Podcast #2
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[00:00:00] What does being well mean? What does it look like when someone is healthy or, well, some words seem so apparent in their meanings and definitions that we never really stop to think about them and the way that we maybe should. I think health is one of those words we take for granted when we say someone's healthy, that everybody knows what that means.
Often when we reference someone being healthy, we're thinking specifically of an absence of outwardly visible symptoms. And sometimes we also mean symptoms that are invisible to the outside observer. Like in the case of something like high blood pressure, someone who suffers from migraine headaches. And usually when we think of someone being healthy, we also often assume that the person is autonomous and able to have control over their own body.
But [00:01:00] does someone not having outward symptoms like a fever or a runny nose or a rash on their skin and having no blood tests or other diagnostic testing being positive for disease, and the fact that they're able to move and control their own body, does that automatically mean the person is healthy? I think that we need to look at things like physical symptoms.
Psychological or behavioral signs and symptoms or adaptive responses in the way we move our physical bodies. An example of this could be a 3-year-old who only ever walks on their toes. I think we need to look at these things through a different lens. Let me use an example. When we have young children in that incredibly fun phase, we all know and love where they're about two or three years old and they're starting to develop an understanding of their own autonomy, [00:02:00] and they're trying to figure out the borders and the boundaries of where they control their own lives, something that is vital to healthy neurologic development.
Is it more healthy to have a child who pushes against the rules and authority in order to find those edges and to better understand themselves as a sovereign being separate from their parents, or to have a child who never does any of those things and is quick to follow orders and requests? There's definitely one of those children who's easier to live with and to parent.
But is that the same as the one that is the most healthy? It's the same idea when your child wakes up with a fever and a runny nose that tells you that their immune system is trying to expel, uh, viral or bacterial infection through excess mucus and killing the intruder with the fever. [00:03:00] This is the most correct expression of health for the body.
Taking those circumstances into account. Giving them something to suppress those symptoms would make them look better. And it would feel better to the child, of course, but it would be less healthy. And if we can change our lens slightly and look at our definition of health. It may change the way we look at and respect that the body's main job is to adapt to its environment and protect the organism in the best way that it knows how in order for the person to survive.
And if you take a minute to think deeper about. What's happening underneath the surface? That's always a good idea because we've been so trained to think that all people at all times should feel as comfortable as possible, [00:04:00] and sometimes that costs the body dearly from being able to protect, and adapt to its environment.
And the environments that we find ourselves in these days are not always created to promote health in human beings. That makes it all the more challenging. Whoever decided that the human body should be as comfortable as possible all the time, forgot that a threat to our health, and ourselves is supposed to cause dis-ease.
It's supposed to feel bad. So we get out of that environment that isn't good for us, not stay in that environment, but feel less uneasy about it. That is counterproductive to overall health and survival. I was at a lecture about 25 years ago. I'm dating myself by telling you how long ago it was [00:05:00] with a chiropractor who I respect and admire Dr.
James Chestnut. And he gave an example of this that I thought was brilliant, and I have probably told thousands of patients this story over the years, so I'm going to give him credit, but I'm gonna tell you the story. Imagine if each of us at birth was placed out in a very big swimming pool with those arm floaties on our arms that kids wear before they can swim, and a backpack on our backs from birth.
And in the beginning of our lives, we're just out there in the pool with our floaties and our backpack. But as time passes, the cumulative effects of the stressors that we face in our everyday lives, physical, chemical, and emotional stressors are like rocks that are getting put into our backpacks out there in the pool, some of the rocks are bigger and heavier, and some of them are smaller.[00:06:00]
And we can remove rocks from the backpack by doing things that are good for our health and help us to better cope with physical, emotional, and chemical stressors. And that is lightening the load of the backpack. And there are things we can do to avoid any rocks going into the backpack at all. And those things are obviously really good Also.
And so our total health at any given time is determined by the amount of rocks we have in our backpack. And so if we haven't done a great job at removing the rocks or avoiding them altogether, we end up out there in the pool with a really heavy backpack weighing us down, and the floaties on our arms are helping us.
To stay above the water, but they can't really weigh up for a bunch of heavy rocks, right? So eventually we start sinking a little bit. Our faces get a little bit closer to the edge of [00:07:00] the water. We aren't as high up as we were. It's getting tiring to keep ourselves afloat with that heavy backpack. The effects of the stressors in our lives, the late nights with too little sleep, too much sugar, not moving our bodies enough, too little water, not enough nutrient dense foods in our diet.
Tough relationships or circumstances in our lives, and imbalance in how much we work versus how much we play. It's a pretty long, long list of things that contribute to our health, like rocks in a backpack, wood. And they start to push us so far down that now the water is right underneath our noses. Now we're stressed out.
Our blood pressure's increased. We aren't sleeping very well at night. We're worried all the time about how hard everything feels trying to stay just above the water there all the time. We aren't digesting our food very [00:08:00] well. We're in a bad mood most of the time. We often feel depressed. So we go to the doctor and we tell them how we're feeling, and after checking blood pressure and maybe taking some blood work, we leave there with blood pressure, medication and anti-anxiety pills, and something that can help us sleep.
And the point of the story is that the only normal response that the body could possibly have. To having a backpack full of rocks and water going up your nose half the time is to not be able to sleep and to feel anxious and be depressed, and to have high blood pressure. Anything else would be insane and not working.
To keep the human body alive, it's supposed to tell us when we're off the path that leads us to creating optimal health in human beings. That's its job. [00:09:00] And you can decide that something to help you sleep may make you better able to handle the situation while you're trying to figure out how to get the rocks out of your backpack.
That can be a good decision. But sleeping while you have a backpack full of rocks that is making it so the water is going up your nose is not a good long-term strategy for better health. And I think this story does such a great job of illustrating how crazy it can actually be sometimes to medicate for things that are the body's way of trying to alert us to danger in our environment without ever investigating the environment.
If kids are having a really hard time concentrating in school, for example, it would be a good idea to see. Whether there is something in their environment that can be changed to help them achieve more focus and have them concentrate better. And if a child's [00:10:00] having a hard time sleeping, looking at whether they have an optimal environment for sleep and are not causing an overstimulation of their brain before bedtime would be a really good thing to investigate.
And since those questions aren't always getting asked from our healthcare providers, we need to be asking them ourselves and finding healthcare providers who do ask them, in my opinion, and also readjusting our lens to see symptoms more as a message that something's off in the body and we need to investigate the environment for physical, chemical, or emotional stressors to see if we can find out why.
To look at these symptoms as a messenger or a clue about something that has gotten us off the path that we need to be on in order to feel and express more optimal health [00:11:00] and health. Truly sometimes is a lot of trial and error. But we get better at it the more we do it, and we also learn a lot from each other by sharing information about what works to help our families thrive.
I hope that this has been helpful and I look forward to the next time. Until then, be well.
