Proven Strategies That Help You Feel Better and Live Longer

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(…continued from last week)

Stress & Illness

Let’s talk for a moment about distress. In our world today, psychosomatic and stress related illnesses are huge. Medical research says that somewhere between 50% to 80% of illnesses have a psychosomatic or a stress related component. That sounds a little high to me, but research supports that’s correct.

I’ve dealt with many psychosomatic illnesses over my 30 year career. In many cases, when we change what’s going on inside of the person’s head, the problem and the health issue reduces or goes away.

Included are things like cardiovascular problems, cancers, strokes, sexual dysfunctions, ulcers, colitis, asthma, allergies, hypertension and high blood pressure oftentimes, insomnia can be, frequent colds, and at times headaches are created by this.

The four most common disorders that are prominent in the U.S., in Europe and in Japan, the big industrialized nations, are thought of as afflictions of civilization. These four major illnesses – cardiovascular problems, cancers, arthritis and respiratory diseases fall into this stress related category. Those oftentimes have at least some psychosomatic or stress related component to them.

It’s Up To You

We need to take care of ourselves. That’s part of your job. If you’re not taking exquisite care of you, how can you possibly have the resources you need to give to your family, to your community, to your church, to the little league, or whomever you choose. We need to really take care of ourselves.

You see, stress isn’t what makes you sick. What makes you sick is your body’s reaction to the stress. Stress just creates an environment for the illness to occur in.

For instance, someone says “Well, how could stress give me cancer?” It could or could not. I actually posed that question to an oncologist, who was my anatomy professor when I was in college.

Clarifying Illness Onset

He said “Think about it like this. Cancer can come from many things. Cancer can come from genetics. If your great, great grandparents on both sides had it, and your grandparents had it, and your parents have it, and all your siblings have it, you most likely are genetically predisposed to have it too. You may not, but you have much more of a chance of having it then somebody who doesn’t have all those genetic factors.”

He said, “Here’s another way people may get cancer. If you spend your whole life working in an asbestos factory, and you never wear any breathing gear, and for 50 years you’re breathing asbestos, there’s probably a pretty strong likelihood that you’re going to get lung cancer.”

“Or, let’s say you’re one of those people who insists on laying in the sun all summer long, 12 hours a day, until you are burnt crispy black. Now that may look great for the tan, but you do that enough years, and I’d bet you’re going to be seeing a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon. They probably will need to remove melanomas from your skin by the time you’re in your 50’s or 60’s. So there are those kinds of things.”

The oncologist went on to say, “Think about it this way though. Let’s say that you get really stressed often. When you get highly stressed your body tends to turn off some of the immune system functions. Why? It’s a throwback to ancient days.”

“For instance, if you are a warrior going out on the battle field wielding a giant broad sword, when you’re in the middle of a battle, do you really need to worry about whether you’re going to catch a cold or not? Not really. You’ve got to worry about that guy with a battle axe coming at you, right?”

“Our immune system slows down the function of producing immune cells at that time, because we don’t need it when fighting hand to hand combat. What I really need instead, is I need to have more strength, so my heart pumps more blood out into the big skeletal muscles, so that I can swing my sword harder.”

“In modern day, when I go into one of those stress responses, I’m feeling threatened. I get extremely angry. I get scared. Something affects me. When that occurs my body reacts as if I’m back in the ancient days swinging my broad sword. It tends to depress my immune system so that it can give me more strength in my big muscles to fight the battle.”

Stress Overtime

“It’s okay sometimes, but if you do that day, after day, after day, after day, after day, after day, and you get no rest or relief, when it doesn’t abate, you have a problem. That will make you sick. What happens is this stress response depresses your immune system. If it goes on long enough, precancerous cells may not be handled by the immune system, so you grow a tumor”

“Your immune system normally gets rid of those precancerous cells with white blood cells, lymphocytes, leukocytes, phagocytes, killer T cells, helper T cells, etc. Those immune cells grab onto the cancerous cells and eliminate them from the body. If your immune system gets depressed enough, you do not have enough immune cells in your body to go and grab those precancerous cells.”

I never thought about it like that. So it isn’t that stress makes you sick, it’s that your body’s response to stress – creates this reaction, so that you have this physiological response. The immune system gets depressed, the cancer cells grows.

It made sense to me. I’d never thought about the immune system that way. He described other examples. Things like hypertension, the knotting up of your muscles inside. Hypertension is known as the silent killer. Every year there are well over a million deaths due to hypertension-related illnesses.

Examples of hypertension-related illnesses: heart problems, arteriosclerosis, strokes, and blood pressure issues. Those have to do oftentimes, with hypertension which we can take care of by calming ourselves, quieting ourselves, and having more eustress and less distress. We need to cope with the distress when it occurs, so that it doesn’t affect us in the same way.

(to be continued…)

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