The Body Doesn't Lie (5 page)

I have a patient who is a professional singer. His entire career rests on a supple and well-rested throat. When that man begins to feel a tickle in his throat, he immediately fears losing his voice. “My God, I hope I’m not getting sick!” he might say.

Now, he might think that the fear he feels stems from the pain of an aggravated throat. But actually, the reverse is true: The pain he feels
stems from the fear.

I have another patient who suffers from recurring panic attacks. She describes a feeling of “going out of my body” or “leaving my body” when the breathlessness and the pounding heart take over. Her mind starts to check out, wander off from her body, which goes into a gasping, suffocating spasm. Was it her heart and her lungs that reacted in panic first, or was it her mind that started the attack, drifting off, and the body simply reacted, trying violently to bring it back?

Some of my patients have endured pain for so long that their pain has become their refuge, their built-in excuse: “Sorry, my neck [or back] is ‘out,’ so I can’t make it to your event.”

All of these reactions are about fear—the fear of truly
feeling
our feelings, the fear of feeling pain. We do everything we can to mask our pain, so it accumulates, and then we end up using it as an excuse to avoid life altogether. How much easier would our lives be if we stopped resisting?

Our entire existence becomes more authentic the moment we learn to own
all
our emotions—the good, the bad, the ugly—in our sometimes messy lives. And that authenticity is the key that unlocks our body’s immense self-healing powers.

We’ve all seen inflammation on the surface of the body: You get stung by a bee, or you bang your finger with a hammer, and inflammation zooms to the rescue as local redness, heat, swelling, and pain. The cornerstone of the body’s healing response, inflammation is the body’s attempt to restore balance, to bring more nourishment and immune-cell activity to a site of injury or infection.

When inflammation is triggered too often by physical or emotional stressors, it becomes the default environment for the body—in other words, it turns chronic—and the entire ecosystem of the body changes. Your arteries start to stiffen; your blood sugar stays high. The cells in your brain start to wither and die. And when the mechanics of the body have been stressed to their limits after months or
years
in Negative Feedback, all it takes is one small activating event—twisting to grab something from the backseat, lifting a heavy box that’s unbalanced, or sitting for hours on end working toward a stressful deadline—to trigger a new episode of potentially long-lasting pain. The sign that you’ve hit bottom in Negative Feedback can be pain, but it can also show up as fatigue, mood swings, panic, depression, insomnia, headaches, period problems, digestive upset, increased infections, and more.

When you go to traditional, allopathic doctors seeking relief, especially to “pain specialists,” most simply ask you to isolate the pain and then give you pharmaceutical remedies to deal with that specific pain. I have no problem with this—but only as a temporary fix, a way to help sneak you into the early stages of Positive Feedback. Because while pain medication can be useful in alleviating the acute symptoms of pain—the blinding headaches, the joint and muscle aches—it does nothing to address the underlying cause of the pain. In fact, when you take the long view, pain medication more often
leads
to Negative Feedback than
delivers
you from it.

We’ve talked about how our Adaptive Response is the natural, innate way of getting our body as quickly as possible back to homeostasis. But rather than tap into this healing mechanism, many of our pharmaceutically based pain-management strategies seek to mask it—which interferes with our innate ability to grow stronger from pain.

In the United States, the most common reasons people visit their doctor are skin issues, joint disorders, and back pain; a bit further down the list are anxiety and depression, chronic neurological problems, and headaches.
⁵
All these are facets of pain. But the standard approach to “treating” these types of pain actually
keeps
us in pain—and in some cases kills us.

Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that our death rate from drug overdose has been rising in recent years, primarily because of prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin. In fact, more people die of drug overdoses than die in car accidents—and 43 percent of all drug overdose deaths are from prescription painkillers,
⁶
more than heroin and cocaine combined.
⁷

Women are most at risk.
The New York Times
reports that more women now die of overdoses from pain pills such as OxyContin than die of cervical cancer or homicide.
⁸
Alarmingly, deaths from prescription painkiller overdoses among women have increased more than 400 percent since 1999.
⁹

Women are more likely than men to have chronic pain, to be prescribed prescription painkillers, to be given higher doses, and to use those drugs for longer time periods.
¹⁰
Likewise, women are more likely than men to die of overdoses on medicines for mental health conditions, such as antidepressants.
¹¹
Mental health drugs can be especially dangerous when mixed with prescription painkillers and/or alcohol.
¹²

Despite the billions of dollars thrown at the problem every year, medical care for pain in the United States seems to be getting worse, not better. The general population is getting older and many of our seniors can’t take care of themselves. Boomers are less healthy than their parents were. Our young people are more obese and have a shorter life expectancy than their parents for the first time in modern history. And everyone is turning to pills as a cure-all.

These scary facts and statistics underscore the truth: Masking the pain only makes things worse. Instead, we need to honor the pain and try to understand the physical and emotional reasons behind it. My mission is to help you believe in yourself so that you can examine
why
you’re taking those pills and ask yourself—once you’ve committed to the Positive Feedback program—if you really need them.

My guess is that once you’ve made a few small adjustments to your daily life, you truly won’t need pharmaceuticals—or even want them anymore. Because the mightiest painkillers on earth aren’t those found in a pharmacy or a hospital. No, the most powerful pain relievers are free, life-extending, all-natural, and in an unlimited supply at your disposal, twenty-four/seven. They’re coursing through your veins every single second of your life. You just have to learn how to access them.

Once you learn to tap into your innate, self-healing pain-relief system, your entire orientation toward life will change. You’ll see that you’re not a victim of your pain—in fact, you don’t have to be a victim of anything. You have the power to halt pain in its tracks, no matter if it comes from an injury, an illness, a heartbreak, or a negative state of mind.

