Let’s be honest, it has been a pretty stressful and demanding time in most aspects of our lives over the past 6 months. Particular highlights that come to mind are homeschooling 2 boys under 7 while my 18 month old performs his new ‘smash this’ trick multiple times. It got me thinking about how we have all experienced this time differently and had different struggles and victories throughout. The way our bodies deal with and interact with our environment is the same way. We have an in-built ability to adapt to the challenges that face us, whether big or small (or microscopic) and it is called our nervous system.
We live our lives through our nervous system and there is a balance struck between our fight/flight nervous system and our rest/digest when we encounter threats in our lives. Now one thing to realise at this stage is YOUR BODY IS AMAZING, during the time it took to read that last sentence there have been millions of reactions and actions taken place in your body:
- 60000 nerve impulses every minute (x200 billion neurons= 12,000,000,000,000,000 impulses to your brain every minute)
- 12-20 breaths per minute
- Your heart will pump 1.5 gallons of blood in 60 secs
- Produce 120 million red blood cells in 60 secs
- Uses 5832 joules of energy per minute
Pretty incredible system, then we can look at the remarkable intelligence our bodies have: a mother’s breast milk will change to include disease fighting cells dependent on the feedback it gets from the baby’s saliva! We will save the amazing facts about the digestive system and lower parts of the body for another time!
The nervous system coordinates all of this at lightning speed and if you’re not sure about it then consider this: a surgeon can remove someone’s heart in a transplant and it continues to beat, but that heart rate cannot speed up or slow down, the person’s nervous system does that.
Now the other thing your nervous system coordinates is your immune system and the best way to explain how this works in relation to how we deal with different diseases (germs, bacteria, virus’) is by thinking about your body like a rubbish tip (nice image I know).
A tip (our body) has lots of rubbish, old food and has the hygiene level of a 1st year student dorm at a university. So naturally what does this tend to attract? Rats. Now we can choose to get rid of the rates through traps and poison and they tend to work quite effectively. However what happens once we stop putting down traps and poison? The rats return (usually in greater numbers!) Now if we cleaned up the dump and sectioned off all the rubbish into containers and kept the place tidy and clean is it not more likely the rats will go somewhere more hospitable to them?
This is why we see bacteria and microbes (like the flu) affect people so differently. If an immune system has been suppressed by chronic drug therapy, poor diet, lack of adequate vitamins, high stress, poor nervous system communication (through spinal subluxations) then the body’s natural ability to adapt will be compromised and the ‘rats’ keep on coming.
The great news is that our bodies are a self-healing system, how well that system heals is dependent on how well you have taken care of it. How well do your cuts heal, how many times a year are you ill, are you on medication for any chronic diseases and so on. A smokers risk of lung cancer reduces to around the same as that of a non-smoker after 5 years of stopping and recent research has demonstrated that brain tissue has an ability to regrow after injury (something that was never thought possible).
In short, be a bad host, make your body and immune system function at it’s optimum. There are plenty of hints and tips (including on our Facebook, Instagram, youtube and now TikTok- my team run this as I am clueless!) around on how to get healthier and of course we are available for any help you need, just get in touch.
