The Body Doesn't Lie (2 page)

I have seen a pattern in my practice: Many people recognize their
physical
pain and have no problem asking for help. They’ll seek relief with a massage, an adjustment, some reflexology, a cranial sacral release, or a nice strong pill. But if they’re experiencing
emotional
pain, not only do they refuse help, they resist even really
feeling
the pain—resist it with all their might.

Is this you? Maybe you’re mourning the loss of a job or a close friend, but do it behind closed doors, never sharing the depth of your pain with others. Maybe you’ve endured and denied the agony of a bad relationship for years, even decades. Maybe you regret a missed opportunity, or you do anything to avoid feeling afraid or lonely:
Must check my iPhone for e-mail rather than be bored for one second and risk feeling the pain of sitting at this table alone.
Or maybe you simply try to block out
all
your anxieties and discomforts and fears on a daily basis:
Must have a glass of wine/hit of pot/tub of ice cream before bed, in order to block out the bad dreams and help me sleep.

We can become addicted to these distractions—to anything that prevents us from truly feeling our emotions, especially those that are painful. And if we repeat these distractions often enough, they start to create very physically painful results themselves.

Perhaps your pain started as a physical injury—then quickly progressed to emotional when it began to disrupt your life. Maybe your pain started as overstrain—but why were you pushing so hard? What internal or external pressure was causing you to deny your limits?

Your pain may have started with an emotional or physical trauma, large or small. But what I want you to understand is that emotional pain and physical pain share the exact same brain waves and hormonal cascades, and these pain signals have the power to embed themselves in the tissues and synapses of your body and brain, long-term.

You may want to stuff down that anger and resentment of your boss, feed those feelings of loneliness and boredom, block out that fear of the future—but the whole world that you’re carrying on your shoulders, that pain and fear that you’re running from, that you’re trying so hard to ignore, will find a way to bubble up, one way or another. And if you’re not ready to acknowledge the pain of your anger or face your fear head-on, it finds a physical way out—via a shoulder injury or lower backache or a pain in the neck (literally!).

Consider the ways you might be hiding from your pain:

Do you eat your emotions?

Do you drown them in drink?

Do you spend all day working, working, working—never taking time to take care of yourself or your body, to rest and replenish?

Do you spend the night awake, staring at the ceiling—and then use caffeine to get through the next day?

Do you use your phone as a shield from the world—constantly checking e-mail, Facebook, Twitter? Does the phone feel like a crutch? An addiction? A lifeline?

Do you stay away from the gym or the yoga class, blaming your bad back or your injured shoulder—when you know that movement and exercise are exactly what you need?

Do you feel shame about your body and hide yourself inside, away from the sun and the fresh air?

Do you deny yourself the joy and pleasure of being alive—though you’re not sure why?

If so, I understand. Trying to protect yourself from feeling pain makes perfect logical sense. After all, who really
wants
to feel chronic muscle or joint pain, let alone the soul-rending pain of regret or heartbreak? We use our little habits and addictions—overeating, overdrinking, overworking—like comforting Band-Aids on our adult boo-boos. These diversions may not make us heal faster, but they give us comfort, temporarily. The problem is, when we continue to rely upon unhealthy Band-Aids to triage ever-worsening emotional wounds, we tend to end up with
a lot
of Band-Aids.

Those unhealthy diversions—smoking, drinking, eating health-eroding food, avoiding social contact—start multiplying and just end up making you feel worse. You haven’t dealt with the core source of pain; all you’ve done is add a dozen other sources of pain on top of it!

In order to live a life of health and vitality, you need to face your pain—all of it—and toss that Band-Aid mentality. You don’t need a quick fix. You need and deserve
true healing
, from your nagging headache down to the bottom of your soul. And you can start right now.

