Internal Friction…..The Tipping Point
Part 3 of 5
I believe there is the tipping point. Our internal frictions, both mental and physical are what fills our glass as they swell and grind in our life, minds and bodies. Many people focus on and put a lot of time and effort into emptying their glass to try and keep that tipping point low. This is called traditional stress management. Many people look to stay clear of life’s conflicts where ever they can and consequently put a lot of energy into doing so. This is called stress avoidance.
What I really want to do, and where I spend a lot of time and energy is working to build a bigger cup. That is called resilience. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are times and places for stress management and avoidance for sure. In today’s condensed, hectic, demanding world I will take all the advantages I can get, but it is in building our capacity to convert stress from a potentially negative impact on our lives into a potentially positive one that makes us truly resilient to stress.
As far as I can see we have four main areas that these internal frictions produce the majority of their damage:
1. Expectations
2. Brain Chemistry
3. Hormonal Chemistry
These four areas of our health, body, and life all start to collect the ill effects of the internal friction of our lives independently or collectively and dump them into our glasses. Let’s go through them each in reverse order.
Cellular Oxidative Health. What am I talking about here? Our body is made up of lots and lots of cells that all function in a very similar fashion as our body does as a whole, just on a very small scale. Each cell eats, eliminates, breathes, grows, reproduces, moves, and lives its little cell life. Healthy happy cells make up healthy happy tissues that make up healthy happy organs that work in healthy happy systems that make up a healthy happy body that has a healthy happy mind and enjoys a healthy happy life.
Health starts within the cell itself and anything that we do to irritate, interfere, damage, or negatively stress our cells will change how they work and ultimately how they express themselves and reproduce. In order to have any disease in our body we have to have had some significant damage occur within the cells of the body and that damage had to happen to A LOT of cells to the point that when they reproduced they produced new, yet damaged, or improperly functioning cells for many generations.
Cellular level toxicity, trauma, oxidation and maladapted behavior from our life and lifestyle are the most basic fundamental frictions that occur in our body and start our glass filling up. Many of these changes and actions that occur and produce this cellular level internal friction are not even something people can feel or see very easily, but they start the ill health and negative mental well-being ball rolling.
That leads us to our Hormonal Chemistry. When enough of the cellular level friction occurs it sets off our hormonal chemistry. Hormones are how the cells of the body all talk to each other and communicate what they need and how they feel so to speak. The cells use hormones and hormone receptors to tell their story to the rest of the body and the body in turn reports to the cells what is going on in the world through hormones so the cells can make changes accordingly. When this process is off, either from the cell to the body or the body back to the cell we see changes in our hormonal chemistry start to occur. This hormonal shift creates the next level of friction that we can now see and feel in our body. Hormones are very powerful little chemicals and they direct a whole lot of larger level action in our body like how we feel, how we look, they control how much fat we store or burn, how much muscle we build or lose, they make our skin look young, attract us to other people, help us sleep, control our energy levels, make us hungry or feel full and they can also make us impulsive, irritable, reactionary, angry, jealous, resentful and a whole lot more.
Generally speaking, we want to be as hormonally sensitive as we possibly can. That does not mean that we are just “hormonal,” as they say and being “sensitive,” to everything around us. It means that our cells, the hormones they use, the glands that make hormones and the rest of the body are all living in harmony and communicating well with ease and without any friction. We want our body to be sensitive to hormones meaning that a very little hormonal message goes a long way and does what we need it to. A hormonally sensitive body is a healthy, happy, good feeling body.
When the cells friction is building and health is being challenged we start to see signs of becoming hormonally resistant. The first place that this can be seen is with insulin, a very powerful hormone that does not play well with others and can throw our whole system out of whack when it shows up on the scene. Insulin makes our stress hormone effects worse, throws off our sex hormones and hi-jacks our metabolism. Early signs of insulin resistance are stubborn weight that won’t come off when you do the things that have worked for you in the past to lose weight, high fasting blood glucose as in over 83 for what I call the pre-pre diabetic state, 100-125 for medical pre-diabetes, and over 125 being type two diabetic. High triglycerides, high fasting blood insulin (over 5), elevated liver enzymes, fatty liver, and carb/sugar addiction symptoms are all just a few of the potential signs of insulin resistance.
To be continued…….
