It's all in your nervous systemS

I was going to write a post about what can we tolerate after hearing what Dr Datis Kharrazian said about it on the Interconnected series by Dr Pedram Shojai, but I had already posted about it in 2013.

But it has lead to this post which is also about tolerance, stress, diversity, inclusivity and integration on a micro and macro level.

When they say that stress is the biggest killer, they’re not joking, even though this has become somewhat of a cliché that we don’t pay much attention to anymore.

Mirroring the mind body split, we have the split between the central nervous system and the enteric nervous system, or to put it in everyday terms: the brain and the gut. This is most definitely changing in many circles, but very very slowly in the mainstream.

As a reaction to the dominance of the brain and the emphasis on reason, logic, reductionism etc. over the last few hundred years, we have more and more emphasis on the body which is great. But focusing only on the body or the brain is not an integrative approach. Humans are systems living within systems and I think any approach to health, mental and physical, needs a systems approach. We cannot afford to leave anything out of the health equation if we want good health and vitality.

Something that Dr Kharrazian said about tolerance made me think about my own tolerance levels over the last 10 years or so; and they haven’t been great. My tolerance for unhealthy chemicals is really low, I smell things I never used to smell. In fact I react to them because I have developed such a low tolerance, which is actually a good thing as it is pointing me to something that I need to work on for my mental and physical health which is the health of my gut.

It also mirrors my tolerance for other things in life which has also been low and has led to me having a ‘short fuse’ for things I would have normally taken in my stride. Or did I ever take them in my stride? Did I just push them down, not wanting to deal with them? And like so many, one day the straw broke the camel’s back and I was forced to deal with the mountain of stuff I had avoided.

We don’t realise that stress affects everything, especially our microbiome. Research is showing just how important it is to have good diversity of bacteria in our gut for our overall health, but it is especially exciting to realise just how much it affects our mental health. Everything we ingest is important to our health; food, experiences, other people, the stuff we read, watch and focus on. Which is why we need to be as selective as we can with the things we ingest and food is probably the easiest place to start for most people. It’s certainly easier to control than other people!

The gut lining completely regenerates itself in just 5 days. Try eating things you’ve never eaten before. This ensures good diversity in your gut. Increase your intake of vegetables, fruits and healthy fats. Drink lots of clean water. Chew your food slowly and sit down and relax when you eat. These simple things will help you enormously. Slow down in general, don’t even try to multi task, it overwhelms us and causes unnecessary stress.