Stress And Disease Connection - User Manual For Humans S1 E02 - Dr Ekberg

good evening I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg thank you so much for coming here this is user

manual for humans part two and we had part one last week we'll do a little bit

of review we'll do that every time because there's some fundamentals and if

you recognize them then it's just your opportunity to learn it even better some

of these basic concepts such as sympathetic parasympathetic which is

fight flight and feed breed these are so fundamental for your health that I think

you should know them to the point where you can teach them to someone else that

you can save their life to doing that if we started talking about stress and

today we'll talk specifically about how what is the link between stress and

diseases all the stuff that people complain about and that people suffer

from and that people take medication for how does that actually come about in the

body and you can mark off on your little outline there if there's something that

you specifically would like to improve if it's pain weight blood pressure

cholesterol diabetes of course there's things that you just

want to learn more about when we talk about health first we want to find out

and and and be fine and know that we know what health is because most people

say hand-raise how many people want to be healthy good what is health we want

it but what is it so simply but health is when everything is working the way

it's supposed to and that is completely different from the general opinion that

is simply when you don't have a disease if you go to the hospital and they say

well do you feel healthy or whatever you get a clean bill of health that just

means you don't have any disease you don't have a symptom well you can have a

heart attack tomorrow but according to their definition if you don't have a

symptom today you're still healthy well function which we talked about here is a

much better way of defining health health this when everything is working

another way of saying that is because your brain and nervous system regulates

everything about your body and everything about your experience another

way of expressing health is to say when your nervous system can receive and

appropriately process all information in your environment and that's the key

appropriate in order to understand the body we need to figure out when

something isn't working in the body would you agree that if you have pain

that there's something that's not working that if you have a symptom

there's something that's not working well what is it that isn't working if we

think of the body as having three levels of function the lowest level is passive

tissue that's bone cartilage fluids blood fat tissue all those tissues they

give the body structure that provide attachment points but they don't take

any action and they don't make any decisions their passive tissue they're

important but they don't do anything next level up is active tissue and

that's muscle muscle which includes your heart and your digestive tract and your

blood vessels they take all the action they perform all action but they still

don't make any decisions the next level up is brain and nervous system that's

regulatory tissue and that's where all the decisions are made so if we truly

understand this hierarchy of passive active and regulating tissue then we

understand that the brain and nervous system is where all the function is and

it's where all problems are so if there's something in your body if you

have a symptom there's something in your brain that isn't working it's the only

place it's the source of the problem make sense now we know those functions

now we're going to talk about the autonomic nervous system so everything

in your body that has without you thinking about it is handled

by the autonomic nervous system and that nervous system has two branches it's

called the sympathetic which is five flights sympathetic and stress both

starts with an S so you can help remember and the other branch is

parasympathetic or feed breed one helps your body defend itself so whenever your

body needs additional resources when it needs to expend energy for physical

effort that's called defense so if there's a grizzly bear that shows up

then your body wants to be in a state of emergency you want to allocate resources

so that you can defend yourself and save your life parasympathetic is about

health it says when the danger is over when the grizzly bear is gone now we can

allocate resources inwards to digest food and send energy to our immune

system and our reproductive systems what we really have to understand as you see

in this in the slide there is a seesaw there's there's a balance beam that

means that when one side increases the other side decreases always and this is

so key and so fundamental to understand because if one side is defense and one

side is health that means we can't do both at the same time your body is

always making a choice between the two so let's see a show of hands between

defense or health which one is more important who says defense is more

important and who says health is more important and how many people are on the

fence all right we got we got one of everything so it's kind of a trick

question because both are absolutely essential but they're essential at

different times the defense is about surviving this moment health is about

surviving till next year so the hierarchy the priority in the body is

defense sympathetic always always comes first always because if you don't

survive the next few seconds there's not much point to anything else right and it

