Stress And Health - User Manual For Humans S1 E01 - Dr Ekberg

this is the first in a series and I've told the most of it already so with

about the ideas and we'll skip that but basically what I've noticed over the

years is that we buy a car we get a user manual to buy a microwave oven there's a

user manual they buy a computer there's a user manual no one ever gave you a

user manual for the human body and even though we go to school and even though

we learn all these things we spent thousands of hours at school to learn

about math and science and historical dates and precedents and nobody ever

teaches us about how we function and really that's the most important thing

that there is so this is a user manual for humans part one and we'll see how

far the series goes and we'll start off with some basic concepts and then we'll

expand into personal growth things and eventually but when it comes to to

health and stress you can just check off for yourself you can share with with

with us but what are some things that you are interested in in changing

improving about your health pain weight strength energy well-being clarity focus

whatever once we talk about the body we want to start thinking about it

differently so rather than thinking about the body as a as a physical

machine that we take over to the hospital we bring them the machine and

they check it out and tell us what's wrong with it we want to start thinking

of that body as as hardware and software it's a whole ecosystem

so would you all agree that whatever it is that you checked off that you want to

improve or whatever it is that they're wrong with with with your quality or the

function would you agree that there's something that isn't working right does

that make sense and if that something was working right then you wouldn't have

a problem that makes sense too so then the next question is what what is it

that isn't working right what what level of function what part is it that isn't

doing its job so we need to start thinking of the body in levels of

function and the lowest level is passing tissue that's the bones and the

cartilage fat tissue blood connective tissue it's all the stuff that if you go

to the hospital and they run a diagnostic test that's what they measure

they take an x-ray they see what happens with your bones they take a blood test

they see what sort of chemicals which kind of molecules which physical

particles are in that blood test they're measuring passive tissue which really

has nothing to do with function it's an effect of something else the next level

up is active tissue and active tissue is muscle muscle is the tissue that can

change shape and performs all the function in the body so

when you move a limb that's a muscle when your heart beats that's a muscle

when your blood pressure changes that's a muscle in the blood vessel that

constricts so the the passive tissue is a tertiary affect the active tissue the

muscle is secondary but the primary function in the body is the nervous

system the brain and the nervous system that regulates all function so once we

truly understand this this hierarchy we know that it doesn't matter if you have

an ulcer or you have a headache or you have a neck pain or if you're can't

digest food whatever it is that's going on it is not the problem on the body

part because the body part is only acting on the regulation from the brain

okay so whatever the issue is there is an

imbalance in the brain and the only way that we can ever change it is if we

change something about the brain something about the way that the brain

perceives it so that's why we we measure that in this office and that's why we

use that as the yardstick to know when we're making progress

and and when we're done health what is health we've already touched on that

that's when everything is working the way it should and another way of saying

that is it's when your nervous system can process and coordinate all the

information so you have a hundred trillion cells in

your body every little cell is a little machine a little miracle machine that

can do all of the wonderful things that you can do it can process oxygen and

nutrients it can make your proteins that have has respiration and as excretion it

does all these incredible things if you put it in a solution it will stay alive

for forever basically and all of these cells are working in your best interest

but they can only work if they work together and the nervous system is what

helps them talk to each other so that you can coordinate the effort to keep

you alive against the the world out there in the world out there

so we have this miraculous body mind it is self-healing self-regulating and it

can heal anything this sounds pretty basic but think about this anything

means anything there is no condition that a human has not recovered from

there is no cancer that is a hundred percent fatal there is no disease that

no one has recovered from what that means is the mechanism for healing is

built-in and it took me years and years and years to - to get that that you know

it's not some of the things it's not the little simple things like a scratch or a

