Wellness for Life: Stress Part I

When is the last time that you made the effort to take really good care of yourself? This is a question you might want to seriously consider. Thomas J. Stanley, author of Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind, surveyed 100 millionaires between the ages of 60 and 65. An alarming 60 percent of them had some type of health problem and needed wheelchairs and/or oxygen tubes. The majority said the one thing that they regretted, that they would do over, would be to spend more time on their health so they could enjoy their wealth now.

Your wealth is in your health. But what is health? And what is wellness?

Health is more than the absence of disease; it is a lack of stress on the body that would otherwise create dysfunction in its systems. Where does this stress come from? From our lifestyle choices. So wellness is a lifestyle we choose in order to maximize health at any age. In other words, wellness is the process of making choices about how to handle stress, so the state of our health is the end result of those choices. Wellness means realizing that we need to process the stresses in our lives, and making choices to be able to process those stressors.

Choices for wellness are important because stress is the major cause of illness in this country. Research may categorize conditions or behaviors like heart attacks, diabetes, smoking, cancer, etc. However, all of these illnesses are ultimately caused by stress. In today’s society, especially in East County with its hectic commuter lifestyle, stress is very difficult to avoid. For some, just waking up in the morning might be stressful. The point is that we need to look at stress, understand stress and how our bodies respond to it, and take action for ourselves and our families to help cope.

What Is Stress?

Stressors can be found in three forms. One is physical stress, which occurs from the activities and type of work we do, or even sometimes the lack of activities. For example, a football player’s body will experience physical stress from being tackled. Someone in a car accident or other traumatic event will experience physical stress. Even the white-collared lawyer or executive who sits all day in front of a computer will suffer physical stress from chronic static positioning and poor posture.

Another form of stress is chemical, caused by what is ingested or put onto the body. Any substances that are not natural to the body create stress and can have drastic effects on the health of both body and mind. For example, many chemicals are found in the foods we eat. Even with healthful foods we must sometimes be careful of the pesticides, antibiotics, or steroids used in growing them. Anything with artificial preservatives or sweeteners challenges the body’s digestive abilities. Chemical stress is also found in any drug (recreational or medical) that is consumed. Cigarettes, sodas, coffee, and alcohol have negative effects on the body, forcing it to work overtime in order to clear the foreign substance.

The third key form of stress is mental/emotional. Yes, even our emotions create stress in the body. Mental/emotional stress is very powerful — and often underestimated. Something that weighs on our minds consciously, and even more importantly subconsciously, can create enormous health problems, especially when one deals with long-term stressors. Events like a death in the family, relationship troubles, and monetary issues are some of the major mental/emotional stressors.

These three types of stress can create “dis-ease” [cq] or injuries in the body when they go into overload. When the body gets into a state of dis-ease, then diseases like cancer, heart disease, and arthritis can flourish. The scary thing is that many times there are no warning signs. For example, most first-time heart attack victims had no warning; however, does this mean they were not sick prior to the heart attack? The answer is no. Typically it has taken years and years of a stressful lifestyle (mental/emotional stress), possibly a poor diet (chemical stress), and potentially little or no exercise (physical stress). These together created a situation in which the body’s tolerance threshold was reached and something had to give. So, as it turns out, there were signs — they just were not recognized, and so this person failed to take care of himself adequately to cope with the stresses of daily life.

These stressors are especially insidious because they also can affect each other. For example, a chemical stressor in the body will create physical stress on the body because it must work overtime to clear out the foreign substance. By forcing the body into working longer, the stressor takes away from normal rest periods and the rebuilding of cellular tissues. Optimal function is compromised.

How to Get Well and Stay Well

This is why we need to look at how we deal with stress and what we do for ourselves to best allow our systems to cope. By taking time for our own personal care and addressing our body’s needs, we can go a long way toward improving wellness, which will improve our quality of life and allow us to live optimally each and every day.

It is important to look at what we need to do to get well and to stay well. The majority of people who are not sick or in pain would probably say they are well. But are they healthy? Stedman’s Medical Dictionary [26th edition] defines health as, “A state of dynamic balance in which an individual’s capacity to cope with all the circumstances of living is at an optimal level.”

