Relax your way to health
Okay, now I think it’s time to talk about an idea I’ve been nurturing for a while. The idea is that we as a society don’t really know enough about how our minds and bodies recover their strength and the possible links this could have to many problems we have in life.
It’s quite a broad topic, isn’t it? Well, it’s really just going to be a little stroll among the ballpark that suggests some ideas I’ve had for a while that seem to hold up to deeper analysis.
The general idea is that our bodies are naturally built to restore themselves. Our minds, bodies, and emotions all go through periods of being used up, worn out, or pushed to the limit, and we need to give them time to relax and fill up their tanks again. Some of this we readily understand, such as how our muscles get stronger, wounds heal, and how we need to relax after being stressed.
Okay, that’s obvious enough. What I wonder, though, is, what impact does it have on our lives if we don’t give sufficient space and time to recovery for each aspect in our daily lives? I want to analyse the mind, body and emotions in this article, but I’m really interested right now in the mind. The reason is that there isn’t so much research, to my knowledge, on the effects of a mind that hasn’t been allowed to recover, so we don’t know much about its effects.
We know plenty about the body, and there is a lot of information out there. Our emotions could also be included in what I’m about to talk about because they aren’t investigated as thoroughly as the body, but I’m not so knowledgeable on the topic of emotions, so I’ll leave that for now.
So what do I want to say? Well, it’s following on from a previous article on recovery and Western illnesses that put forth the idea that many of the physical, mental and emotional problems we face in life may be partly down to a lack of respect for recovery that Western society has.
We all seem so focused on getting where we’re going that we don’t like to stop off for a little rest. We treat life as a sprint rather than a marathon or the Tour de France. These guys don’t race through the night. They get some kip, too, and if they don’t take care of themselves every day, they won’t last long.
Anyway, I said I wanted to talk about the mind. How could a lack of recovery in the mind have a part to play in developing physical and emotional problems? It occurred to me that the mind, particularly the limbic (hindbrain) system, is the control centre for much of the body. I believe even the spinal cord itself may play a part in controlling the very basic functions of the body. Now, there’s plenty of evidence that without proper sleep, brain function gets worse and worse and worse.
So, it’s only natural to assume that its control over the body gets worse and worse and worse. Therefore, a brain routinely starved of sleep and recovery time will function badly. Sure, it will probably learn to adapt to the lack of sleep and find a way to do its best, but there are always limits. Do we really know each person’s limits in terms of recovery time through sleep?
Another post on this blog about heart disease and rest discusses the possibility that all the risk factors for coronary heart disease could reflect that the circulation isn’t functioning well, and things like cholesterol are being released to try to fix this. Now I can’t prove this is the case but it certainly makes a lot of sense to me to explain it thus.
Someone who is highly stimulated all day because their fight or flight (adrenal) response is always activated, say they drink a lot of caffeine, are always on the go and don’t rest until they hit the pillow at night. the kind of guys that do this on a regular basis. They’re the most likely to have heart problems.
In this view, their brain is not getting enough time to relax. This is possibly because the adrenaline is still flowing through their system, so the brain can’t fully shut down. Therefore, essential upgrades and maintenance to the nervous system infrastructure that supplies the most important body parts will likely be the upgrades that don’t happen because these can’t be shut down.
That means their functionality drops over time. So breathing, heart rate, blood pressure control, artery flexibility, and the circulation system as a whole get worse because the whole body is getting worse. Each system that is failing is causing problems in other systems.
This is a very simple explanation, but it also holds up very well every time I try to tear it apart. It explains why, as a generation, we may not all outlast our parents. It gives insight into why cultures that have high-risk factors, such as the French, don’t have the high level of disease and death (morbidity and mortality) that countries such as the UK and the US do.
It may explain partly why cultures that used to follow their own traditional lifestyles but now follow more Westernised lifestyles, such as Japan, are showing more Westernised trends of disease and mortality.
So there you go. I hope I haven’t babbled on too much. Maybe others have already arrived at this notion. If so, I’d love to hear about it and find more of the pieces to this puzzle. Maybe this idea will fall apart in time, but I really like it right now. What do you think?