thumbnail it's anything and the only limit is if we if we believe it can

happen and there is some sort of interference if there's something that

is keeping that mechanism from happening and that's what we're going to spend

most of the time talking about so when there is interference and when there is

imbalance what was it that happened what's going on in the body they don't

want to talk about hardware and software so we all know that a computer has has

hardware that's the stuff that you can touch and

the mechanistic and electronic parts of it but we also need software to run the

computer without the software the computer is absolutely useless it just

sits there even with the power turned on it is absolutely useless unless it has

software and unless it has a way for us to to interact with it and the same

holds true with the body the physical tissue is is useless without it is only

as good as the software operating and what's a hardware lesion well a gunshot

a knife wound a broken bone all those things they're pretty obvious that

there's something broken there's something damaged about the physical

machine but what about diabetes what about headaches what about high

blood pressure you can't take a picture of it so it's not the physicalness that

that's the problem and yet that's really the only thing that our healthcare

system can address is if the hardware stuff so we're going to talk about is

the software and we're gonna realize that all degenerative diseases that's 99

plus percent of everything that affects people when they get older that affects

our seniors population all of that is software problems

they're not suffering from from gun wounds and broken bones they're

suffering from some regulation that is so when we when we start understanding

that that we are more software and it's more signals then we also start

understanding that the medical model as good as it is saving lives it is based

on something called reductionism and reductionism means that if you take a

machine if you take something physical and you start taking it apart and you

get to the smaller parts and the smaller parts and the smaller parts reduction is

it means that you believe when you got to the smallest part if you understand

that part you understand all about the machine and

you can control and regulate everything about it the only problem is that's not

true that holds true for mechanical machines but it does not hold true for

biology one of the best analogies that hard for that is if you have a radio and

you start taking the radio apart and you look at all the little components into

the minut detail then you still will never find the music

you cannot take the pieces of the radio apart and find the music because the

music isn't in the radio and the same is true with humans that you can't take the

the molecules apart and find the life force you can't find the intelligence in

there and yet we know it's there we know that's what makes us human but it's not

in there it's playing through the body okay everything in your body that you

don't think about is handled for you your nervous system handles about 1

billion bits of information every second it's an astounding amount of information