makes a lot of sense if you're if you're right in the middle of the battle you

don't sit down to have lunch right and so the body that's the body's priority

as well and that's so important to understand because it means whenever we

have a sympathetic response whenever we have a stress response

we cannot heal at the same time at least not completely worth or adequately what

this means is that there are physiological changes in the body when

we switch in the system from one to the other and we want to start thinking this

as resource allocation how do you allocate resources in the body what

carries the resources in the body well it's the blood right blood carries

oxygen and glucose and minerals and nutrients and it carries the waste

products out that's the transportation system of the body so just like you're

driving your car and you want to speed up you give the

engine more gas you wrap it up you want to give a body part more energy you send

it more blood okay it's as simple as that

so resource allocation is simply where do we send the blood in a given

situation so when we have a stress response we want to send the blood to

the places that can save our lives and when we have a parasympathetic response

where the danger is over then we can send the body to the digestive organs to

heal and get healthy and procreate and regenerate makes this just a little

cartoon and it's one of my favorites glass Bergen it has a lot of funny stuff

about health lady says don't tell me to improve my diet I ate a carrot once and

nothing happened and I like this guy because he he really he perceives the

the flaws and the weaknesses in humans and in in the system but that's how a

lot of people think they they don't understand that it's about function and

it takes time to build a system so we expect something to do something we take

a pill because we wanted to do something we take supplements to do something

that's not how it works we take something if we need it if we

need something and we provide it we're better off if we take something and we

didn't need it it makes no difference it's not supposed to do anything all

right so now we're moving into the that was

pretty much for you so now we're going to spend a good amount of time on the

neck three slides seven eight and nine and

this is where we're going to show you so you will get a whole lot smarter than

98% of the doctors out there because they will tell you that we don't know

where these diseases come from they'll say the cause is unknown and I'm going

to show you exactly where they come from it's not a mystery it is a mystery if

you're looking in the physical tissue for this for their cause but it's not a

mystery if you start looking and function and understand how the body

works and it's all based on this sympathetic versus parasympathetic

accounts for 99% of all the diseases so let's just read through some of the

things here high blood pressure high cholesterol

those are both relate to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks Raynaud's

syndrome that's a lot of women especially have cold hands and they have

cold hands to the point where their fingers get white and they they're

almost hurt neck pain headaches diabetes constipation blood clots obesity

infertility miscarriages erectile dysfunction digestive problems ulcers

allergies autoimmune diseases rheumatoid arthritis and cancer we got a pretty

good coverage with that list okay now let's look next line we're going to go

back and we're going to tie this together so don't worry about missing

stuff and there may be some other drugs here but I just kind of went off a top

10 list just to get some examples and there's simba statin it's a

cholesterol-lowering it's levothyroxine which is thyroid lisinopril blood

pressure hydrochlorothiazide or blood pressure and fluid retention atenolol

blood pressure metropole all stuck and in a year or

something blood pressure and blood platypi blood pressure OMA pres old

ulcers and GERD which is gastroesophageal reflux disease as they

call it metformin type-2 diabetes furosemide

which is diuretic and then there's an array of over-the-counter medication

which are primarily for cold and cough remedies allergy relief products

antacids and laxatives do you see a pretty good fit between the drugs and

the problems of abhava not not complete but there's like better than 50 probably

80% correlation there and now let's look at the mystery that they're telling us

that we don't know where these things come from well in the stress response

when when we have a sympathetic response when the grizzly bear comes charging

what happens in your body there's going to be on the left side of the next

diagram that's called the initial adaptive stress response so what happens

is your adrenaline and your cortisol goes up your glucose your blood sugar

goes up as a result of cortisol you increase your energy mobilization you

increase your cute cognition which is your alertness your mental powers if you

will for that situation you become clearer you increase your pain tolerance

you increase blood clotting factors you increase your blood pressure you

increase your skin conductance and you increase your brain activity on the beta

wave which is the high frequency okay so let's go back and talk and see why

does this happen well here's the grizzly bear

do you think adrenaline is - it is a good idea to get you that burst of

energy probably so yeah that sounds life-saving cortisol and in the

following minute cortisol is released to increase blood sugar sounds like a good

idea because blood sugar is is the energy for you to sustain the fight and

in order for you to to get that blood sugar you also decrease your sensitivity

to insulin you become insulin resistant okay we'll just kind of put that out

there for now energy immobilization obviously that

goes with the adrenaline cognition you want to be bright and alert you want to

evaluate your options do you want to see where you can get away do I climb a tree

do I grab a clock what do I do pain tolerance increase pain tolerance

that also seems like a good idea you don't want to worry about every little a

campaign you want to get out of there so that becomes second hand blood

clotting factor why why would you want a blood clotting factor well what if you

run through some thorny bushes what if the bear gets a few scratches in on you

you want to be able to stop that bleeding quickly and and that's what

that's what the blood clotting factor the stress response best let me add one

thing to that part of the blood clotting process is cholesterol LDL cholesterol

because the LDL cholesterol takes cholesterol out to the tissues and into

the blood so that you can close up the wound quicker and so that you can

rebuild cell membranes quicker to repair the damage your cell membrane is 13

percent cholesterol so you need a lot of cholesterol to repair damaged tissue so

this is all part of the stress response obviously your blood pressure goes

so you can squeeze the blood out into the body parts that need it quicker skin

conductance that's that's the moisture on your skin

okay people with sweaty hands why does that go up well if you have dry hands

and you try to grab a club you might slip but if you're a little bit moist

and sticky now that you get a really good grip on that club and that tree

branch so it increases your chances of survival all these things have been

built into your body to increase your chance of survival right so let's look

let's go further here we have a decrease in digestion

okay well why would we want that digestion is good right but it's not

gonna save you against the bare your stomach acid is not gonna unless you

throw up on the bear but really for the most part that that digestive process

isn't gonna help so let's put those processes on the back burner and focus

on saving our life with the bear so that's what drives this whole system

sexuality well sexual function or erections or ovulation they're not gonna

do much for the bear we assume right so they're gonna be they're gonna be turned

off they're gonna be a lower priority while we have a stress response

reproductive hormones the female is not going to say that well you know grizzly

bears here I don't think I want to reproduce right now so the body hasn't

figured out growth and healing is not it's not a priority and extremity

temperature down so your hands get cold well that's

just kind of a byproduct of vasoconstriction when you raise blood

pressure and you can streak the blood vessels they the fingers the skin in the

fingers that's just not a high priority warm warm skin isn't going to do much

for you so that blood is needed elsewhere

and so all these things that happen there indirect immediate result of the

stress response so let's go back up and look at health issues high blood

pressure while we get that one accounted for that's pretty plain high cholesterol

we've got that one accounted for Raynaud's syndrome cold hands and

fingers yeah neck pain not so totally obvious except

that when we have a stress response we increase muscle tension because we

wanted that increases our readiness in our alertness we can get out of there

quickly so but if we have that neck if we have

those muscles tense for a long long time when there's no bear around well we're

probably going to get some neck pain and quite possibly some headaches as well

diabetes we cover that because the court is all will increase blood sugar glucose

and it will it will increase your insulin resistance it will decrease your

sensitivity to insulin which is the first step toward diabetes constipation

okay we sell all these laxatives and constipation just says well you know I'm

not gonna expend energy moving my gut when there's a grizzly bear blood clots

well that comes from the blood clotting factor your blood is a little bit

thicker than it should be so so that you could stop bleeding if you had

see obesity this is a separate seminar altogether but just real quick that the

obesity comes from when the cortisol raises your blood sugar because your

body thinks there's a fight here I'm gonna have to expand energy so you raise

the blood sugar but if there is no actual fight if there's no actual

grizzly-bear but only a perceived danger then that blood sugar is going to get

converted into storage and the only thing we can store in amount in any

large amount is that so if we constantly have a lot of cortisol then a lot of

that blood sugar is just going to turn right around to fat and that's why

people get bloated and overweight when they're on when they're on what's called

corticosteroids for any length of time

infertility we get that one counted four miscarriages we get that one account

accounted for erectile dysfunction digestive problems ulcers let's talk

about ulcers just a little bit do you know what actually causes ulcers the

bacteria exactly for the longest time they just looked at the stomach and they

said well it hurts but I have more stomach acids so the stomach acid must

be the problem and therefore ulcers are caused by stomach acids then this guy

came around and found that it was an actual bacterium that it lives in your

gut and if there's an overgrowth of this bacterium it eats away at the lining of

the stomach and you get an ulcer but this bacterium is very sensitive to acid

so the ulcer is not caused by too much acid it is caused by not enough

so when you have a functional system when you have your parasympathetics and

your digestion functions you make more stomach acid that keeps this bacterium

under control and you don't develop ulcers and they heal up the problem is

that they look at it the wrong way so they say well it's the stomach acid

hurts so we'll give you something to reduce the stomach acid even further so

they're making the problem even worse well now you don't have the pain from

the ulcer but you can't digest food your also doesn't necessarily heal you just

don't have the pain but now you're getting all sorts of problems down the

road because you're not absorbing nutrients from your food allergies they

have to do with an imbalanced on imbalanced immune system that's a

separate takes a little bit long to go into and all of the immune diseases

rheumatoid arthritis and cancer these are all immune system functions okay

what happens with when you have a stress response you shut down your

parasympathetic response right your parasympathetics is what runs your

immune system so anytime that you have a stress response you shut down your

immune system

how many students get sick around finals time do you have an increase of colds

and flus yes okay right there you have all these this evidence right in front

of you and all you have to understand is what the sympathetic and the

parasympathetic do in your body it accounts for everything that happens

okay so all of these drugs would be unnecessary if people learn to balance

their sympathetics and their parasympathetics so now let's just look

at the the second half of number nine there we covered what happens initially

because when the grizzly bear is around that's an appropriate response

that's an adaptive stress response that's something we want to happen but

if this goes on for a long long time what happens then and that's the problem

because your body only has one of stress response and it doesn't matter if it's a

