The sympathetic nervous system is an important part in our health. The sympathetic nervous system allows us to be able to handle threats or things that scare us.
Stress is chemical, mechanical, and emotional. Mechanical stress, like lifting weights, has a positive impact because it will help develop blood communication and dump better calcium into the bloodstream rather than pulling it away from our bones. However if you beat your body up every single day at the gym and never give yourself time to recuperate then that is going to lead to an injury.
Stress is also chemical. Let’s say we want to have a cup of coffee, having one cup of coffee made with organic ingredients is fine.
However if you need multiple cups of coffee or you are drinking coffee all day and it is the only way you can make it through the day, that’s stressful.
Chemical stress is also taking over the counter medications all the time because you think you should always have a way to resolve the common everyday headache. A headaches every single day of your life is letting you know that there is stress going on in your system.
Of course, stress is emotional as well. Maybe you are dealing with finances or relationship problems, or even suffering a loss. There are many forms of emotional stress.
The sympathetic nervous system is meant to be in balance. It has its counterpart known as parasympathetic which is what allows us to get better bloodflow to the rest of the body. There is supposed to be a balance between them. When we live in chronic stress we are changing blood flow from the frontal lobe or the executive function to the backbrain because there are only two messages, fight or run. Your body is preparing to run away from that threat so you lose blood flow to the gut.
This could be why you have things like food sensitivities, why there is leaky gut, why there is poor absorption of the vitamins and minerals in food, why there is acid reflux. These are indicators that your gastrointestinal system is completely out of balance and it could be related to the stress response.
Here in the office we do a stress response test to see if you are in a chronic state of stress or not. If you are in chronic stress that means it has been going on for a while and now you are actually changing real estate in your brain. The longer it goes on, your brain starts taking more architecture with it. For example if you were an avid runner and now you find yourself only running one day a week and then you notice you are only doing it twice a month, you are actually losing real estate of the enjoyment you used to feel about running. The stress response is saying that you aren’t using that part of the brain so we are going to take over this part of the brain to keep the stress response going.
If this continues, you have now changed how your brain is interpreting the self. You can get yourself back! It does take the ability to pay attention, you have to practice it in real time, and you have to want it more than you have ever wanted anything. If you are at that point then I encourage you to make a decision to change the real estate in your brain!
