The Body Doesn't Lie (6 page)

• The alarm buzzing in the morning
  
• That first cup of coffee before breakfast
  
• Road rage on the way to work
  
• The constant “ping” of your e-mail inbox, bringing more demands
  
• Crushing deadlines and demanding customers or bosses
  
• An ever-rising workload due to recent (or threatened) layoffs
  
• Road rage on the way home
  
• Murder and mayhem on the 6:00
  P
  .
  M
  . news (followed by a dismal economic report)
  
• Kids screaming, laundry piling up, dog barking, spouse scowling
  
• Phone ringing with invite and added stress due to scheduling issues
  
• One last check of the e-mail before sleep—wow, so much to do tomorrow!
  

We not only rely on the SNS; we become addicted to its powers. Adrenaline is a drug, after all—we can become chemically dependent on our stress response to get things done.
¹⁸
And our addiction to excitement and stress and productivity—even when we’re doing fun stuff—can become toxic and tip us into Negative Feedback.

Luckily for us, the parasympathetic system is there to help us set the brake on this stress response. After the challenge is met—project done; confrontation over—the PNS releases beta-endorphins that help us cool down, loosen up our blood vessels, and get our digestive system back on track. It’s almost like pressing the
RESET
button. If the SNS is the accelerator that races us through a stressful fight-or-flight challenge, the PNS is the brake that slows us down to “rest and digest” and enjoy the fruits of our labor. (Gilbert calls this the “contentment” system.)

In a perfectly balanced system, the activity level in a person’s sympathetic and parasympathetic systems would be just about equal. But in our stressed-out world, the dominant system is the sympathetic system. In fact, the response of our PNS, the so-called relaxation response, is swamped by the overpowering charge of the SNS if the latter is engaged too often. We must consciously slow down and breathe deeply in order to support our little-engine-that-could PNS.

Think about the overstressed executive. The multitasking mother. The recently divorced job seeker. The caretaker of aging parents. All of whom have barely enough time to tie their shoes, let alone wedge in self-care and relaxation.

While some people can maintain a naturally placid demeanor no matter what, and take time to decompress every day, most of my patients tend toward a perpetually keyed-up state of nervousness, sickness, and inflammation. I can feel differences in the reactiveness and the chaos of their nervous systems under my hands on the treatment table. Some people’s energy nearly leaps out from their skin.

When you consider how many factors go into the functioning of the nervous system, it’s no wonder that the potential for breakdown is so great. The strong and resilient functioning of the Adaptive Response depends on the various subsystems cooperating and communicating easily and smoothly. If you’ve been taking care of yourself and all of those subsystems speak well with one another, chances are your body will react to stress with the Adaptive Response—learning, adapting, growing stronger
because
of the stress. You’ll remain in Positive Feedback and be able to bounce back quickly. But if your body is in a generally weakened state of Negative Feedback, any stress will likely trigger the Maladaptive Response,
¹⁹
causing you to move further into the negative, increasing inflammation and pain, weakening muscles, releasing extra stress hormones, and increasing insulin resistance. Whether your body treats an intense challenge as a breakdown or a breakthrough depends on where you are on the Negative/Positive Feedback continuum.

As we age, unless we’re vigilant about doing everything we can to keep our body in Positive Feedback, our brain becomes less and less resilient in the face of these SNS/PNS swings. The very thoughts and experiences that rumble through our brain impact the structure and function of the brain itself; and with repeated stresses, we start to lose the capacity to regulate the Adaptive Response. The stress hormones coursing through our body interact with the weaker aspects of our genetic material and essentially age us. And that, my friend, is the ultimate legacy of a lifetime spent in Negative Feedback: premature aging.

