Don't Stress It! - Lesson 3
It's human body tour time!
Welcome to The Feel Good Life! A newsletter about health, prevention, empathy, and hope. I’m Dr. Mariana and you have just arrived to my practical and medically-guided course on managing stress. (To start from the beginning, go here.) Happy to have you here. :)
Hello! Welcome to lesson 3 of this stress-busting course.
It’s been 2 weeks now since we started this course, and I’m eager to dig further into it. Today’s lesson is a bit of a long but fascinating and fun read! So just take your time and enjoy.
In today’s lesson you will learn:
Stop Thinking & Start Listening
Human Body Tour Time!
Challenge #3: The Pee Challenge
And in case you missed it, here are the previous lessons: Intro, Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.
Ok, let’s go!
Stop Thinking & Start Listening
Today’s one is important, because it's all about YOU - and to start, you're going to need some serious You-time. To get the full benefits of this lesson, seek out some peace and quiet.
Like, NOW. ;)
It's time to shut the world up, so you can think. No distractions, and no possibility of interruptions.
The ideal place? Lying in bed or the couch, over a calm cuppa tea, or maybe first thing in the morning. So if this is you - PERFECT. Great job.
Ready?
Okay then.
Here’s what I want you to do.
First, stop thinking.
Next, start listening to what your body is telling you.
That’s all.
Except, as you’re about to find out, it’s actually kinda tough.
We’re used to having thoughts racing through our minds, and worries churning around our thoughts like clothes in a washing-machine. Stopping those thoughts is hard. That’s why people have to teach meditation, because meditating does not come naturally. It has to be learnt.
(The wonderful Headspace is a great place to start.)
Anyway - try meditating tomorrow. For now, just listen to your body.
Listen closely to every part of your body. How’s it feeling? Any aches making themselves known? How about clenched muscles? Are your shoulders tense? If they are, let them slump away from your ears for a second. Are you gritting your teeth? Is your jaw completely relaxed now? How about your lower back? Try relaxing that, as far as it’ll go….
Give yourself a minute to be fully aware of how your body is feeling.
You’re probably not used to doing this, so it’s going to require some effort and it’s okay. You’ll find yourself tensing up again without knowing it, but no matter - this isn’t about becoming completely relaxed, this is about becoming unusually aware.
You hardly ever notice your own body like this - which is entirely healthy and normal, so no worries. Your body rarely lets you know how it’s feeling unless it’s feeling bad - so if you’re hardly aware of it, that’s probably a good sign.
Okay?
Done?
When you're ready, sit up straight, stretch your back, roll your shoulders, flex any muscles that feel like they need a good flex - and grab a drink to wake yourself up.
The listening is done for today. It's time to go travelling.
Human Body Tour Time!
We're travelling - yet not that kind of travel today.
We're staying a lot closer to home - in fact, as close as it's possible to get.
For the next few minutes, we’re going on a tour of the miraculous living, breathing, self-repairing machine that you’re housed in for the rest of your life.
Think about that for a second. You're in this body for the rest of your life. One place. Nowhere else.
It makes sense that you'd want to look after it, right.
Let’s start with your laptop, tablet or phone.
It may feel like part of your body (hey, I hear you there), but we’re more interested in how you’re interfacing with it.
Behold - the hand. Millions of years went into the design of this thing. Beat that, Apple.
Now, follow the fingers down. Next to your wrist, you can see your hand’s opposing finger, better known as the thumb. Opposable digits are mainly confined to primates, some marsupials, Giant Pandas, a few birds and the occasional dinosaur. They’re the reason we started making tools, and without them, our species would be an evolutionary backwater. Thumbs up to thumbs!
(These days, the times we’re most aware of our thumbs is when we get cramp from texting. Thanks for that, modern life.)
Let’s briskly continue up your arms, over your shoulders and onto your face...
Please smack your lips….NOW!
Congratulations! You just did a magnificently complicated thing involving countless muscles (around 43 of them) and electrical impulses all working together as one, and it took no effort on your part whatsoever.
That’s amazing, isn’t it?
The mouth is part of one of the most important mechanisms involved in another of those uniquely human traits - making face-noises. When your mouth and vocal cords work together to shape sounds, well, on a planet-wide scale, that is actually nothing special.
What is special - in fact, utterly incredible - is how we’ve turned noises into speech, those sounds into intelligible language, and created all sorts of ways of efficiently communicating meaning to other people (even though having the same tube for talking, breathing and eating is something of a design flaw).
And we haven’t just created language once - we've done it again and again. There are around 6,500 fully-formed languages being spoken in the world today. And it takes about 100 muscles to speak!
It’s a staggering display of our intellectual prowess - or, you could argue, it shows how much spare time our ancestors had on their hands.
Scientific research suggests that tool-making and speech evolved simultaneously and together. Just as opposable digits unlocked tool-making, language unlocked another vital trait for the rise of humanity: the storage of knowledge.
Without language, all of history and knowledge would be lost to us - and our brains would largely be a waste of space. Without language, human culture and society as we know it simply couldn’t exist.
So let’s go straight to the part of the body most responsible for getting us to where we are today.
If you’ve ever wondered what a normal human brain looks like, and if you’re not at all squeamish - click here.
Welcome to the place where everything you regard as truly You is at work. In every sense that matters, you are your brain. It’s the seat of all your thoughts and feelings - and it’s where your personality is stored.
Consequently, if you have a health condition that messes with the brain (like long-term stress), it’s not just messing with the biological machine you’re housed in - it’s messing with you, directly.
Problem is, the human brain is almost unknowably complex.
You might be surprised to hear this. With all that modern medical science has learned, are we still in the Dark Ages about brains? Well, yes and no. Sure, neuroscience has come along leaps and bounds in recent years. Doctors and scientists know more than ever about how specific regions of the brain seem to work - but how the organ operates as a whole, together, as one unit of consciousness?
Hah. No.
In this fascinating article, four neuroscientists comment on the challenges they face when trying to understand the brain. Stephen Smith, Ph.D. says:
“It’s complicated enough to somehow explain all the richness of the human experience as we know it: All of our feelings, all of our subjective experience, all of human history, human art, human science. Wars, love, greed. The brain is at the root of all those things. Is it appealing to think that a simple machine, easy to understand, could explain all those things? I don’t think so.”
I hope you’re getting the idea here.
The human brain, and the nervous system it’s connected to, is one of the most complex and delicate systems in Nature. It’s a perfectly balanced web of cells working together in ways so intricate that even our most powerful supercomputers can’t model them accurately.
Imagine this for a second: each of the 80-100 billion neurons in your brain has a job. We rarely know what it is, and we don’t know how it knows what it is. We don’t know how thoughts are transmitted, or even what they look like (although we’re started to get excitingly close).
In short, we hardly know anything about the brain - and yet we’re completely dependent on it for doing everything.
We’ll return to discuss the importance of this later - but for now, onwards with the tour!
Oh Romeo, Romeo - where art thou, Romeo?
Answer: if “Romeo” is a synonym for “romance”, he’s located somewhere in your brain, not in the enormous muscular pump just behind your ribs.
But in another sense, yes, the heart is the root of all emotion, because without it, you’d be highly unemotional indeed - by way of being highly dead.
Your heart is the hardest worker you’ll ever encounter in your lifetime. If you’re healthy, your heart flexes in a complicated way around once a second, pumping blood around your body to where it’s needed. It does this without being asked, without orders, and over your lifetime, it’ll do it around 2.2 billion times.
If we treat our hearts right, they get stronger and they’re capable of doing a lot more - and if our heart’s health is neglected so much that it stops working properly, trust me, you’ll know. Probably terrifying quickly.
But right now, all’s fine - it’s working away tirelessly without making a fuss, out of sight and entirely out of mind. Let’s face it - this is probably the first time you’ve been aware of it all day.
Bless you, thankless master-plumber of the human body!
In a way, the heart is the perfect role-model for us as we work on developing your healthy habits. It requires no willpower to keep working, and yet it achieves something profoundly meaningful - aka, keeping you alive.
Now we move ahead on our human body tour!
We’re not going to spend much time on the lungs - not because they’re not important for your health and sense of wellbeing (just ask an asthmatic person), but because we’ve got a date with your liver, and you’ll see why in a minute.
But before we move on, and again, if you’re not squeamish - check this out.
Lungs are made of a type of spongy material that’s riddled with tiny, tiny airways. When you breathe, each one expands, allowing you to gulp the air your body needs to get oxygen to your cells. There’s a lot of them. More than you would believe, in fact. Your own pair of lungs contains around 1,500 miles of airways.
That’s not a typo. Your airways, stretched out in a line, would run from England to Greece.
Okay! Our whistle-stop tour of the landscape of You will now head south.
Run your hand down the right side of your ribs, to where they end. If you gently poke on your right side, into the squishy space under that ridge of bone, you’re poking at your liver - the Swiss Army Knife of bodily organs, because it basically does everything.
It cleans your blood up, and helps it clot when you’re damaged.