Structure helps us feel safe. Parents and teachers use structure to help kids feel calm and learn to take care of themselves—to brush their teeth, to tie their shoelaces, to comb their hair. As adults, we think we’re supposed to have things all figured out. Even when life gets tremendously chaotic, we tell ourselves that we’re
supposed
to know what to do next.

But life just isn’t like that. In fact, life is full of moments when we don’t have a clue what to do next, so we try to fake our way through. And the panic of not knowing the way—and having people see that we don’t know the way—can drive us back to those Band-Aids. But I’ve found that having structure—a clear, step-by-step, daily routine to follow—can help you break the grip of those negative distractions. A clear structure can help you learn positive habits that ground you, nourish you, and help you grow. Structure simplifies your “What next?” choices and helps you feel safe from moment to moment in the midst of a very chaotic, very adult life.

When you have a map to follow, you don’t have to worry that you’ll get lost in the woods of your pain with no means of escape. Even if you resort to a temporary diversion for a moment—say you sneak a smoke or have a few too many glasses of wine at a cocktail party—you can always get back onto a healthy track simply by returning to your program. You don’t need to be scared or to hide from your pain anymore.

With the Positive Feedback program, I’ll teach you a step-by-step plan of simple daily routines, movement techniques, menu plans, and thought exercises that will guide you along the safest, most effective avenue for releasing pain. Think of me as reaching through the pages of this book to take your hand and walk you through the three-step process. Together we will systematically identify and reflect on pain-causing patterns in your life; help you let go of what no longer works for you; and blossom into an entirely new, energizing, pain-free way of living. The plan is designed to greatly reduce any pain-causing inflammation, increase your circulation and oxygen saturation, and release accumulated waste products in your organs and tissues. By the end of the Positive Feedback protocol, you will have developed an eating, movement, meditation, and self-care framework that will keep you feeling safe and strong and carry you through the rest of your life.

After two weeks on the program, you’ll begin to shed unneeded weight, restore clarity to your skin, release toxins trapped in your brain and body tissues, and regain your vibrant energy and ageless beauty. By the end of the third week, you’ll have learned a process that will help you boldly explore your core passions and identity as you design an entirely motivating, soul-stirring, and, most important, achievable path to your most deeply felt dreams. You’ll graduate to living fully in the positive, okay with the fact that you are a work in progress, knowing that you may stumble into the woods of your pain again, but feeling secure that you have a map that can guide you back out again, anytime you’re ready.

In the following pages, I’ll share the program that I’ve used with my patients for years, everyone from working mothers to recent college grads, from members of the British royal family and Hollywood actors to international moguls and ten-year-old girls. Every single one of them, at various times in his or her life, was in some kind of pain. Some of that pain was physical, some emotional. Some acute, some chronic. Some these patients had been choosing to ignore, but ultimately decided to face head-on. Through my guidance and their own focused work, all learned to understand and then gently break themselves free from their pain. How did they accomplish this? They came to know themselves on a deeper level by tapping into an innate biochemical system we all share, a natural mechanism called Positive Feedback.

Your feelings impact every system in your body simultaneously. Let’s look at why that is.

Your emotions are born in your nervous system—the system that physically runs up and down your spine and branches into every organ and limb and digit of your body. These emotions trigger neurochemical changes in your brain, hormonal releases in your endocrine system, bloodflow changes in your circulatory system, and airflow changes in your respiratory system. When working as it’s supposed to, this integrated reaction is your body’s so-called Adaptive Response: Your body meets a challenge (or stress) and, through adaptation, learns how to function better in order to meet that challenge.

As mentioned earlier, this Adaptive Response shares many of the same characteristics whether you encounter emotional pain or physical pain, and its primary objective is to teach your body to be more resilient, to handle stress better, and to continue to expand your capacity for life. Your Adaptive Response helps you become stronger for having endured a challenge. It’s kind of like evolution on an individual level. Your own personal survival of the fittest, based on the “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” or “Bones get stronger where they break” principle.

