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Our thoughts have the power to harm and the power to heal. The thoughts we ruminate on have a direct connection to our autonomic nervous system. Stressful thoughts produce stress in the body. Peaceful thoughts produce peace and calm and promote healing. So rather than being victims of a thought life that's on autopilot, we should be exercising our God-given agency and free will to choose what thoughts we ruminate on.
If there's one thing we have complete control over, it's our thought lives. Let's talk about it.
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Welcome to the Christian Healthy Left Out podcast where I help you navigate natural health so you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live a bondedly. I'm your host, David Sandstrom. Today we're continuing my series on the power of the mind-body connection. I'm going to be reading from my book, The Christian's Guide to Holistic Health, specifically chapter 23, The Anatomy of a Thought, part two. Chapter 23, Anatomy of a Thought, part two.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Romans 12.2. Thoughts have energy. If we're going to maximize our health potential and tap into the healing power of wholism, we must address our stressful thought lives. According to WebMD, 75 % to 90 % of all doctor visits are stress-related. One of the more effective ways to reduce stress is to eliminate toxic thinking.
Thoughts have energy. Just as a rock tossed into a pond creates a ripple effect radiating outward in all directions, our thoughts have influence beyond our minds. So let's track an idea from its conception to a physical manifestation in the body. New thoughts get filtered by our individual life experience with all our beliefs, desires, biases, and expectations.
By passing through these filters, we form impressions and assign interpretations. Over time, these interpretations give birth to full-blown convictions. These ideas can and do act on our bodies. It could be as outward as a physical movement or a spoken word that operates through the somatic voluntary nervous system, or it may be an unseen response that affects our organs and systems via the autonomic involuntary nervous system, or the ANS.
The ANS's influence on our hormones and neurotransmitters is of particular interest to our health and well-being. The ANS is divided into two parts, the sympathetic, fight or flight, and the parasympathetic, rest and digest. These two divisions operate in a seesaw-type relationship. They are antagonistic to one another. In other words, when one is up, the other is down. Operating together, they bring homeostasis or
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balance to our systems. Fight or flight. The sympathetic side of the ANS responds to stress and prepares us for fight or flight. This stress response is also referred to as general adaptation syndrome and was first documented by Dr. Walter C. Cannon of Harvard Medical School in the 1920s. In response to stress, our bodies react in a very predictable pattern which we need to understand to make the connection to our health.
Stressful thoughts will trigger a stressful physiological response. For example, let's say it's late at night, you're in a hotel parking garage and suddenly hear a loud bang. You think it may be a gunshot. Your amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, gets fired up. Your pulse quickens and you start to sweat. You see someone in uniform. He's the hotel valet. You're puzzled because he looks as cool as a cucumber. You ask him if he heard the gunshot. He calmly replies,
If that wasn't a gunshot, it was a car backfiring. Chillax, there's nothing to worry about. You breathe a sigh of relief and your pulse returns to normal. In this situation, you didn't tell your heart to start racing. It merely reacted to the idea that you were having about possibly being in danger. This reaction is automatic. Since it's part of the autonomic nervous system, we don't exercise any conscious control over
This engaging of the sympathetic branch of the ANS is referred to as our stress response or our fight or flight reflex. The stress response works through the brain and enlists certain vital organs that flood the body with catecholamines, stress hormones and neurotransmitters. The interaction of three primary endocrine glands serves to make up what is known as the HPA axis or the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis.
The hypothalamus is the master regulatory gland that sits at the base of the brain. In response to stress, the hypothalamus produces a hormone called corticotropin-releasing hormone, or CRH. CRH then signals the pituitary gland to secrete adrenocorticotropic hormone, or ACTH. ACTH then stimulates the adrenal glands to produce cortisol and adrenaline. This chemical cascade is what prepares the body to handle stress.
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See figure seven. When the sympathetic nervous system is active, it prepares the body for fight or flight. Energy and resources are directed away from non-urgent tasks such as digestion, immune function, and cellular repair toward more urgent tasks designed to help us escape from danger. Our pupils dilate and our alertness is heightened. Heart rate and blood pressure increase. Blood is directed toward large muscle groups such as legs.
we may hyperventilate, perspire, or experience trembling. In addition, since our bodies are preparing to defend themselves from an attacker, there is an immune response. If we're going to have an encounter with a lion, there will likely be scratches and wounds that will become entry points for microscopic organisms the body would need to defend itself from. We must understand that inflammation serves a purpose and is a normal part of our immune response in healing from trauma.
Therefore, when our stress response is active, our bodies will promote desirable inflammation by releasing pro-inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-1 and tumor necrosis factor, or TNF. We encounter difficulty when this inflammation becomes chronic and systemic. Chronic stress and the unrelenting release of these cytokines will cause elevated glucose or blood sugar levels that increase our risk of type 2 diabetes
obesity, high cholesterol, heart attacks, and strokes. Furthermore, chronically high glucose will damage insulin receptors contributing to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Now, we've set ourselves up for a vicious cycle. Because all these conditions promote release of more cytokines, promoting systemic inflammation, and this process will feed on itself. Over time, this escalation will induce system breakdown.
All of this is a perfect thing if we're being chased by a lion. A healthy stress response is an indication that the body is doing exactly what it needs to do to protect us and keep us alive. The trouble is, most of us are not being chased by lions these days. Nevertheless, we encourage our stress response with unhealthy thinking patterns. This puts us in a condition known as sympathetic dominance. Sympathetic dominance equals system breakdown.
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Our bodies are designed to handle stress. However, we are not intended to stay in the stress response. There should be an ebb and flow to it. As we saw in section two, stress can come in many different forms. However, here we're focusing on mental-emotional stress that stems from toxic thinking. For many of us, our first world stress comes mainly from chronic mental-emotional issues. These include fearful or catastrophic thinking, jealousy,
pessimism, bitterness, anger, rage, or a poor self-image among many others. We don't call these toxic emotions for nothing. We've all been around people like this. Don't they sap your energy? Truth be told, we all engage in this type of thinking from time to time, and we drain our own metabolic energy in the process. These toxic thoughts and emotions trigger a cascade of reactions that flood our bodies with harmful catecholamines
or stress chemicals. See the Geeks corner above. Chronic activation of our stress response or sympathetic dominance amounts to a tremendous burden on our bodies. When stress hormones and neurotransmitters are kept chronically high, the body begins to break down. Remember the 2x4 in the sawhorse metaphor from section 2, chapter 16. It's not the single brick that causes our 2x4 to snap. It's the total load of bricks underneath.
Likewise, it's not a single trip into stress that's the problem. It's chronic activation that takes its toll on our bodies. Rest and digest equals healing. The other side of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic or rest and digest. This is sometimes referred to as the relaxation response. Dr. Herbert Benson from Harvard University documented this process quite well in his best-selling book, The Relaxation Response.
The relaxation response is basically the opposite of the stress response. The body releases calming hormones and neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, GABA, and serotonin to buffer the stress response and puts us in a calmer, more relaxed, peaceful state. It is in this peaceful state that our bodies do most of their repair functions. An important point to remember is that our bodies primarily perform routine maintenance and repair when our stress levels are down.
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and the rest of the just side of the ANS is in control. Critical health building processes such as detoxification, elimination, and immune function can only be performed efficiently when we are at rest or peace. Another vital process that takes place when our relaxation response is active is autophagy. Autophagy is where old worn out damaged cells are either repaired or replaced with new ones. In short,
We can only expect to efficiently repair damaged cells, remove toxins, eliminate waste, and have a strong robust immune system when we're in a peaceful state. And the relaxation response is active. Here's the main point. When we chronically think stressful thoughts, we suppress our body's natural health building activity. Stinking thinking. So this begs the question, how do we engage our relaxation response? Well, there's plenty of ways.
The first thing I would suggest is take some advice from the late Zig Ziglar, author and motivational speaker, and get rid of the stinkin' thinkin'. We'll have more on identifying and eliminating unhealthy thinking patterns in the next chapters. Some activities that can encourage the relaxation response can be read a good book, pray or meditate, take a walk outdoors, play with your pet, make love, engage in a hobby, watch a funny movie.
volunteerism, et cetera. I'm sure you can add to this list. All these things are helpful and to be encouraged, but they're temporary in nature. Unhealthy thoughts can be relentless and go on for years, even decades. If we don't address our stinkin' thinkin', these healthy activities amount to nothing more than band-aids. All the while, the wound is festering underneath.
like an old bridge that's rusting off from underneath and one day collapses. Our health may one day fail as a result of our chronic, unaddressed, stressful thought lives. We must address the root cause of our stress. This is why reflecting on our thinking patterns and taking inventory of our self-talk is foundational to our health. Here's the main point of this chapter. We can engage in stress-reducing activities till the cows come home, but if we don't address the things that are causing our stress,
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In this case, toxic beliefs, ideas, emotions, and thinking patterns will be in sympathetic or fight-or-flight dominance and our health-building efforts will be compromised. Although we don't consciously control our sympathetic nervous system, we do have control over our thought lives. We can dramatically reduce our stress by applying the biblical advice at the top of this chapter and choose to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Chapter 23.
Summary. Thoughts have energy that radiates outward, similar to a rock being thrown in a still pond. Through the release of hormones, the two divisions of our autonomic nervous system, fight or flight and rest and digest, have a great deal to do with our body's response to stress. Our thought lives elicit a response from the autonomic nervous system. Chronic toxic thinking destroys health. Habitual peaceful thinking builds health.
Well that's it for now. Make sure you tune in to the next episode. I'm going to be talking about the mind-body connection, chapter 24, from my book. We're going to be talking about the placebo and nocebo factors. That's it for now. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Go out there and live a moderately. Be blessed.