Any of the conditions listed below can trigger, perpetuate, or be caused by Negative Feedback:

• An acute injury that was not well managed
  
• A deficiency in omega-3 fatty acids
  
• Emotional eating
  
• Environmental allergens
  
• Fear/amygdala overdrive
  
• Food intolerances/sensitivities
  
• Insulin resistance
  
• Lack of exercise/movement
  
• Leaky gut syndrome
  
• Obesity/toxic visceral fat
  
• Poor diet—one high in dairy, sugars, white-flour carbs, and processed foods (especially sodas, baked goods, pasta, fast foods)
  
• Smoking
  
• Unchecked addictions
  
• Unmanaged stress (both positive and negative)
  
• Unrelenting sadness
  
• Unresolved childhood trauma
  
• Vitamin D deficiency (caused by lack of time in the sun)
  
• Weak muscular or skeletal health
  

The amazing truth about the strength and nature of our individual stress response: Attitude really is everything. While most of their activities are involuntary, the SNS and the PNS are heavily, continuously influenced by thoughts. Every thought that goes through your head runs through this interconnected system and interacts with your body on a cellular level. You react to this information physically, sucking in oxygen, burning up glucose, crackling your synapses, and shifting your brain waves, surging your neurotransmitter levels up and down. Long-term, each of these changes leaves a trace. As you feel fear, excitement, desire, delight, and other emotions, blood surges into various regions of the brain, growing new brain cells, bulking up one area, atrophying another. Certain neural paths and connections are dug deeper; others are left to wither and die. Each of these biological shifts may even alter your genetic expression.

These ups and downs are not all bad, though. The enduring legacy of lifetimes of these surges and shifts made it possible for the human race to adapt to a changing environment, and they’re the reason we’ve survived astounding challenges through the millennia. The reason we’re still around is because our ancestors paid more attention to negative stimuli than to positive stimuli, a human trait. Psychologist Roy Baumeister called this our “negativity bias.”
²⁰
We’re the great-great-great (times a thousand) grandchildren of the people who survived vicious attacks and raging storms, because they knew that danger meant they had to react quickly and keep those close to them safe from harm. We can thank our ancestors for being Nervous Nellys—they kept the human race alive, after all—but they also cemented the modern human brain’s innate focus on negativity. Because of the strength of that instinct, unless we today learn to counter that dark focus, we soon discover that negativity can drown out positivity way more easily than the opposite. (Psychologist Paul Rozin quotes an old Russian saying that sums it up well: “A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar.”
²¹
)

Yes, we evolved and survived as a species primarily because we were constantly on the lookout for danger, our brain developing a habit of seeking out and fixating on the negative. And that tendency can get even more pronounced within an individual lifetime. If we experience a trauma, especially in early life, that event gives us irrefutable proof that our innate bias is correct, programs the developing brain to overreact to future stressors, and further strengthens our SNS’s already heightened reactivity.
²²
If we don’t do something to change these unconscious instincts, our SNS continues to dominate and we become “wired to worry,” gravitating toward fear-based, hectic, run-run-run lives. The chronic activation of our stress hormones ages our brains, our skin, and our hearts, and we get locked into the downward spiral of Negative Feedback.

Triggering stress can become such a default that our PNS can lose some of its power and become weakened. Luckily, we humans have learned that we can counterbalance this deficit. Hanson says we can consciously work to strengthen the PNS with, for example, deep-breathing techniques, meditation, yoga, and other centering, stress-relieving activities; such “work” helps us relax and allows the body to release tension routinely, before it can build up and become toxic.
²³
For example, one Nepali study showed that a type of meditative exercise called pranayama can help strengthen the parasympathetic system in as little as five minutes a session. By slowly breathing in, through both nostrils, for four seconds, and then breathing out for six seconds, while thinking about an open blue sky, study participants significantly reduced their blood pressure and slightly reduced their heart rate.
²⁴
This type of deep breathing exercise has been proven to strengthen the sensitivity of the baroreflex, a mechanism in our cardiovascular system that inhibits the SNS and activates the PNS. When we strengthen the baroreflex, we strengthen the PNS.
²⁵
Neuroscientists, psychologists, meditation teachers, and even trainers for the U.S. military, who seek methods to help manage soldiers’ chronic stress, have found that the stronger the PNS is, the more flexible and responsive this relaxation response will be in stressful situations—which is why strengthening the PNS is a major focus of the Positive Feedback program.
²⁶