To understand how Negative and Positive Feedback control our experience of pain, it’s helpful to have a better understanding of how the nervous system—where pain actually expresses itself—impacts every aspect of our health.

Caroline Stone, in her book
Science in the Art of Osteopathy: Osteopathic Principles and Practice
, compares the spinal column to a keyboard that “one could play—releasing various keys (joints) and improving function of the tissues/organs related to those keys—or as a mirror, each articulation acting as a reflection of the state of whatever organ/tissue sends signals to that segment.” Osteopaths use the spine as a “decoder ring” to diagnose illness—they see and feel the body’s reactions to these releases and we can tell how the organs are functioning even before any illness shows up in other symptoms or tests. Stone calls the spine a “window on the internal environment of the body.”
¹³

These reactions are related not only to the internal organs and their dysfunctions but also to how our tissues interact with those organs. If you have a knot in your tissues, or the bloodflow to a specific area has been blocked, all the healthy communication between different parts of your body will be disrupted. This communication breakdown can make normal movement and function difficult, if not impossible—which is when the system starts to shut down. That’s the point at which people tend to sprain their ankle, or break their arm, or get those nagging pains in their lower back—exactly the pains that bring people to see me. Often those patients want the pain to simply go away, but it’s not that simple.

The nervous system has many different parts, some of which are entirely beyond our control, and some of which we have direct or indirect control over. We have the central nervous system, which is made up of the brain and the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, which houses the nerves and connects the central nervous system to the rest of the body. One part of the peripheral nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, plays a large role in the work of many organs and guides important functions such as our breathing, heartbeat, salivation, and sweating. The interplay between two subsystems of this autonomic nervous system—the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS)—is what defines our individual response to stress. Rick Hanson, author of
Hardwiring Happiness
, calls the SNS the accelerator and the PNS the brake of your autonomic nervous system—together, they determine how keyed up and how mellowed out we are, both on a moment-by-moment basis and overall.
¹⁴
The SNS and PNS systems, depicted in figure 1, are highly influenced by both the amount of stress in our lives and how we react to it.

Let’s look first at the sympathetic nervous system. The SNS is the engine of what evolutionary biologist Paul Gilbert calls the “drive system.”
¹⁵
Evolved to get us ready for stressful encounters—whether eons ago with a bloodthirsty tiger or now with a worthy opponent on the tennis court—the Adaptive Response uses the SNS to raise our heartbeat, shoot up our blood pressure, and make us breathe faster. We experience a feeling of intense interest, and excitement courses through our entire body. This “drive” reaction happens when we experience challenge on the job, or take delight in our sport team’s win, or anticipate a sexy date, or feel our stomach flip at the thought of the looming April 15 tax deadline. Whenever we need to hit the gas pedal and go, the SNS helps us do so.

Now, if triggered only occasionally, and for positive reasons, the “drive” response of the SNS can be fun and thrilling—our brain and body are motivated, focused, and rewarded with a natural high of accomplishment. Triggered too often, though, or in situations that feel dangerous or threatening, it becomes what Gilbert calls a “threat” response—one that is totally draining and depleting, and that hastens our downward slide into Negative Feedback. Instead of taking either the fight or the flight option, we freeze. Our nerves are shot; we become paralyzed instead of motivated. We simply don’t have the capacity to sustain constant triggering of the go-go-go of the SNS, so the whole nervous system wears down.

Figure 1.
Schema Explaining How Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nervous Systems Regulate Functioning Organs

The master control panel, the place where all of these threat signals come together, is called the HPA axis. This axis encompasses the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands. All messages that travel through the body—whether from inside (our thoughts) or from outside (everything in the world beyond our thoughts)—impact the hypothalamus, the thermostat of the brain. The hypothalamus helps control our body temperature, hunger, thirst, and sleep cycles—as well as our emotions. When something requires our immediate attention, the hypothalamus sends out messages to the brain stem/spinal cord and to the pituitary gland. These then send messages to the immune system, the autonomic nervous system (including the SNS and PNS), and the endocrine system (especially the adrenal glands, which release the stress hormones epinephrine and cortisol). Basically, the hypothalamus issues an all-points bulletin to the entire system:
Hey, wake up!
But if we’re not careful to consciously calm down and give our mind a rest after each onslaught, the chronic activation of our HPA threat system can take over our entire body.

When the HPA axis has been consistently bombarded by repeated stress, whether from a sleep debt, repeated arguments, a bad diet, or chronic dissatisfaction with our job, this high burden keeps the “hopelessness hormone,” cortisol, coursing through our veins and causes the immune system to get swept up in a vicious cycle of stress and inflammation. A steady stream of cortisol increases blood sugar and releases more inflammatory cytokines. These messenger proteins then flip around and trigger the HPA axis
again
, releasing yet more cortisol, leading to even more inflammation . . . and the Negative Feedback cycle is functioning at full force.
¹⁶

If we let this kind of stress go on too long, it can take a toll on every part of our body—especially thought and memory. We can start to lose brain cells, particularly in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. As delicate and complex as our brains are, their structure and function are exquisitely sensitive to the level of stress we endure throughout our lives. What was once a positive level of challenge can become a destructive level of stress if we don’t learn how to handle these challenges in a positive and productive way.

And the brain isn’t the only victim. When the HPA axis and SNS are triggered again and again, we exert major wear and tear on our cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, immune, and nervous systems.
¹⁷
All that damage—and we do much of it to ourselves!

In modern-day times, especially in the West, we rely almost entirely on the SNS to power us through our days. Think of all the SNS triggers we experience in a typical day: