Stress And Diseases Pt2 1/5 User Manual 4 Humans

good evening i'm dr stan ekberg thank

you so much for coming here

uh this is

user manual for humans part two

and uh 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 feet breathe

these are so fundamental for for your

health that i i think you should know

them

to the point where you can teach them to

someone else that you can save their

life doing that

and

when we talk about 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 the people suffer from and that

people take medication for

how does that actually come about

in the body

so

and you can mark off on 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 or if there's things that you

just want to learn more about

when we talk about health

first we want to find out

and and

define 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 put

health

is when everything is working the way

it's supposed to

and

that is completely different from the

general opinion that health 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 a 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 is 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

so we'll talk more about that

and 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 they provide attachment points

but

they don't take any action and they

don't make any decisions

they're 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 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 happens without you

thinking about it

is handled by your autonomic nervous

system

and

that nervous system has two branches

it's called the sympathetic

which is

fight flight

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 expand 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

and

the 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 have 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 or or adequately

so

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