Healing the body: 101(b)(ii)

Welcome to another installment of "healing the body".

Before we begin this evening's entertainment, I would like to pause to thank you all for visiting this page. I began this page under the impression that I was shouting into the darkness. I was intending to make an on line journal, private, and just for me. I thought it would be cathartic. It was cathartic, but little did I know that I had an audience. The feedback has een wonderful, and this morning I went over 3,000 hits for the first time. Now, yahoo(!) probably does that volume in about .000042 seconds, and god knows I have seen blogs total millions a month, but this is really special to me, that someone is reading, someone cares, someone is getting something out of this. I hardly feel like it is mine anymore. Thank you to all who come here.

Ok, this is a subject near and dear to my heart. This is an indication that I am about to ramble. I will try to write this as succintly as possible, but I am rusty, and at work.

Reducing the stress load.

The body stores stress. It does not differentiate between environmental stress, physical stress, emotional/psychological stress, or nutritional stress. It stores them all the same. That means, whether you have lost your job, inhaled smog, missed a night of sleep, or eaten a pile of sugar, your body records this all in the same way. Researchers disagree how much of our total daily stress load is psychological in nature. I have seen some reports as low as 10 percent, and some as high as 40%.

One thing is for sure, there is no thing as "just stress". Stress is like a liquid being poured into your system. You can hold that stress. Think of a bucket. The stress pours in and in and in, adn you keep on drinking your mocha double late, working 16 hour shifts, eating luna bars, and doing just fine. Then the stress reaches the threshold of the bucket and it pours over in gentially pre-determined ways. For one it might be a heart mumur, for another diabetes, for someone else, hand tremours, another mental illness, maybe derpression, maybe breaking out, maybe headaches. We do not reduce the stress load, but we manage it. Drinking, anti-depressants, TV watching, deep breathing, therapy. Whatever. Eventually, it will get us. it will get us all---old age is the ultimate stressor. But how it gets you and when is coded in your genes. heart attack, cancer, MS, Parkinson's, whatever.

F.M. Alexander observed that your body stores tensions as the result of every insult. A survey, taken in 1987, reported that the average person, in this culture, was exposed to more than 1000 times as many stresses/person/day as people were exposed to 100 years ago.

The point is: there are too many things causing a "Fight or Flight" stress response for us to discharge that much "Readiness" in the usual 8 hours sleep. Each day, we wake up with a little more "Readiness" than we had when we woke up the day before. Over the years that creates a heavier and heavier burden of alertness that influences how we respond to EVERY stressor. Relative insomnia is one of the very early signs of this overload.

Dr. Stoll offers the following illustration:

If you tripped over a rock, in the middle of a field, you would feel a
stress-effect. If you tripped over the same rock, in EXACTLY the same way, at
the edge of a cliff, the near-death experience ("Ack! I almost fell over a
cliff!!") would result in a much greater stress-effect from the SAME stressor
(the trip). The same thing is true of EVERY organ system in your body. The
closer you are to the edge of your reserves, in that organ system, the more
stress-effect you will experience IN THAT ORGAN SYSTEM. Anything that produces more distance, between you and the limits of your reserves, will result in each stressor affecting you less. Remember, you did NOT fall over the cliff. The
stressors (trips) were identical. What you EXPERIENCED was the "stress effect"
and that is what is stored in the autonomic system. Dr. Hans Selye was right
about stress and its effects on human physiology--all the way back in the '50's.
We are just now starting to learn what he was telling us.

The fortunate thing is that while your body records all stresses, regardless of source, in the same way, it also discharges them all without discrimination. For example: a muscle massage will discharge emotional stress as well as physcial stress.

There are many forms of stress reduciton: sleep, masssage, hot baths, yoga, alexander techinique, rolfing, etc etc etc. However, biofeedback research over the past 20 years has demonstrated that the common denominator, which determines the effectiveness of ALL types of relaxation techniques, is that the technique must produce an Alpha or Theta rhythm in the brain. The normal awake thinking brian rhythm is called Betal, which cycles at 14-20 cps. Anthing above this rate is panic or hysteria. The lowest rhytm is reserved for sleep. It is called Delta and cycles at 2-4 cps. Theta is a state of substantial relaxation and suscpetibility, from 4-8, and Alpha is proufoundly relaxed, from 8-12 cps.

It seems that, when the brain rhythms are 4-12 cycles/second (cps), the body/mind discharges the stored readiness of "fight or flight stress-effect" 24 times faster than sleep does.

24:1. At this rate, it is possible to reduce stress faster then we accumulate it. Thus, it is possible not only to prevent additional stress loads, but to discharge stored stress loads. In our culutre, it usually takes a person 6-12 months to reduce stress loads to below threshold levels.

The good news: it doesn't appear to matter what techinique you use so long as you reliably get into a sustained alpha state. Your options include things like: Biofeedback, Meditation (all forms including Prayer), Self Hypnosis, Silva Mind Training, Autogenics, Breathing Techniques, etc. But you need to get the Relaxation Response. Herbert Benson, MD, from Harvard Medical School, has described The Relaxation Response in his book by that name.

The most effective self-help book to learn these techniques is The