While it can sometimes feel as though we’re at the mercy of our brittle nerves, we
can
direct the growth and change of our brain and our entire nervous system. In fact, we do this in every positive choice we make, whether or not we do it
consciously.
When we opt to calm ourselves down, take deep breaths, meditate, take time to rest and replenish, we increase the strength of the PNS. We spend more time in a relaxed, contented state and our organs (especially our brain) get a break from their stress hormone bath. Our brain becomes less reactive to stimuli—we take a break, stay mindful, and thoughtfully choose an appropriate response to any situation. We start to fill up our tool chest with Positive Feedback emotional responses—empathy, love, patience—rather than reaching for the biggest hammer in the Negative Feedback tool chest: fear. By making those positive choices, we activate our Adaptive Response and nestle ourselves comfortably in Positive Feedback.

Yet we cannot become complacent. When, despite our positive tools, we make choices that trigger the SNS—focusing on the negative, surrounding ourselves with drama, not sleeping enough, or eating tons of sugar—we again weaken our parasympathetic response, encourage an increase in inflammation and stress hormones, and nudge ourselves back into Negative Feedback.

In the case of Amy, the patient I introduced at the beginning of this chapter, her pain was telling her this very clear message:
Slow down.
She needed to take the time to care for herself; to feed her body nourishing, anti-inflammatory foods; to get the full seven hours of sleep that her body craved; and to relax and replenish her nervous system instead of pressing forward, working harder, never stopping. She needed to reverse the cycle and get back into Positive Feedback.

During those many hours in bed recovering from shingles, she literally came face to face with her pain as a snake of burning nerves shot up, red hot, through her eyebrows, over her forehead, and under her hairline. Her doctor had told her that shingles among young and middle-aged people is almost always triggered by stress and a lack of self-care: “It’s your system’s way of throwing the fire alarm and really getting your attention,” he’d said.

Amy got the message. All the encouragement and guidance I’d been giving her over the years finally came together. Brought to attention by a rampaging virus, she now understood what she needed to do.

She took out the packet describing the Positive Feedback program I’d given her years before. After reading it carefully, she spent an afternoon in bed doing several of the Reflect exercises described. While creating her Body Timeline—one of those Reflect exercises—she realized that after her youngest child was born, she’d abandoned the daily walk that had always kept her sane. She had always intended to resume her walks, but life had intervened, as it tends to do, and she was shocked to realize it had been five years since she’d exercised on a regular basis.

The next day, she started to do the Morning Glory routine and her Tibetan Rites soon after waking. After a few days, she felt stronger and decided to dive right into the Release phase. She threw out all her inflammatory foods and focused her diet on fresh, whole vegetables and fruits, green smoothies, and salads. She drank filtered water and rested, meditating under her ice packs. She started to talk back to the negative voices, to hold herself as gently as she’d held her babies, to surround herself in a circle of positive white light, just as I’d taught her in our meditation routine at the office. She threw herself body and soul into the Positive Feedback program.

And now, four weeks after being at the lowest point ever in her body’s health, Amy looked positively radiant. I asked her what the trigger had been—what had made
this
time work, when at so many other moments in her life she had denied herself that healing. “The pain got so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else,” she said. “I finally stopped running away; I just stopped and listened. And now here I am.”

In her Reflect stage, she realized that she’d been working so hard because she didn’t feel able to say no: She put everyone else’s needs before her own. Anyone who asked a favor of her got put to the top of her list—and she got pushed off the end.

As Amy dug down and reviewed the Body Timeline she’d prepared, she realized that the pattern went deeper. She saw that her intense focus on work had been draining her for years. That she hadn’t felt inspired in many years—perhaps even decades. Her dedication to her corporation felt unbalanced, unfulfilling—even traumatic. And as she dug deeper, she came face to face with the truth: She’d lost herself, at seventeen, when her father had died and her mother had refused to send her to art school. A dutiful daughter, Amy chose a business major at a nearby university, attended an MBA program, and joined the corporate world right out of grad school. And she’d never been the same since.