Your Brain Can Fix “Dis-ease”
Many of us already know that stressful thought can harm our bodies and our health.
What we haven’t fully wrapped our heads around yet is that the opposite is also true: as well as causing dis-ease, our thoughts can literally change the proteins made by our cells to fix problems in our bodies.
I am learning about this neurochemical process in the book I am currently reading called You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter by Dr. Joe Dispenza.
Today I want to share with you a morsel from this book that supports what I have been telling my patients for a long time: your thoughts start a cause and effect chain that ends with biological reality (such as changes in your immune system proteins or the signalling of new genes).
While there is, in fact, such a thing as positive stress as well as negative stress, our bodies really can’t tell the difference.
I put all of it into a category called “physiologic stress.“
I also call this, “life as we know it.”
For example, I have a patient who loves his job as a hedge fund manager, travelling the world all the time and providing for his family. However, it still takes a toll on him from a hormone balancing standpoint.
I could comment all day long about my many women patients who lead very physiologically stressful lives (not enough sleep, not enough quality food, not enough exercise, etc).
A phrase Dr. Dispenza uses in his book that I have heard in other venues is “neurons that fire together, wire together.” When you make the same choices day after day, you use the same neural pathways day after day. You literally dig the rut in the road deeper with repeated use.
Luckily, you can carve out, widen, and pave new roads, in your brain and in your life.
When you choose to think a new thought, it might feel uncomfortable, exactly in the same way using a new muscle may cause discomfort in your body. We are starting to understand that thinking is literally a similar physical process.
Hormone balancing is just a bridge in the process of rewiring your brain and sending new signals to your cells so that you can then cause new and better outcomes in your health.
Stay tuned for lots more to come on how I am incorporating this cutting edge information into my practice.