It makes digestion possible.
It stores vitamins, minerals and energy, in the form of glycogen, a type of sugar.
And it does hundreds of other things - capably taking on as many as 500 different roles, according to some sources. It's the Daniel Day-Lewis of body organs.
We’re finishing here at the liver because it neatly illustrates a very important point about your body:
Everything is connected.
The liver cleans your blood (which carries oxygen collected in your lungs from air drawn in through your mouth) which is pumped around your body by your heart, about 20% of which goes to the brain.
If something goes wrong with your liver, everything is affected.
If something goes wrong with your heart, everything is affected.
Lungs? Everything (and quickly, too).
Brain? You guessed it.
If you’ve always thought of your body as something like a car - a network of components that can be successfully ‘swapped out’ when they’re damaged - then you’ve got it all wrong. Doctors treat “health” as a complete system because to do otherwise is to put your life at risk. Everything needs to work well for you to stay healthy.
This is why stress is such a fearsome Enemy - because it has the power to shut your health down in so many ways, organ by organ:
Fear and anxiety decrease the liver’s ability to process blood.
Stress increases wear & tear on the lungs, restricting airflow and leading to asthma and bronchial problems.
How does the heart handle huge amounts of stress? Answer: not well at all.
And for the brain, this article title says it all. (Brrr.)
Your body is amazingly tough - but it’s not invulnerable. If longterm stress gets its claws into it, no matter where that stress begins to manifest, the whole of your health is going to suffer.
That’s what’s at stake - and the good news is, no matter how complicated the human body may be, the mechanisms for tackling stress are surprisingly simple and achievable.
The tools to manage stress are in your hands already - because at a rock-bottom level, it’s all about making sure your body is getting the right amount of just three things...
Thing #1: Water
Thing #2: Sleep
Thing #3: Movement
Wonderful news for a cash-strapped world! All these things are pretty much free, they’re widely available, and it’s easy to turn them into habits, because when our bodies aren’t getting enough of them, they usually send us warning signals we can't ignore.
If these three things were available in pill form, we’d pop them every single day without fail - and a lot of other types of pill would disappear from the shelves of our pharmacies, maybe for good.
So - what’s the problem?
If we have access to these three things already, and our bodies shriek at us if they’re running low on them, why do we need “healthy habits”?
Why can’t we just sit back and let our bodies send their warning messages to us?
In fact, why do I need to take an online course to learn how to get my health on track?
The answer is simple and scary.
Stress stops those messages reaching you.
Stress opens your mail, and crosses out all the important bits.
It misleads, it cheats, and it lies.
Your body can be desperate for a top-up of water, sleep or physical movement - and you wouldn’t have a clue, because stress shot the messenger. In this way, stress can put you in a world of trouble in a surprisingly short time.
When you’re stressed, you absolutely can’t trust what your body is telling you.
Out of your head with anxiety? You’ll be unable to sleep, because your body can’t communicate sleepiness to you - even though it’s desperate for you to shut your eyes. Not feeling hungry or thirsty? You could be parched, or critically low on the nutrition your brain needs to keep working.
You get the picture. It’s really not going to end well.
So if you can’t rely on the signals coming your way from your own body - and you can’t rely on willpower to kick yourself out of this panic-filled rut of misery and suffering - what can you do?
Habits.
And luckily, that’s what we are here for.
Challenge #3: The Pee Challenge
The challenge from lesson #2 - identify your morning no-brainers - was a little bit tricky. (But I hope you did it anyway, because we'll need it for the next lesson.)
Today’s challenge though?
SUPER EASY.
1. Go to the kitchen and get a small glass beaker or small cup. The kind that holds around 250 ml (quarter of a litre) of water, and looks something like this. Not too big; not too small. You know the kind.
2. Now - from now on, every time you go to the toilet to have a pee, I want you to come out the bathroom and immediately drink a glassful of water using that glass. Every single time. No worries, is safe. (Tip: You can put a sticky note on your bathroom’s mirror or door so that you don’t forget.)
I’ll explain why this matters in our next lesson. For now, all I need yo to do is drink that wee glass of water every time you go pee. Deal? Great!
See you in Lesson #4!
Hugs,
Dr. Mariana
Image Credits: Unsplash, Pixabay
Catching up on these tonight... I've never had it put that way about stress stopping the drink/sleep/move messages from reaching you. Fascinating. I look forward to reading the rest of the lessons, but going to pause here so I can put the glass of water assignment into practice. Really need to get a handle on stress, so glad to have found you via Notes!
I am a bit behind on these lol but they are great!