grizzly bear or if it's a pile of bills or rude people or gas prices or bad news

on TV anything that makes you feel tense or uneasy or that puts you in defense

like you're trying to attack something even if it's just imaginary it will

trigger the same exact stress response but to a lesser degree but whereas the

bear eventually you either he eats you or you or he goes home these everyday

stressors they never go away there with you you wake up with them you add to

them during your day you go to bed with them and you wake up the next day and

they're still there so that's why it's so important to understand this stuff

and to learn how to adapt a lifestyle where you want

your stress a little bit better so what happens when we have a prolonged stress

now instead of adaptive we have a mal adaptive stress response so now you have

a decreased immune response your immune system doesn't work anymore whereas

before you had an increase temporary increase in alertness now you have a

decrease in memory and learning you have a decrease in reproductive function and

here's a big one whereas before you had an increase in pain tolerance because

that helps you survive the grizzly bear over time this breaks down and you have

a decreased pain tolerance with chronic stress this is a huge factor in why so

many people are experiencing pain for no other reason there's no organic there's

no real cause for the pain except their their sympathetic and parasympathetic or

miswired so they perceive pain because they have a reduced stress pain

tolerance also skin conductance this isn't necessarily life-threatening but

it's worth noticing in an acute stress response your skin conductance goes up

but with a chronic stress response you kind of wear out that response

it says I'm tired I'm not going to respond anymore to get chronically dry

hands

so let's look at the rest of it we get an increase with insulin resistance and

therefore weight we get an increase in fatigue we get an increase in chronic

blood pressure called hypertension and this is the big one

it's the biggest-selling medication you see half the list of the popular drugs

are blood pressure medication and in the medical books it is called essential

hypertension that means they don't know where it comes from

and if you read the textbook it's right there this increases blood pressure that

is the cause but because they can't find a physical molecule that they can pin it

on they say it's unknown okay it really

beats me but we have increase in respiratory problems we have an increase

in opportunistic infections because of the reduced immune response we have an

increase in bone decalcification that's osteoporosis we have an increase in

autoimmune disorders psoriatic arthritis rheumatoid arthritis we have an increase

in strokes and cardiovascular disease and we have an increase in digestive

ailments so do you see how all of these these three slides how perfectly and

exactly they fit together and how that there it really is no

disease out there that is not a stress problem they they have officially

recognized that ninety-five percent of all doctors visits are stress-related

I think that's an understatement I think the anything that's not an acute

trauma like a car accident or a broken bone or a gunshot or a knife wound those

those are traumas I think everything else is stress absolutely everything

there may be an exception here or there but so all of these mysteries know that

when you read the magazines and the journals and they say well we don't know

what causes it we don't know well now you know it's right there and all you

have it's in this is not unknown it's not a secret it's in it's in the

introductory textbook for medical physiology

it's just that nobody applies it because and the reason we don't apply it is that

we are we're so biased we're so hypnotized in believing that

the physical mass of our world is the most real one we don't believe in things

we can't see and we can't see function it's harder to quantify function than

then two inches of finger or a pound of weight those are very easy to quantify

and and that's why we're stuck in in this erroneous model of the body where

it's all a machine with different parts that we can manipulate it's all about

function it's all about brain and how the brain allocates resources in our

body based on the situation we're in when there's a grizzly bear that's an

appropriate response when there is no grizzly bear it's an inappropriate

response that accounts for 99 percent of medical bills very good any questions on

that so far getting it all covered now let's just

wrap up and talk about what do we do about this so everything in your body

that isn't working is a habit that's gotten stuck everything that you've

never learned every skill every pattern every belief that you have is a

neurological pattern it is something that you receive a certain stimulus

you're like a Pavlov's dog you just initiate that pattern you kick it off

and it runs automatically that's where all of our reactions and virtually all

of our behavior comes from so whatever is working or whatever isn't working is

a neurological pattern so the first thing that we need to do to change is to

interrupt that pattern we just there are many many ways of doing that but we just

