Category: Makes You Think

This category covers things that relate probably require some reflection and some time to allow your brain to process more completely. It will be the largest category because the aim of this site is to get people to shift their thinking in some way and to create a new “normal” state. It is safe to say that any post that is included in this category will probably present you with a new piece of information, a new way of looking at something, or a different take on what is already considered common sense or common knowledge.

Antiquated Coping Strategies – Smoking

NOTE – I don’t know the person in the image above but her story is available here. I use this image because it is reminiscent of my dad’s last few days and because those last few days were like NOTHING I have ever experienced. Take a look at the Poo bear on the table and the pictures of her loved ones. Read her story and the final words from her husband. I could be her in a few years and the post below outlines what I need to do to stop that from being my future.

I started smoking again. I had the choice to not start but I convinced myself that I DIDN’T have a choice and set-out believing that it was a fine coping strategy.

It was embarrassing to lie to my father about it. “I’m going out to work on something in the workshop” was what I’d say, and I’d do something, but it was really a trip out there to smoke. The lie made him feel better, like I was finally taking ownership of my life and working hard to build the panel business and it allowed me to avoid disappointing him in his last weeks here. He was proud that I had turned my life around after Natalie’s death – stopped smoking, started eating correctly, got back to exercising, became a personal trainer, started teaching cycling classes and effectively stopped doing most of the things that were destructive. I was glad that my dad was happy and once I slipped, and it was evident that he was getting sick, the smoking habit took hold because I didn’t want to stop out of fear of what it might be like. I also didn’t want to rock the boat given his terminal diagnosis.

Now I have quit. I left everything as it was until I was able to deal only with the death of my dad and the impact it has had on my self-awareness. This was a request of my family to just try and keep things normal until you know what you are feeling and are ready to make the changes. Strangely, the thing that actually clued me into the fact that it would be fantastic idea to stop was a realization about my girl friend at the time. She’s an amazing women and I think we both knew that the relationship would be a 2 part thing if it was to last at all. There was not going to be continuity in it, a separation / break-up was going to be absolutely necessary because of WHO I am and where I am in my life. BUT, my time with her was good and I realized that I actually wanted to live for as long as I can. There was something about the relationship with her that helped me realize that you can feel connected to someone and this connection can help you see things about your behavior that aren’t working. I needed to stop for myself, not for her, my dad, for anyone. I tabled the stopping until after my dad died.

I don’t want to die. I want to live forever, floating through the universe with a smile and love in my heart. But I will not live forever, and if I don’t fix my bad habits, I won’t live for much longer.

Below is a list of the positive changes that occur when someone stops smoking. I like this list because there are benchmark to achieve and it tells a story about recovery. The body will heal itself from a lot of damage if you do the things to promote recover, but only if you stop the damage as well.

Last smoke plus …
  • 20 minutes
    		•  Your blood pressure, pulse rate, and the temperature of your hands and feet will all return to normal.
  • 8 hours
    		•  Remaining nicotine in your bloodstream will have fallen to 6.25% of normal peak daily levels, a 93.25% reduction.
  • 12 hours
    		•  Your blood oxygen level will have increased to normal and carbon monoxide levels will have dropped to normal.
  • 24 hours
    		•  Anxieties peak in intensity and within two weeks should return to near pre-cessation levels.
  • 48 hours
    		•  Damaged nerve endings have started to regrow and your sense of smell and taste are beginning to return to normal. Cessation anger and irritability peaks.
  • 72 hours
    		•  Your entire body will test 100% nicotine-free and over 90% of all nicotine metabolites (the chemicals it breaks down into) will now have passed from your body via your urine.  Symptoms of chemical withdrawal have peaked in intensity, including restlessness. The number of cue induced crave episodes experienced during any quitting day will peak for the “average” ex-user. Lung bronchial tubes leading to air sacs (alveoli) are beginning to relax in recovering smokers. Breathing is becoming easier and the lungs functional abilities are starting to increase.
  • 5 – 8 days
    		•  The “average” ex-smoker will encounter an “average” of three cue induced crave episodes per day. Although we may not be “average” and although serious cessation time distortion can make minutes feel like hours, it is unlikely that any single episode will last longer than 3 minutes. Keep a clock handy and time them.
  • 10 days
    		•  10 days – The “average ex-user is down to encountering less than two crave episodes per day, each less than 3 minutes.
  • 10 days to 2 weeks
    		•  Recovery has likely progressed to the point where your addiction is no longer doing the talking. Blood circulation in our gums and teeth are now similar to that of a non-user.
  • 2 to 4 weeks
    		•  Cessation related anger, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, impatience, insomnia, restlessness and depression have ended. If still experiencing any of these symptoms get seen and evaluated by your physician.
  • 21 days
    		•  Brain acetylcholine receptor counts up-regulated in response to nicotine’s presence have now down-regulated and receptor binding has returned to levels seen in the brains of non-smokers.
  • 2 weeks to 3 months
    		•  Your heart attack risk has started to drop. Your lung function is beginning to improve.
  • 3 weeks to 3 months
    		•  Your circulation has substantially improved. Walking has become easier. Your chronic cough, if any, has likely disappeared.
  • 1 to 9 months
    		•  Any smoking related sinus congestion, fatigue or shortness of breath have decreased. Cilia have regrown in your lungs thereby increasing their ability to handle mucus, keep your lungs clean, and reduce infections. Your body’s overall energy has increased.
  • 1 year
    		•  Your excess risk of coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke has dropped to less than half that of a smoker.
  • 5 to 15 years
    		•  Your risk of stroke has declined to that of a non-smoker.
  • 10 years
    		•  Your risk of being diagnosed with lung cancer is between 30% and 50% of that for a continuing smoker (2005 study). Risk of death from lung cancer has declined by almost half if you were an average smoker (one pack per day).  Your risk of pancreatic cancer has declined to that of a never-smoker (2011 study), while risk of cancer of the mouth, throat and esophagus has also declined.
  • 13 years
    		•  Your risk of smoking induced tooth loss has declined to that of a never-smoker (2006 study).
  • 15 years
    		•  Your risk of coronary heart disease is now that of a person who has never smoked.
  • 20 years
    		•  Female excess risk of death from all smoking related causes, including lung disease and cancer, has now reduced to that of a never-smoker (2008 study). Risk of pancreatic cancer reduced to that of a never-smoker (2011 study).

    Establishing My Baseline

    I’ve been making a lot of decisions over the last 2 year that I wouldn’t have made any time before. I needed to, my boat was floating in still water and there wasn’t a wind. Life wasn’t going anywhere I wanted it to take me because I was sitting on my hands waiting for someone to shepherd me towards the experiences I would judge and blame them for exposing me to. Yeah, I knew it wasn’t working so I had the change things up.

    Looking back on the last 24 months it is with a mixed sense of satisfaction and complete disappointment. I’m satisfied because I understand who I am, what I need to be happy, what I do that doesn’t make me happy and I’m closing in on the reason WHY my life is exactly as it is. I’m completely disappointed because the ride has been a lot rougher since I started to get my life moving again. It’s hard to change things, even when you know you have to, it still sucks to go without the things you have grown accustomed to. You’ve normalize them, and while they my not be ideal, things are as they are and we suffer when they change.

    This is life though. It’s always in flux. One is born, one dies, two fall in love, two end their relationship, There is a patterns of beginnings and endings and when you get it right there is a middle. And maybe if you get it really right there isn’t really an ending.

    But with all the beginnings and endings that I’m going through, it should be getting easier at this point and it doesn’t really seem to be. The reason for this is that I don’t really have much of a stable identify to return to or hold on to. As a consequence I tend to view myself as not being okay and look to others for signs that things are good. I’ve said this before though, a bunch of times. The difference now is that I’m actually saying it to people who only engage me as an Adult – they don’t parent anyone other than themselves. And it feels ridiculous to say out loud to them.

    My baseline is something that I haven’t seen in a long time – a little over a year ago was the last time I actually felt like I wasn’t working against the universe and the people in it. I know exactly why the switch flipped and it was because I made a mistake a number of months before that I ignored when I made it. The outcome was an assumption that led me down a number of unusual roads all of which were unworkable because they weren’t the roads that I travel best.

    Now with my dad gone and having the freedom to just collapse, I’m taking the time to disappear for a while and come back when I’m me again. I am okay, other people are okay. I do see this now. I just need to take some time to establish my baseline so I have a point of reference to know if I’m off course. I’m actually really excited about it. There are challenges in the experience as I have been off for a while now. I think it’s time that I got to know the ME other people see and like.

    Goal Oriented Action – A Great Proxy For Confidence

    “You are being so insecure” was what Leesa said when she finally said anything. The timing was conversationally accurate yet a situational non sequitur. What I had been saying was revealing a huge hole in my confidence but what I had just been doing didn’t embody the complete lack of skill that said confidence would help manifest.

    “It doesn’t make any sense to me when I say it out loud. Feels kind of stupid actually.” That was true. I’ve known Leesa for a couple of years and we go climbing a few times a year. She navigated her way through her recent divorce in the same way that most people don’t handle a parking ticket. There are few random movements in my life so I was suddenly getting the feeling that there was something going on under the surface.

    There were a few moments spent listing the things I do well, this interested neither one of us. I KNOW what I do well. This was a game and I was feeling it.

    When someone presents themselves with insecurities we can engage them in three distinct ways – like a parent and try to solve their problem or demand a change, like a child and play with them or hurt them with it, or like an adult and coach them through the issue or establish a boundary so as to not get impacted by the other (ANY interaction between 2 people will be engaged from these POV with each member shifting roles; self talk will also take on these roles).

    Whatever I had said created an Adult observation with a Parent response of “you are being so insecure” for her. My reply was Adult, and in this case it was Adult, but there have been times in the past when I responded to this exact mixed reply with a Child or Parent response. It can be useful in meeting girls because everyone has something that they don’t feel 100% about and, having codependent tendencies the only way I can get someone to do something for me when they don’t want to do it is to have them approach the task as though they were a parent. In this case, I was seeking coaching so we were able to dispense with the Parent / Child roles very quickly.

    Once the interaction became Adult : Adult the information started flowing from her and the conversation took flight. You have to do stuff, everyday, for weeks and months and years. The things you do need to either cultivate your intellect, your emotional intelligence or your physical being. This will begin to manifest itself as a shift in ease at which life seems to flow. This is your spirit healing and growing; the invisible piece of you that others pick-up on as they observe your interactions with the world.

    The truth is, we don’t gain confidence when we are involved in goal oriented action, we lose insecurity. Focusing on the action shifts our consciousness onto the present, which is reflexive but not usually consciously regressive. Going up the wall, I’m not thinking about every fall I ever took, I’m not really thinking about the foot or handhold I just moved from and I’m not thinking about the sales goal for the week. I’m mapping out a route from where I am and where I want to be and I’m determined to close in on my target. When I come off the wall, the focus widens and life begins again.

    Confidence is the knowledge that you will try something and being in the habit of trying.

    When I Died

    The last few weeks have been an existential stew/spew.

    Here’s the thing: for most of my life I have not had a soul – I’m an atheist. Not having a soul and having lived a life with a concept of spirituality that was hard wired so to impulsively think “soul” and just tune out, I haven’t been engaging the world as effectively as a someone who is in balance with the universe and those within it. Obviously….

    I don’t believe in prayer. Seemed kind of unnecessary to do something pointless. It would be to me I guess, but it isn’t to the person doing it. I say this not because those who pray tell me it isn’t pointless, I say it because I believe their prayer serve to cultivate something that is very important in peoples lives. It’s something that has been missing from my life for a very long time.

    I have found a need for a spiritual piece in my life. I have lived an extremely good life, with a great family, great friends, great girl friends, a life with more privilege than 98% of the worlds population yet I don’t feel that way subjectively. My life has been series of temporary experiences most neutral, some great and some bad. But in general waking-up each day is both a blessing and a drag.

    But it isn’t always that way. There have been times of extended bliss, when I exist in a child state with the brain of an adult; when I would play, shameless and with out fighting anything. I was okay and the world was okay. During these times I didn’t actually realize what it was that I was feeling, it just felt right and I floated along knowing what I had to do next, starting it with a smile and a sense of excited anticipation. Thinking about it now, those moments / periods were the times in my life when I was cultivating my spirituality in that my thoughts, feelings, movements and purpose were aligned and I was moving forward with pure intention.

    For a long time I have blurred the lines between religion and spirituality. To foster a sense of each, one need only do the same things – align their thoughts, feelings, movements and purpose and move forward with pure intention. Praying is similar to mediation, particularly when you know the prayers verbatim and trance out while saying them. In each case, the attention is highly focused on something and this will have a very similar impact on brain waves. Going to a church retreat is very similar to going to any social event that has a theme – a Star Trek convention is not a religious experience in the traditional sense, but it has a lot of the characteristics and the same group-think mentality. Both events serve to create a union between many people and allow for the shameless existence for all participants.

    I have always been a spiritual person but I have actively worked against this aspect of my nature because I am an atheist. It has become clear that I do not enjoy a lingering sense of peace due to my lack of attention to fostering a sustainable ME. A strong spirit will continue for a while even without active cultivation. But it needs to grow first, and before that, it needs to be encouraged and allowed to take root.

    Spirituality then is about my relationship with the universe. Relative to the rest of the universe, I’m moving really quickly away from everything. Relative to what is on the earth, there is a very dynamic interaction of everything. The essence of my life, of my spirit, is mostly here on earth. Most of what I actually interact with is contained within my body. Most of the nurturing needs to be spend on aligning my thoughts, feelings, movements with my purpose.

    When I gave-up the notion that I had a soul I died because that washed away most of the objectiveness about spirituality. This prevented me from seeing the benefit that altering my thoughts, feelings and movements will have on creating a unified ME that has the power to continue to exist even when I am not thinking about it.

    “Stop Making Excuses For People”

    My mom was almost yelling it. My ears felt like they went back the way a cats do when you sing to it. I rarely feel a wall of anything other than joy coming from my mom so when the chill hit me I shut my pie hole.

    I thought we had been talking about the way past experiences can manifest themselves in the present and that by understanding ones past relationships of significance you can make a good prediction on future behaviors and get a notion as to why someone may act in particular ways. Valid but basically trivial information to me in every case other than my own life. It’s potentially damaging when it is used to explain away an action that had a negative impact on me personally.

    In the theater of recovery, it’s therapy information. In the theater of a relationship / friendship, it is an excuse for things to remain exactly the same.

    “Okay” was what I said when it was safe to say anything at all. Life can shape people in a particular way but they choose to act as they do. It’s better to leave them alone, stop making excuses for people and let it go.

    Why Losing My 67 Year Old Father Is Only As Bad As Sad

    When Natalie got killed many years ago there wasn’t anything anyone could say or do to make it right or make it feel better. It was going to be unpleasant because there wasn’t much of a silver lining to see. There still isn’t, there never will be because 21 is an awful young age to die for someone who should have come much closer to their life expectancy.

    Some death is like that, unjust and tragic. It’s outside of the natural cycle of things and you do what you can to manage the whole thing. It will remain that bull shit event in the past and you may be able to manufacture a meaning out of it, but you’re just as likely to end up addicted to drugs to numb the pain. The waves of this type of death ripple forward into the future, carried along on impossible “what if” questions.