When the Adaptive Response is working well, it’s a short process. You meet the challenge; your body’s systems adapt to the stress, and you move on. Take exercise as a prime example: On a hectic day at work, you head outside for a quick walk during your lunch break. You push your body beyond its normal levels of exertion. You get out of breath; your muscles feel weak. But as you recover, those torn muscle fibers grow stronger and your lung capacity expands. Your body’s Adaptive Response to the exertion increases your body’s future capacity for strength and endurance.

You repeat the experience the next day, and the next. Because your body develops greater stamina, you don’t have the same slumps in the afternoon, so you’re not resorting to your diet soda at 3:00
P
.
M
. Instead, you reach for an apple and few almonds or a cup of herbal tea. You build up to a daily habit of walking at lunchtime. The exercise helps balance your blood sugar and burns off your stress hormones. When your head hits the pillow, you fall instantly asleep. You wake up at dawn, refreshed and ready for a nice sunrise walk with your dog.

You’ve entered a Positive Feedback loop—each healthy, positive choice ensures your body’s healthy Adaptive Response to stress. Each choice builds on another, making the
next
positive choice easier, more natural, and more pleasurable.

But Adaptive Response is not automatic; it relies on our good choices to safeguard the process. Let’s say instead of taking that first walk on that hectic day, you choose to spend the same amount of time checking Facebook on your phone. Your muscle strength and VO
₂
max, the capacity of the body to transport and use oxygen during exercise, is not only not strengthened—it’s weakened. Your metabolism slows down markedly. Your afternoon fatigue pushes you toward caffeine and sugar, which raises blood glucose and increases the level of cytokines (those inflammatory messengers I mentioned earlier) in the body. That systemic inflammation makes your old knee injury flare up—your leg swells into a dull ache. Your plan to take a walk after work fizzles. You’re still keyed up from the caffeine and can’t fall asleep, so you toss back a couple glasses of wine (increasing C-reactive proteins in your bloodstream, another signal of inflammation), watch late-night TV, and doze fitfully until morning, never getting deep sleep’s full cleanse of the neurotoxins in your brain or the release of anti-aging growth hormone that allows your tissues to repair. You are awake between 3
A
.
M
. and 5
A
.
M
., hot and anxious, tossing and turning. You groan at the alarm, or even sleep through it. When you finally wake up, adrenaline courses through your body—you’re late! Your heart pounds on the drive into the office . . .

In this scenario, you’re locked in a downward, negative spiral. Your body’s response is no longer either adaptive or positive, and it can get stuck that way: in a dark loop in which negative emotions lead to biochemical changes that interfere with your body’s natural healing mechanisms, which lead to less self-care, which creates physical pain, which leads to more dark emotions, which cause low self-esteem and in some cases lead to self-destruction—until finally there’s a cut, tear, or break, quite literally, in the structure and function of your body. You have stumbled into Negative Feedback.

Instead of the Adaptive Response that builds your strength reserves and capacity for the future, your stressful, constant go-go-go choices trigger the Maladaptive Response. You might think you’re putting on a good show, working hard, “staying strong” for your job or for your kids, but all the while, your Maladaptive Response is building up toxic reserves that will continue to weaken your system.

So why do you slip into Negative Feedback? Why do you ever fall out of Positive Feedback in the first place?

In part, you can blame your wiring. Human beings are born with an innate setting that ensures we remember negative experiences. While evolution installed this nay-saying habit to help us prepare for the worst and spare us from repeating dangerous mistakes, it unfortunately also predisposes us to dwell in negative thinking and to jump to negative conclusions. When we’re depressed, this tendency is further aggravated, and we can get trapped in painful thoughts and feelings. These negative thoughts then create fertile soil for Negative Feedback.

The trouble is, those long-lived mental habits trigger fear and leave a neurochemical residue—amyloid plaque, stress hormones, and inflammatory cytokines—that perpetuates the pain. And so the negativity continues.