need to interrupt it one of the absolute most effective ways is the chiropractic

adjustment and we can show you the research we can show you the

neurophysiology that the adjustment interrupts that pattern that is what he

does you can do this with many different ways you can change your thoughts you

can change your belief system you can start meditating you can exercise the

problem is that it takes a lot of growth and most of us for most of us is going

to take years or decades to get to that point where we can change them on our

own so in the mean time we can get it kick-started by it by getting adjusted

now we've interrupted the pattern number two we need to restore balance in the

nervous system so how does imbalance develop where does it come from well

let's say that first of all every cell in your body needs food and stimulation

it's called use-it-or-lose-it so how do you stimulate the brain cell you send an

electrical signal the brain is designed to process electrical signals so in

order to stimulate and use the brain you send an electrical signal okay you

stimulate a muscle cell by putting tension on it because that's what it's

designed for you stimulate a bone cell by putting weight on it in a field of

gravity because that's its purpose so how do you send electrical signals to

the brain is you fire off receptors receptors are little things that sit all

over your body and inside the joints and every millimeter of tissue has receptors

that convert signals and movement and things in your environment into

electricity so that your brain can process it so where does imbalance come

from well if there is an imbalance in the way that signals come into your

system if there's more signals coming in on the right side of the body than the

left side then the left side one side is going to get more used than the other

and that you will develop an imbalance just like a tennis player is going to

have a bigger stronger arm on the one he holds the racket so the reverse holds

true if you don't use something it's gonna get weaker so if you put if you

break your arm and put it in a cast then that muscles gonna atrophy and the

pathway to the brain is going to get used less and that area in the brain

that receives that information is going to get weaker just like that arm just

like that muscle does so let's say that you sprain an ankle and you limp around

for a couple of weeks and then the fields all better and you don't think

about it but during that those two weeks you change your gait so now you're

pushing off one percent less with that leg just because you develop that habit

well that's an imbalance that means there's less pressure there's less

signals being sent on that sigh so your brain develops an imbalance

so how many things do you think have happened in your life where you've had

the risk or chance of of setting up an imbalance you've probably had something

every week of your life mm-hmm all right and we need to understand this is where

imbalances come from and the long-term effect of weekend weekend brain function

is called aging and things like Alzheimer's and what's the other big one

Parkinson and so forth they're just areas in your brain that get too weak to

function anymore and they just haven't been stimulated so that's where the

imbalance comes from how do you rebuild the balance chiropractic exercise

breathing exercises you send an increased and different kind of signal

to the brain that's how you're rebuilding third rebuild strength and

stability in the nervous system that kind of goes with with number two

chiropractic and exercise the problem with exercise though is that

if you have an imbalance between left and right and you go and workout you're

going to maintain that imbalance you're going to increase both sides but the

imbalance is still there that's the strength and the uniqueness about

chiropractic is when we find a leg length difference when we find a weak

muscle when we find something that isn't working and we make it work

we have helped restore that balance between left and right

all chiropractic techniques are built in some way around the difference between

left and right and when we can even something out

we have evened out the brain balance then you go and exercise and stretch and

do yoga and you amplify the effect and you activate those pathways

so the last one is reduced stress since we know that the stress is what

interferes with a system in the first place now that we have rebuilt the

strength and the balance in the system we need to reduce the stress and how do

you do that chiropractic exercise and we start slowly and gradually and surely to

cultivate some inner peace we there's many different ways of doing that

some people praise and people go to church some people go out in nature some

people pet their dogs it all works okay but we need to do

something consistently to to increase our ability to feel good all right now

we have restored health what is required to maintain it so if you have a plant

and it's wilting what's the first thing that you need to

give it water amen so you feed it you give it some water and it's still not

looking at me what's the next thing that you try

take it out of the closet give it some sunlight yeah and so you give it water

and you give it sunlight and it's still not happy what what do you do exactly

it has to have healthy soil it needs nutrients and not too many toxins so you

can ask your five-year-old what it takes to raise a plant that's gonna tell you

you need soil you need water you need sunlight and then let's let's turn the

question around a little bit and let's say that you try 1 million times to

raise a healthy plant but you only give it two out of those three to give it so

and water but no sunlight you give it Saul and sunlight with no water and so

forth you try a million times how many healthy plants are you gonna end up with

zero that's what required means if it is

required you have to have it okay if there are three requirements you can

never ever get away with two okay so now the good question that we're interested

in is what do humans need what is required for humans and we basically

have nutritional physical and emotional requirements we need good food we need

movement and we need to feel good so simply put eat well move well

well now these are requirements so how how many times are we going to be

successful trying to achieve optimal health with two out of three can't

happen okay so your system is designed for food it is designed for movement it

is designed to feel good you cannot achieve often of health

if you don't do all three of those movement is not optional it isn't okay

that is about all we're gonna cover for today so just to end up I'll ask you to

think about if you enjoyed if you got something out of tonight if you learn

something that you think maybe someone else need to hear then please put down

some names of some people that you care about and feel free to invite them next

time thank you