and it's about growing fingernails and hair or repairing skin and digesting

food and regulating balance and regulating blood pressure and ingesting

and excreting all of those things one and still keeping track of where you are

and everything that goes on around you 1 billion bits of information every

second out of that you are aware of 1,000 your conscious awareness can take

little snapshots click click click of a thousand bits per second that means of

all the stuff your brain does there's a million times more going on in the

background than what ever aware that's a lot of work and all

of that is handled for you by the autonomic nervous system so what the

autonomic nervous system is all about it has two branches that are busy figuring

out where to send the resources where do we spend the the most appropriately

spend the resources in any given moment and in the body of resource is always

carried by the blood oxygen and nutrients and energy and sugar

environment all those things are sent by the buck so if we want to send if we

want to activate the body part we just send one bucket it's just like in a car

if you want to speed up the engine if you want to give it more gas the engine

revs up it's the exact same thing with the body you give more blood to a party

body part it revs up so allocating resources in the body becomes the same

thing as deciding where to send the blood at any given time

and that is basically what the autonomic nervous system does so it has two

branches one is called the sympathetic and one is called the parasympathetic

and you have all heard that because I'm told you a thousand times you know it

perfectly by now that the sympathetic is your fight flight it says when there is

a real or imagined threat I need to allocate the resources ice need to send

the blood to the places that can help me stay alive and defend me in this moment

and then there is the parasympathetic that helps you internalize resources to

stay alive for next year so we call the sympathetic it's about defense and the

parasympathetic is about health so which one would you say is more important

let's see a show of hands how many people think health is more important

takers okay how many think that defense is more important okay

you're little more right it's a trade question both of them are vitally

important but they are appropriate in different situations however defense is

always more important in this moment because if you don't make it through the

next new seconds who cares about next year right so

because of that your body is wired in such a way that the sympathetic always

comes first always comes first and that is why we are so stressed what is it

then that brings this this out of balance and we said that the sympathetic

nervous system responds to stress and so consequently what brings this out of

balance is really stress and stress responses so stress is not just made to

understand it's not only when we think about what people say oh man I'm so

stressed that is when we are when we feel tense and overwhelmed or inadequate

then we feel stressed but that's just the tip of the iceberg because all of

stress is so much more stress as anything that your body needs to respond

to and this is any sort of chemical structural or emotional stress so a

chemical stress is something that you're allergic to it can also be anything

artificial that doesn't belong your body and chemicals pollution heavy metals

artificial sweeteners artificial colorings all those things that are the

artificial man-made molecules that don't occur naturally in food they are a

burden for the body they interfere and the body has to deal with a structural

stress can be something like bad posture too much exercise not enough exercise

slips and falls any kind of imbalance if we learn to walk imbalanced that's a

structural stress an emotional stress can a speaks for itself that's anything

that that we feel tense or upset about so the sum total becomes the body burden

and the total stress that the body has to defend itself against but we also

must realize that it is not the stress and in terms of the stress or it's not

the thing it's not the event out there that that is the bad thing it doesn't

become harmful until we react to it so it's really more about the stress

response that that matters so if we sit in traffic and we have white knuckles

then that's a stress response but if we're sitting in traffic relaxing

listening to classical music it is not a stress response and we are wired to

react differently to millions of different situations in our life

and they become automated and habitual and we don't think about them so that's

what the stress response is and that's how some people can do get all these

things done and not be stressed and other people can hardly get anything

done and yet they're just stressed all the time because it's a perception and

the important thing about that is that it can be changed so any questions so

far everything crystal clear excellent why chiropractic what I talk about this

stuff people say yeah this makes a lot of sense but they still fail to connect

to what any of this has to do with chiropractic the fact well you're

talking about health you're talking about brain you're talking about stress

but I know chiropractors move bones and they help with pain so just to clear

that up we need to talk a little bit about what chiropractic actually does

chiropractic interrupts it neurological patterns that have become stuck

chiropractic stimulates brain activity and therefore the chiropractic

adjustment is a neurological event not a mechanical event now we're going to

break things up a little bit here and do a muscle testing demo so if you hold

your arm out parallel to the floor and you're holding it real nice and strong

and if I push down and you resist we'll see what happens hold strong and hold

even stronger nice and strong hold beautiful so that's

a nice strong lock and what we need to understand is again there's three

components here we're pushing on the bone which is attached to a muscle and

controlled by the brain so all three of those have to work in order for that arm

to stay to stay solid now if you move your left leg forward

and then you try to hold strong again just like before hold and now it's not

working well at all now some people would say okay well the muscle for some

reason the muscle went weak and that's not really a correct way of saying it

because the bone is still there the bone didn't go anywhere

the muscle is still there the muscle it's not like you lost half the muscle

it's still the same cross-section area the only thing that can change is the

signal from the brain so when we check a muscle we are

checking the brain we're checking this function we're checking the the in this

moment for checking the signal strength of the brain the other thing that we

learn from this is that we would think that the arm is an independent body part

that it takes care of itself if it's strong here what should it be strong

here what is it then that has to do with this and now we start understanding that

anything anywhere in the body can affect anything else in the body and why

because they're all processed centrally so when we change something down here

we're changing the signal input remember the body processes a billion signals

bits per second so if we change some of those bits we can change the total

output so this is just like a computer how do you talk to a computer you use a

mouse and keyboard the mouse and keyboard creates electrical signals that

go into the computer and change the input so that would produce different

outputs in the body we can change the position of a body part and we change

the input therefore the output is different

yeah

so in this case is it is normal and expected because ever since you were six

months old you've developed something called a cross crawl pattern so when

when one leg moves forward the brain anticipates and tries to get the same

arm to move back and the opposite arm to move forward so when do you do something

that doesn't make sense that confuses the brain and it says no no this needs

to relax and come back so that's why you can't hold it up but it's all about

software when we're changing the input we change the output okay make sense so

you've all seen this before but I also want to make a point if any of you are

ever tempted so this is an example of of a normal function of a normal inhibition

