Same mother, same house, same life, same experiences and they are still different as night and day. Even if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are its still a different duck.

Don’t ever fall for statistics. The research that is done for statistics is done by people who want to get their doctorate, or who need to do the study for school. Research for statistics is done so that the people who have money will know where it needs to go, and so that illness can be cured. It is not done to put people into categories and suggest that all the people in the category will be cured with one pill. Everyone is different and there are always exceptions. Research and statistics are for understanding, not diagnosis.

If you are reading this then you are already on your way in your research about you. Hopefully you will get out if what you need to grab that branch.

The almighty, brain-draining, coverall diagnosis, “stress”, everyone uses it to describe almost all forms of unexplained pain and illness. Stress causes everything, and no one believes it. Well, you need to, because it does.

The symptoms you have that are caused by stress are your body’s way of telling you stop. I am sure that you have heard this before. Our bodies are made to heal themselves believe or not. We have protection against disease, viruses, illness and more. They have been looking for the cure to the common cold when it has been in our bodies all the time. That is why most colds only last 7 days; it’s just the infections or repercussions of not listening to your body that linger on. We need to learn to listen to the signs of stress and figure out what is triggering that stress so that we can cure the effects of it.

Ever been driving down the road and all the sudden you realize that you’ve been zoning out for the last mile? That is body and brain disconnecting. Your eyes are still seeing road but you brain is somewhere else. This usually means that you under some kind of stress and it could be one of your first signals that its time to slow down, especially if you are in your car driving.

The only problem with us these days is that we are getting so programmed that we have to earn a living and pay the bills and keep going, and that our kids have to be perfect and the house has to be cleaned and clothes have to be iron and we have to know everything and take care of it ourselves and it is never ending. Wow, that was a long sentence but that is what our lives have become and somehow we have trained ourselves, throughout our evolution, to withstand this until we retire at 50 or 60. Yeah, well, these new stress related problems is evolutions way of telling us “baloney.”

First thing you need to do is reprogram, unless you would rather live the average life expectancy of your generation and hit midlife in your thirties. Find your triggers. Pay attention to everything that your body is telling you. Do your shoulders seem to be closer to your ears? Believe it or not if you take a deep breath right now and fill your lungs up all the way and drop your shoulders away from your ears as far as they can go, you are on your way to a better day. Even little signs like that are your body’s ways of telling you that it is not happy with your brain.

Learn to identify exactly what your feeling. I know that sounds corny but feelings are hard to identify. There is a difference between mad and disappointed, but it’s a fine line. Find more words to identify how you are feeling.

Once you have identified your feelings then you can figure out what triggers them. For instance, I know I need a clean work space or I get frustrated and it stresses me out. So if my house is a mess and I am having a bad day then I clean one area and I stay there for a while until I can relax and get the rest done.

I seem to find that a lot of times when I get triggered I get angry and then I get depressed only because I was angry. It is important to know that feelings and triggers are normal and you are allowed to feel what you feel. The only trick is to change how fast you recover. Part of that is changing your triggers.

Once you realize that you are allowed to have these feeling I believe it will help. But you need to get to the point that once you identify it, validate it, then you can relieve it. Here we go with the corny again, breathe. Put your hand on your abdomen below your ribcage around where your intestines are and take a deep breath. You should feel your abdomen push out when you breathe in and go back in when you breathe out. This means that you are breathing all the way to the bottom of your lungs. After a couple of breaths drop your shoulders as far as they will go and stretch your neck up. Continue to breathe the same way until you can take a maximum of about 6 breaths per minute and still feel like you are getting enough air. You should feel a difference in your whole mind and body, you should feel calmer and your shoulders should release and fall and their own. If you can do this when you feel yourself getting stressed then, congratulations, you have just changed your triggers.

If you are having problems with some of the stress in your life and the breathing doesn’t seem to help then you need to find what makes you breath. For me it is quiet, clean and lying down. I will go to my clean spot and I will turn off the TV or any noise, I will lie down and I will close my eyes and breathe. For some people it may be journaling and actually these days you can journal online and make money at it. It may be sitting outside in your garden or sitting to have a cup of coffee. It will most likely be different for everyone, but it should be the thing that you enjoy doing.

Once you find that thing that makes you breathe then you need to make time everyday to do that. Set a side at least a half an hour to do this every day. You may be able to do it on your lunch hour to break up a stressful day at work or maybe just before you go to bed at night to let go of the day. But make sure you are in a comfortable position so that you can breath and you let your shoulders drop.

When you go to bed at night is your head full of the days crap or the things you need to do tomorrow? One key ingredient to a good nights sleep is letting all that go. Some doctors will tell you to write it all down and get it out of your head which is good but then you are laying there thinking,” have I forgotten anything?” My husband has a bad habit of sitting down with me in the evening and giving me my silence and then when we go to bed he tries to talk to me about things we need to settle or do. I finally told him that he needs to stop. You need to tell your brain to stop that too.

One good way to do that is to create your own dreams. You really don’t need to be creative to imagine things. Your brain has the capacity to create things on its own. When I go to bed at night and I can’t sleep I ask myself what I would like to dream about and I picture it in my head. I start my dreams rolling, I start the dialog or I imagine the sound of waves and I am lying on the beach. If you have problems imagining the extras you can get cd’s with sounds of relaxing things like rain or ocean waves. The whole trick is to not allow your mind to combine your day with your dream. In other words, don’t replay a conversation you had earlier that day that didn’t turnout the way you wanted it and try to change the results in your head, then you are just dwelling on the day. Imagine something new or something that has happened that you liked. Sometimes I will imagine people that I haven’t seen in a while that I miss, like my Dad, and I will picture us doing something that we love to do together, like fishing, and pretty soon I am asleep dreaming of my Dad and fishing and I wake up rested and feeling good. If you practice this you can control your dreams and your moods while you sleep.

Sleep patterns are important too; don’t wait until you have two hours more to sleep to try this. It has been proven that sleep deprivation affects everything that we do and that you should get at least 5 to 6 hours of sleep every night. Plan your schedule accordingly. Personally I have found that with my back problems I need at least 8 hours so I have quiet time from about 9pm to 10pm and I go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am. Sometimes I sleep in but too much sleep can cause problems too. You should research your own sleep patterns and find out what is best for you not what is best for everyone else. Your body heals and distributes hormones while you sleep and you need to do what is best for your body. Everyone is different and produces different amounts of body hormones at different stages in life. Keep a diary of when you went to bed and when you wake up and how you felt that day and if you triggered a lot or not, that kind of thing, to find out what your patterns are. If you feel that changing your sleep pattern isn’t helping then you may need to consult a physician to find out if your hormonal levels or blood work is within normal levels. I am Iron deficient and it cause problems with my normal energy levels and even with my thought process. If you feel that there is something else wrong then you should always consult a physician. My suggestions are only a way to help you relax so that your natural processes can at least take a shot at helping you.

Exercise is always good. Just getting about 15 minutes of exercise per day can relieve stress and help you to sleep better and handle stress better. Like they say, park farther from work, take the stairs, stuff like that, but make sure you get weight bearing exercise in, especially if you are a women. Your body will take calcium in and out of your bones accordingly during weight bearing exercise. Weight bearing exercise is like lifting weights or pushing things with your legs anything that causes you to really use your muscles. This means more than walking. You don’t need to go out and buy a weight set either. You can use your phone book, most are pretty heavy. Or fill old socks with rice and tie the ends. If you leave enough room at both ends of the sock then you can tie them around your ankles while you clean the house, this puts extra weight on your legs and is weight bearing and then you can microwave the sock with the rice later and use it as a heating pad or freeze it for an ice pack.(Careful it will be hot if you microwave it too long, and don’t get it wet or it may swell up or cook the rice.)

Fold your clothes at your couch and then put them all in a basket and lift it up a few times, using the right pick up methods for your back, then go put them away. These are all things that can be done without a weight set or a club membership and they are weight bearing. Aerobic exercise is exercise that causes us to breathe heavy, pumps our blood and strengthens our hearts. I have been taught that aerobic exercise starts when you are breathing heavy enough to not have a conversation without stopping to have a breath in the middle of a sentence. If you do this you need to keep your body moving at that same pace for a while. For me it is about 13 minutes, then I can actually feel the blood pumping in my veins and I have more energy afterwards. Again, everyone will be different and you need to adjust it for yourself. You can read books and figure out what the general levels of heart rate are for your age and body type, but everyone is different. Get to know you and what your body needs and find the time to let your brain listen to your body. If your exercise seems to be wearing you out, you need to listen, you should be feeling better.

The whole purpose of everything that I have written is for you to really think about your mind body connection, how you feel, and what is causing you to feel the way you do. It is to get you to start paying attention, stop reading statistics and do your own research. I don’t think that I know all the answers or that I have all the knowledge to help you. I just feel that it is important to realize that you are not alone and that you can help yourself. Our bodies are made to heal themselves and keep us healthy; we just don’t give them the time or the means to do that.

Taking the time to listen is the whole key. Learning what we need and that we are all different is important, but you need to make the choice to listen and find out what your body is trying to tell you. I am not the healthiest person or the most fit. I am just someone who realized that I don’t fit into a category and I made the choice to listen.