If we use the example of the heart attack victim above, we can clearly see that this person’s body reached a point at which it could no longer cope, so balance was lost. This is why it is so important to take the time to get well while you can, and then maintain health by taking time for yourself every day to ensure that you can enjoy life to its fullest.

The best way to help take care of yourself is to follow these five simple steps:

• The first is to get plenty of rest. With ample sleep daily, and vacation time occasionally, we allow our bodies to heal, to regenerate from injuries, to reduce stress, and to revitalize ourselves for a new day. Lack of rest creates a condition of fatigue in all internal systems and so opens the door for disease.

• The second step is nutrition, supplementation, and hydration. Proper nutrition gives us the vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and energy to function optimally. Foods, especially those grown naturally, are better because the body is built to utilize nutrients the earth provides; it has trouble recognizing man-made substances. The more artificial and processed the foods we consume, the greater the stress on the body, which has to work overtime to handle this problem. Substances that do not belong in the body also block out what is important; so the nutrients the body needs, it cannot necessarily get.

Proper supplementation can also help our bodies heal as well as receive the proper amount of nutrients for optimal performance. This is becoming even more vital not only because of all the highly processed foods consumed, but especially because of increasing damage to health by free radicals. So, supplements high in anti-oxidants are very important. Drinking enough pure water is also essential for good health. It helps hydrate and oxygenate the body, as well as help remove waste materials. Water is the most natural substance and is the most easily processed.

• Exercise is the third critical aspect of wellness. Our bodies are meant to move. Exercise gives us the strength to do our daily tasks. It increases blood flow and thus gets nutrients to the right spots. It also increases the strength of the lungs and heart, which helps combat fatigue and stress.

• Meditation/visualization can also help us live more optimally. Not only does it relieve stress and lower blood pressure, it helps bring clarity into our lives by improving focus and preparing us for a day or an event. Meditation works by creating a relaxed state, especially through focused breathing. Also, by learning to clear our minds of both past and future thoughts, we may eliminate the majority of tension in the body and thus cope with stressors as they arise.

• The fifth step is chiropractic care. Chiropractic truly works towards making and keeping the body well. Through adjusting the spine, we are able to keep proper motion in the body. Proper motion allows for stimulation of mechanoreceptors, which send information from the body to the brain and thus allow the brain to send proper signals to the body. This is important because if a mechanoreceptor is not functioning properly, certain information can be cut off from the brain. If the brain is not receiving all of the potential information in the body from which to respond, then the body will not function optimally.

Working Toward Optimal Health

All of these steps help move us toward optimal health. The more of them we can do on a consistent basis, the better our systems can deal with stress on a daily basis.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to imagine a glass of water. The glass represents us; the water represents stress. When you wake up in the morning after a good night’s rest, your glass has little water in it. However, as the morning goes on, you wake up to a sick child who cannot go to school on a day in which you have a big presentation due. All of a sudden your glass is half full. You then get stuck in traffic on the way to work and are now late after having to also drop off your kid with the in-laws. As your day goes on, more and more events add to your stress, filling your glass to the brim. As more stressors pile on, there is only one thing that the water (stress) can do — and that is overflow. That overflow is typically the breakdown point in the body.

The way to eliminate this problem and help the body cope with the stress, or having your glass overflow, is to continually sip the water from the glass so that there is always room to process that stress. This “sipping” is accomplished by taking care of your self through the five steps mentioned above.

Many people use self-care tools only when they get symptoms. The problem is that they also go in to take care of the symptoms and not remove the cause of the problem. Most often this cause has long been in the works because of poor lifestyle choices. If you are not taking care of the cause of the symptom, stress will continue to build up. If you are masking the problem by treating symptoms then, like the boy putting his finger in the dike to plug the hole, eventually another hole will appear, and then another, until the whole thing gives way and you have a health disaster.

Obviously, the choice about how you live your life is yours. The key to good health is to be aware of your choices and their consequences. With access to the Internet, you can get more information on sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress, meditation, and chiropractic care. So get out and learn what you need to know and take care of yourself.

Remember that the body wants to be well; it is always moving toward balance and wholeness. When we don’t interfere — when we make healthful lifestyle choices — we allow its innate intelligence to function optimally. That is health, that is wellness, and that is always our greatest wealth.