of something now put one foot on the floor and the other on there on the

brach and all that nice and strong

and that's not working either so that little difference in in leg length also

changes to input it is not this input that the body expects it's off by a

quarter-inch and that's enough of a signal change that the brain gets

confused again because it's not what it expects so that's an example of a

structural stress can you imagine if you're walking around with shoes that

are uneven or if there's a little bit of a misalignment in your pelvis and you

take a million steps in a month and every time there's a little bit of

distorted input over time this adds up and that's why this stuff matters so

that's a structural stress what about chemical stress so now we need to just

understand a little bit more about the world we live in so that this doesn't

look too weird but according to quantum physics everything is energy you take

the body down to its smallest parts its molecules and his atoms and subatomic

particles and then all of a sudden it's all empty space and energy that means

that your whole body is energy and the little crystals in these packets are

also energy so that energy interacts with each other and your energy field

can sense the quality and nature of these of this energy so let's see what

your body thinks thinks of this so hold nice and strong and lock

excellent now hold those for me and hold strong and not much is happening so

these are two very popular sweeteners called equal and Splenda and your body

knows that they're no good for you because the vibration doesn't match

anything that has to do with life these were developed by pesticide companies

when they discover they were trying to make pesticides to kill little bugs they

found that these tastes sweet and they said let's make human food out of them

and that holds true for all artificial sweeteners so just an extra

reinforcement to stay away from that's enough and then we also talked about

emotional stress so let's let's do that real quick and we can demonstrate that

very simply by if you think about something that you enjoy and hold nice

and strong and it's rock solid and then that you think about something that

really bothers you something really don't like and most wrong and that's

usually the one that gives the absolute weakest muscle response you can test

this with your friends it works amazingly now think about the solution

to the thing that you don't like and hold strong

and it's rock-solid so this is what happens to us when we have emotional

stress when we think about things we don't like we are stressing and

disrupting the flow and the healing in our bodies when we think about things we

like and the things the way we want them then our bodies get strong and they

function much better thank you thank you very much now we need to understand one

more principle and the first really important principle is the balance of

the sympathetic and the parasympathetic because the body cannot do both things

at once so if you just understand one thing is that the the stress pushes the

body out of balance and it cannot heal at the same time so balance between

sympathetic and parasympathetic is crucial now the next thing we need to

start understanding is how does the body how does how is the physical tissue

created how does the body replenish the tissues every cell in your body needs

two things to live it needs food and stimulation okay every cell so the food

that's the stuff you eat and the oxygen but stimulation and absolutely crucial

so what happens to a muscle that you don't use

after the-- what happens to a tennis player that plays with one hand only and

on the other the handy place with is that arm is twice as big as the other

one and that makes a lot of sense because the body says use it or lose it

it's going to send the resources to the place that is activated because that's

where it makes sense to expend resources and energy to do something if you don't

use it you don't need it okay so with muscles is pretty obvious you you

stimulate a muscle cell by putting tension on it by activating same thing

holds true with bone cells osteoporosis is a huge huge issue for especially the

female population and how do you stimulate a bone cell bone cell lives by

use it or lose it how do you use it what is the bone needed for it's needed to

resist gravity so you have to put weight on it in the field of gravity then the

bone has a purpose if you don't put weight on it in a field of gravity it

has no purpose and we spend 16 hours a day okay so we especially know this to

be true when we look at space travel because when you send an astronaut into

space and there's no gravity the body says well you know

gravity I really don't need bones here so the rate of loss of bone is about 2%

per month in weightlessness so they send them out into space for six to 12 months