    Cancer in someone who is almost 70 is not the same thing as dying at the wheel of a drunk driver at 21. Someone dying closer to their life expectancy is at worst unfair. The ripples from the death of a much older person are from the past and they’re good because they are the answers to the “what if” questions. Some think this too clinical, a little Vulcan, unkind or uncaring and I’m good with that. The thing about thoughts on how I should carry my business is that they aren’t of any consequence to the catalyst for in this situation. Cancer controlled what happened.

    I had an honest and complete relationship with my father, I challenged him as a person and as a dad, I am not the same type of thinker as my father so he’s had to learn how to engage me as I have had to learn how to engage him, we always liked and respected each other and while there may have been things that we didn’t like about how the other acted, we cared enough about each other to not really care that much about those things and to actually learn why the other person felt or acted that way. We were not the same but we liked how the other was.

    All of this is to say that my dad was a good guy who loved his family and friends and he had a great relationship with Des, my mom and me.

    As adults we talked about a lot of the things people don’t really chat with their parents about. I asked my dad what it would be like to have a son die – unjust, unfair and something that he’d get past but never over. I asked him what it was like when his dad died – sad, a real existential struggle to piece together the rightness of his father and the wrongness of losing him at 60. I asked my dad what he thought the purpose of life was – I don’t know, I don’t think it has one other than what we give it. Try to have as much fun as you can without hurting others. Why didn’t you focus on making more money as opposed to focusing on delivering what you promise – because you’ll just spend the money and have to live with yourself for not being your best. What mistake did you always make – I didn’t stick at anything long enough to reap the rewards of being really good at it, once I did it, it got boring. What mistake do you always see me making – you feel the need to get into relationships. When you die, what do you want me to do – keep building the panel business, look after your mother, maybe be a little sad, but don’t dwell on things. Life was going to end, it has to. The world doesn’t need that many old people.

    I laugh at the last answer a lot. My dad knew he had his run and that it would end eventually. He was satisfied with it. At the end it was peaceful. A comfortable wind down chatting with the people he cared about, eating great food and maintaining the perspective that his time had come and that it is good to not linger when it does.

    Why Relationships Ruin Me

    About 6 months ago I wrote Relationships Ruin You discussing the growing ease I had accepting some of the truths my father spoke. The post got spammed commented this week and when I reread it sang a slightly different tune to me.

    For some reason it made me think about being in the hospital a few weeks ago. The nurses needed to reposition my dad and the pneumonia had made moving painful. Things were least bad when his body moved as one unit as opposed to bending at the center or twisting around the core. The first time I offered to help I felt clueless. I thought there was a lot I could do wrong, and there is, but for the most part, if you remember that you’re moving a human being you’ll do very little wrong. As the week progressed, all of us got better at it. The goal was to minimize unnecessary movements and this was achieved best when we all worked together on a coordinated solution. For me it seemed natural to treat my dad with the care he always treated me with and pooling resources seemed an effective way to do this.

    I bring this up in this context of why relationships ruin me because there was something in the experience of helping in the hospital that I have felt before in-spite of the fact that I have never lived through anything like it. In fact, there have been very few times in my life that I went without feeling the same sort of thing for longer than a month. I get the feeling any time I provide a particular type of service to people who play a particular role in my life. For a long time I’ve been aware that I like helping people but it wasn’t until the feelings were the same that things lined up.

    I keep damaging my life by NOT treating myself with the full compassion that I am capable of. If I approached making a meal with the same care I took moving my dad it would be a really good meal. The fact that I throw together whatever is easy says something about what I think about how I deserve to be treated; if only to me, there’s a lot of actions that indicate that I’m not worth the trouble. When I’m single I spend more time in the gym. I do it because it feels good and because it makes me look better. When I get into a relationship my gym behavior stops as I shift my attention onto the relationship. Whatever “me” was developing disappears as soon as I have someone else in my life to really care about. Progress is killed by my behavior. Over and over and over again.

