DAY 93 - Mind Racing ... Can’t Get Back to Sleep?

Photo courtesy of xlibber at Flickr Commons

Trick question coming up; don’t be blinded by the obvious.

Lying awake for hours ... unable to quiet your mind; your mind is apt to be blamed. But is sleeplessness entirely caused by worries, unfinished work, or difficult decisions tossed around in your head?

The answer is NO! Turns out the mind-body connection is a veritable thoroughfare with a lot of traffic moving from south to north, especially at night.

That spicy pizza could activate your brain. The distention of your bowel with intestinal gas from that extra glass of milk can cause distress that would manifest in your head. The tightness and tenderness in your muscles and joints certainly don’t produce relaxed brain waves. And surely you didn’t think that that double espresso at 4:45 this afternoon would have no effect. The fact that you haven’t exercised for weeks is no calming influence either.

Your mind may be racing, but your body may be the source of the fuel.

DAY 58 - Age is a State of Mind ... Oh Really?

It is said that “Age is a state of mind.” And I suppose this adage could be true, ... if one doesn’t have a body. But, given that most have both, this saying holds no water, and even carries harmful meaning.

The phrase implies that attitude comes directly from the brain, and suggests that ones attitude controls and determines whether one feels young or old. This is simply wrong. Attitude comes from the body, the brain, and the environment. It is probably primarily induced and influenced most by ones state of health, and how one feels physically. Let us also not forget, that the mind is a part of the body.

A potential danger of a culture believing that feeling old is nothing more than a state of mind, is that those who feel old, are easily blamed for having a bad attitude.

Another danger is that “state of mind” is a red herring distracting our already distracted cultural attention from the dominant factor that regulates whether we feel young or old; that factor is health. When stiff, or sick, or tired, those of us over 30 are apt to say we feel old. Conversely, when pain-free, flexible, and energetic, we tell everyone that we feel like 18 again.

The adage that really tells the story is, “You are only as old as you feel.” That is, when your knees ache, you feel old. Keep in mind that attitude is not the most common cause of knee pain; poor health is.

To summarize; while attitude is important, your body is the main player that determines whether you feel young or old. So; exercise regularly; eat real, healthy food; cultivate close, loving relationships; and you’ll have a better chance of staying forever young.

DAY 30 – Tweeting Not for Twits Necessarily

Twitter, as you may know, is a very popular instant-messaging system that lets a person send brief text messages, called Tweets, up to 140 characters in length to a list of followers. My bet is that a huge percentage of Tweets are light on significance. Some folks, like my wife, think of them as worthless.

But, some Tweets, as it turns out, carry powerful messages.

My professional mentor, Jeffrey Bland, PhD, (pictured at left) the founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine, a biochemist by training, and a brilliant philosopher and educator by gift and diligence, tweets. I limit my Twitter following, but he is on my short list.

Today I looked at two of his Tweets. The first was a link to an article by neurologist, David Perlmutter, MD, on the brain’s ability to regenerate. One paragraph reads as follows:
““In 1998, the journal Nature Medicine published a report indicating that neurogenesis, the growth of new brain cells, does indeed occur in humans. As Sharon Begley remarked in her book, "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," "The discovery overturned generations of conventional wisdom in neuroscience. The human brain is not limited to the neurons it is born with, or even the neurons that fill in after the explosion of brain development in early childhood.””
For the complete article -> Synthesis (@FMUbyJBland) (via @HuffPostHealth) http://huff.to/9AJzJq

The second Tweet, a quote from Dr. Bland, stated: “A hyperinsulin state can overdrive specific kinase-modulated pathways and increase the relative risk of a metastatic disorder.” In lay terminology, this means that elevated levels of insulin in ones blood (often caused by excess dietary intake of sugars and starches) can cause an overproduction of molecules involved in the process of inflammation, which themselves increase the risk of developing cancers that spread from the initial site in the body. In excessively simple terms this means that eating too much sugar and starch is a risk factor for developing aggressive cancers.

The first Tweet dealt with brain health and brain regeneration, the second with a mechanism of the genesis of metastatic cancers. This is not lightweight material. For busy doctors like myself, these data blasts help to keep me on the cutting edge. 

They may be packed into 140 characters or less, but these are not twit Tweets.