they cannot walk when they get back they are so deconditioned they have to carry

them off and it takes months or years to to recover so the body is just really

smart it's going to send the resources where it's needed same holds true with

brain cells use it or lose it so how do you use a brain cell what does the brain

do what is the brain process it processes electrical signals how do you

use it you send an electrical signal that's it

so your body has all these receptors that converts your environment into

electrical signals so when you see something that's a vibration of light

that hits your eye in your retina gets converted to an electrical signal that

stimulates and then your brain can interpret sound is a vibration that hits

your eardrum convert it to an electrical signal that you can interpret touch

temperature vibration all of those are signals deformation vibration movement

that gets converted to electrical signals so that is how you stimulate the

brain and that's why exercise is so important because the movement of the

body accounts for as much as 80% all the signals they get

brain muscles and joints in a gravitational field account for 80% of

all the signals and why is that well if you can do this

without looking then there has to be some information relayed to the brain

about the position of this finger so the muscles the length of the muscles and

the position of the joints are sent with millions of bits of information to tell

the brain exactly where this is and that's the most important thing there is

for you to stay alive because if you can't stay balanced in a field of

gravity if you don't know where your body parts are then you just can't make

it you'll be falling down you'll be all over the place you bump into things you

get run over you wouldn't last very long so 80 to 90% of the brain's resources go

to figuring out where you are and that's called proprioception the ability to

know where you are without looking but now we can understand what's that

the problem with Alzheimer's is that in such a far-reaching new generation that

the solution should have started 20 years earlier it is never too late to

slow it down but it's really too far too long to reverse it ok so now we

understand that the brain regulates everything we know that the brain cells

are only kept alive by receiving signals and we understand that if we send more

signals to a brain cell it stays healthier if we send too many it burns

out and if we don't send enough then the brain cell degenerates and gets weaker

so the balance of signals and the amount of signals is what keeps it healthy now

we're rapping pulling this together to figure out where does chiropractic come

into this all we said that 80 to 90 percent of the same

the muscles and the joints so where do we have most of the muscles and joints

where is there a lot of muscles and a lot of joints and an enormous amount of

receptors and the answer is the spine okay so chiropractors didn't know this

when they started adjusting because this was a hundred years before we knew any

of this stuff but chiropractic was very very effective and very powerful because

without knowing it they had found where they could provide the biggest input to

the brain where they could fire off the most receptors and do it in a specific

manner at in a short amount of time especially up in the neck there's an

enormous amount of receptor density because we have to know exactly where

the head is relative to the horizon and the head and the eyes have to operate

independently of anything that the body is doing so the amount of processing to

keep the head on straight literally speaking is is astronomical but that

little sketch I think you've all seen it that shows the the adjustment of the

brain activity before and after an adjustment that is the reason that

chiropractic works it interrupts the pattern and it sends powerful signals to

to the brain and down below I put pain relief is a bonus and that's really how

it works with everything in the body that if we can just improve the function

then whatever the symptom was is going to go

away because the symptom was never the problem in the first place the symptom

was an indication that something wasn't working and if we can start making it

work better than whatever the perceived problem was is going to go away we

mentioned how to regain health to get those steps down now how do you once you

have health how do you maintain it and I'd like to talk about requirements that

there are certain requirements for health and then you need to meet all the

requirements for health so if you haven't plans you have a plan at home

and you're trying to keep it healthy but the plant is wilting so what's the first

thing that you think of doing from the plant water exactly so now you give it

some water but it's still not happy so then what do you think think about such

an sunlight exactly you can't water it in the closets and keep it happy so now

you bring it out in the sunshine and you give it water and it's still unhappy now