    I am capable and only too willing to show others a love that I will rarely bestow upon myself and this is why relationships ruin me.

    The Lost Potential For Social Media Sites

    Facebook can be a lot of fun. It’s stimulating, you’re reading and thinking up things to say, there’s pictures, videos, games and apps. The timeline feature really works with the linear way people think about their life – from beginning to now. The whole thing is well put together to massage a number of human tendencies that keep people logging in. The site learns from your actions and presents you with stuff that may be interesting to you. If their goal is to make the user experience better, they have succeeded. Some of the comments my friends friends make are funny, “liked” and over time more and more of their stuff appears.

    What I’m not sure about though is just how much of the actual information they have that they are giving us. With so many users, there have got to be 100000’s of patterns of behaviour emerging. Liking someones comment does indicate a certain level of interest. Then viewing their profile and  clicking on some of their links will indicate a higher level of interest.

    But what does looking at their profile 4 or 5 times in a month mean? What level of interest does that indicate? Then they become friends, and a few weeks later they are tagged together in a photo with someone who works for a particular bank. The bank person “likes” the photo. 2 weeks later, the wife’s profile of the bank person is checked by one of the 2 people who were tagged in the photo.

    What will the outcome be in 6 months?

    There isn’t enough information there for us to guess, but there is enough data in FB to make a prediction about who will be “friends” and be “liking” the stuff in 6 months. I’d wager some money that one of their data miners would be able to tell us when two people are about to break-up based on their FB actions. And I think the miner would know there was a problem with their relationship well before either one of them knew.

    As interesting as it would be to have a dialogue pop up and say “looks like you are about to experience some relationship trouble – click here to view report or click cancel to keep your head in the sand” it would END FB because being stripped naked by the obviousness of your actions is chilling. We’d like to think that we are holding our cards close and out of sight, but our actions reveal our cards. FB remembers all of your actions so it will be able to identify when you start to repeat a pattern; any pattern.

    It will also be able to compare your pattern of actions of other patterns and be able to make predictions about the future outcome. The message box saying “there’s a lot you need to know about how you are going to interact with your new friend” or “we noticed that you changed your relationship status to say that you were in a relationship with someone who isn’t on the site. based on some of your new friends, “likes” and profiling viewing habits we’d like to ask you to reconsider this recent update” or “you are about to tag yourself in a recent picture with your old boy friend from 3 years ago. based on some of your new friends, profiling viewing habits and you taking a similar action in the past, we’d like to ask you to reconsider this action.”

    It can go on, but given that people tend not to change much overtime, the site could become more and more useful in helping people identify and avoid the unworkable situations they keep putting themselves into. Kind of like an older and wiser friend who tells you what they see but never tells you what to do about it.

    I don’t think FB will take the leap and actually start churning out the information they are mining. There is little doubt that they know they are sitting on a reserve of sociological theory and practical knowledge that will push our understanding of human interaction forward dramatically. But since this information is base on millions of individual case studies, the individuals are not likely going to agree that they want to see it. It’s hard having someone read your mind and tell you want you are doing BEFORE you know why you are doing it or even before you know you are doing something.

    Action, Recovery and Consequence

    As I close in on my 40’s I’m starting to notice a pattern in the world – order continues to form, exist and disintegrate. Philosophically, psychologically, physiologically, in the living and in the inanimate, large and small, matter combines and separates for reasons that are now almost completely understood. Once you understand the science and see the pattern, the mystery is gone and the beauty remains.

    Dealing with human beings (me in particular), the order that constitutes me is my body. It is made up of particles that are governed by rules. It’s a complicated bag of matter so many of the rules we have now are general guidelines based on statistics. It doesn’t make a difference what way you look at the numbers though, the longer something exists in an organized state, the less likely it is to continue to exist in that state. Everything is falling apart….