what do you think there's something wrong with the soil it's either not not

enough nutrients or the soil is toxic so plants you can ask your five-year-old

plants need water sunshine and soil so here's the big question you have 1

million plants and you try an experiment and you try to keep them a year with 2

out of 3 oK you've mix them all up and you give

some of them sunlight and water and you skip the soil and some of them you give

water and soil eggs get the sunshine and so on

how many healthy plants will you have after a year zero okay because plants

need water sunshine and soil you can never get a healthy plant with two out

of three required things so what do humans need humans have requirements of

a structural chemical and emotional means those are needs their requirements

so we need to simply put we need to eat well move well and think well those are

requirements you cannot reach optimal health you cannot realize your potential

with two out of three on a regular basis so what does it mean to eat well it

means you eat real food and we'll have another seminar on on food it means food

that nature produced we developed in nature we are a part of nature we cannot

eat things we cannot thrive on things that are not from nature we cannot try

money on laboratory chemicals secondly we need to

well that's the exercise that we talked about that activates the receptors but

it's also if we have if we have limitations moving well also in most

chiropractic because if you have a joint that isn't moving

that's a bottleneck for that information doesn't matter how much you exercise if

that joint isn't moving there's still a part in your brain that's that gets

started so each will move well and then think well we need to feel good that's

not an option feeling good is a requirement for for

thriving and that means we need to make it a priority to feel good if we don't

know how then we read a book you can do something to help us with some positive

input to make us feel good and watching news isn't working that's not part of

the feel-good part so that's the requirements for health plants need

water sunshine and good soil humans need to eat well move well think love not

optional what is required to restore health if we have some issues what do we

need to do to restore the function of the health first we want to interrupt

the pattern whatever isn't working in the body is due to a pattern that is

running that is not in your best interest whether it's making too much or

too little stomach acid or whether it's a muscle in the neck that is turning a

vertebra or keeping it tense whatever it is it's a pattern and the first thing we

want to do is to interrupt that pattern that's step one the second thing we want

to do is to start restoring balance the nervous system and that's

specifically particularly balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic

so we want to give the body a chance a healing by reducing the stress and the

best thing we can do there again is chiropractic adjustments to interrupt

the pattern and follow it up with breathing exercises this is why you

probably have heard me talk about breathing in Batangas

because the heart rate variability is one of the best indicators there is on

future health potential and the breathing is a way that we can we have

direct access to the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic function

third thing we want to do is to rebuild strength whatever areas in the brain

have declined have degenerated we need to try to rebuild them in order to

restore the full function so if you have if you sprained an ankle 10 years ago

and ever since then you started limping a little bit and then the ankle got

better and you didn't think much about it but ever since then you changed your

gait just a little bit so that you're pushing

off three millimeters less on that leg that means that there's less movement in

the hip and there's a difference between the

incoming signals of your left and right brain something a sunless tan will

create a difference is it significant we don't really know but if you have

hundreds of those events they all add up so how do we rebuild strength in the

nervous system again the chiropractic adjustments it sends me fireworks of

activity of stimulation to the brain and because we have different chiropractic

techniques we tend to find where is the weak area we either check a short leg we

do a muscle test we look at some neurological function if we can change

some expression of function then we have helped balance out an underlying

imbalance what's the fourth thing we want to reduce the stress because stress

is ultimately the thing that caused the problem in the first place

and what is stress stress is lifestyle and perception so we want to make sure

that we get adequate rest we want to make sure that we feel good we don't

want to work 80 hours a week and live on coffee and cigarettes we want to want to

give the body a fair chance that's the the smart lifestyle choices and this is

a lifelong process but it's probably the best thing and the most important thing

that we can do for ourselves is to gradually work on changing the outlook

that we have because it's not the traffic that is stressful

it's our perception of it and the same holds true for every person that you

meet every judgment that you ever make every piece of bad news or aggravation

that you ever come across it's 8% and it doesn't mean anything unless you

give meaning to it but that's that's a choice and it's something we need to

work on and then there's a little cartoon in here as well I love this guy

he's got lots of funny stuff on the web because what fits your busy schedule

better exercising an hour a day or being dead 24 hours a day I think that's kind

of to the point because so many times we yeah you know all that stuff it's really

important but you know I'm so busy I just never get to it there's so many

things to do I gotta feed the cat I gotta go to work and if we know if we

don't make it a priority it never happens so if we want to be healthy and

happy we got to set the time aside ahead of time and make it something important

and then we always have time for the important stuff so who wants to feel

better sure you all have someone in mind you already thought of that

you think yeah they get it they have to know this stuff they need to know this

so that's why we started this series of talks so that you can come and learn

we're going to try to change the topics and keep expanding on this and also for

you to bring you new people so that we can have the growing crowd that's really

the purpose of everything that we're doing here to raise the awareness of

health and well-being so feel free to write down some names of

people that you think it benefits from from knowing this stuff and feel free to

bring them next time so thank you very much for your attention and you have any

sort of questions feel free I covered everything too well and I wonder why I

got that board what will I learn to write on internationally