    Fortunately there is a repair mechanism built into living things to stop them from falling apart and with young healthy humans it will replace most of the cells of the body within 3 months and many within hours. This is an enormous undertaking – manufacturing most of the component pieces that make-up 1 human being and ordering them to be an almost exact copy in one fiscal quarter. The body gets it right over and over and over again until it doesn’t. Then it sets out to keep making itself over and over again while attempting to not write-in the mistake.

    Eventually something breaks down or the error is replicated and we get a disease or suffer ill health. If this isn’t addressed, the body will quickly disintegrate into the less-ordered state, death. Once dead, the particles that make up the body break down and find their way back into the environment to become part of something else, eventually.

    There is a relationship between what you bring into your body, what it has to recover from, and the speed of the decline – a toxic internal environment will impair or inhibit recovery / repair and can disrupt accurate cell replication. You can increase the toxicity of the body by bringing in toxins, allowing toxins to build-up and by causing too much damage for the body to completely recovery. Smoking and drinking are obvious stressors with a fairly well established consequences. Dehydration and sleep deprivation are known to impair normal functioning as acute events. Getting a concussion during a football game may require a few weeks or a lifetime to recover from. As a general rule though, the younger and healthier you are, the greater your potential to recover from the stresses of life. Young living things tend to have more resiliency when it comes to maintaining high levels of vitality. There are fewer consequences to their actions because they can recover more completely.

    EVERYTHING we do has consequences. While it is unlikely that one single action will cause disease the battle to maintain order is a war of attrition. Each reaction takes a toll. Every calorie too much or too few does damage to the body that must be repaired. Every chemical reaction can increase the oxidative stress and damage the cells – too much exercise, not enough sleep, holding tension in muscles because they don’t relax, poor posture, constipation, uncomfortable working positions,….

    Treating your blood like the sewer at a chemical factory will also have big consequences on your ability to recover from living life.

    The body evolved to maintain a fairly tight range of environmental conditions that promote optimal vitality and can handle most acute deviations outside of this range that result from us ingesting something. But there is a cost to homeostasis both in terms of oxidative stress and the long term effectiveness of the mechanisms used to restore the optimal range. Insulin and cortisol are important for regulating blood sugar. They are two chemicals that the body produces naturally but which have a toxic effect on the body in acute high doses or chronically elevated levels. Too much insulin over time will increase insulin resistance and impairs the body’s ability to regulate sugar (associated with obesity and a slue of other health issues). This leads to more oxidative stress and the cycle continues to worsen. Prolonged elevated levels of cortisol destroys tissue, creates inflammation and increases oxidative stress. People who don’t eat enough or who exercise too much tend to have higher levels of cortisol

    These two chemicals are mentioned because they are destructive and because our actions dictate when they will be released. Insulin needs sugar. Without an increase in blood sugar, the body will not need to release insulin. We get sugar from the food we eat. If we eat less sugar, we can improve our sensitivity and recover some of the lost homeostatic functioning. Cortisol is released in response to stress; any type of stress – getting scared, thinking about something bad, getting hurt, not getting enough sleep, not going to the bathroom regularly, having too busy a work schedule, children, relationships, your sex life / lack of one, going shopping, ….. doing ANYTHING will create some stress. The issue begins when there is no escape and recovery from the stress and the cortisol the body releases. Consider it like low grade adrenaline – it gets the body going, but it damages the body a little bit each time it is released. If this damage is not repaired before the next stressor, the body grows weaker. This wear and tear begins to compromise function leading to disease. Getting away from stress can be a little tougher than not eating junk food for 5 days, but most of the things that cause us stress usually have very simple solutions.

    The statistical story says there’s a relationship between the amount of pollution we bring into our bodies and the occurrence of disease. Every action has consequences and a need to recover. We DO have control over a lot of the internal environment so we do play a big hand in maximizing our vitality. Our bodies deal with our choices.