Category Archives: Restore Health

Reversing Stress, Being Resourceful

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Reversing Stress, Being Resourceful
By Anna McRobert

Even when our outer world resources seem far from abundant and we are stressing out, we still have inner resources that are amazingly effective.

We live in a body that is self-healing. How totally remarkable! But at times our body becomes overwhelmed, when life events take up more energy to deal with than the energy we can generate under the circumstances. That’s when the body struggles and symptoms become obvious, health deteriorates, causing even more stress, and we go downhill.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You have an inner resource that is constantly available.

Your mind, and how you use it becomes super crucial now, and you can harness the power of your mind to turn things around, if you know how to do that. If life events are generating distressing thoughts that are dragging you down, then give your mind some productive, positive work to do. What you think about, matters. How you think about events, matters. You can help your body and mind to heal, or you can add to their burdens. Because where your attention is focused, where your thoughts take you, that is where your energy is engaged and utilized, for good or for bad.

Stressful thinking, going round in circles, worrying, feeling stuck, all chew up your energy, lower your immune system capacity, and put you into an ever decreasing spiral of poor health, and progressively to tissue breakdown, and to energy exhaustion.

Life is not always easy, so energy lowering stressful thinking is familiar to us all.
What can you do instead of getting caught in the downward spiral?

First is breathe. Under ongoing stress we breathe shallowly. We deprive the brain and every cell in the body of essential oxygen for generating energy. Shallow breathing keeps the brain in stress mode. So breathe in and out, out, out, empty your lungs. Now you can take a full breathe in naturally. Repeat till you are emptying and filling your lungs easily.

Next, bring blood into front brain, the only area with cells designed for new thinking. This is your problem solver, the planner, the organizer, the creator of solutions. Stress increases blood in brain areas for survival, locking you into repeating how you survived in the past, no matter how unproductive that might be for you right now.

How do you put your problem solver to work? Put you hand on your forehead, breathe in and breathe out, and acknowledge to yourself your problem, your worry, your distress. Thinking those things with more blood in back brain keeps you going round in circles. But thinking those things while holding your forehead, draws blood into the front brain cells that are solution creators. This cancels the stress signal. It turns off the alarm.

The forehead will become warm very quickly, indicating there is more blood there now. Review your current problems again and breathe in, and out. Keep doing the review and breathing and soon you’ll find that the stress feeling begins to subside, that you begin to accept the problems not just fret about them. You will start to focus on producing new thoughts and new ideas. In Kinesiology this technique is called Emotional Stress Release.

With blood now in front brain, and more oxygen available for in-the-now energy production, your brain is ready to do something to help you with those problems or issues. You are reversing the stress and on the way to creating a solution.

Help your mind to help you. Instead of locking energy into unproductive worrying and depriving the body of healing capacity, direct your powerful mind to do productive work. You can specifically direct your energy to where your body needs it for healing, for regulating, for normalizing internal functions. What you think about and how you think about your health and life really matters, it matters heaps.

Slow down the adrenals. They have been in alarm, in fight-flight-frozen mode, while you were stressed. Under stress their job is to raise your blood pressure and body temperature so you heat up when stressed, also raise blood sugar for muscles to take action, block digestion and immune system, and block thinking so you can react with survival tactics, definitely not with creating a new future. This is not a healthy, productive state for daily living.

Talk kindly to your adrenals. “Thank you for keeping me going. You can take a break now.” Engage your mind to turn your adrenal thermostat down to normal, just as you would turn down the heat to your hotplate on the stove and see the fire-y red coils reducing to a lower heat level. What colour to you relate to as healing, normalizing? Is it white, blue, green? Different colours may work at different times. Direct your healing colour as a ray of light to your adrenals. Breathe in and breathe out. Allow your adrenals to respond and find their balance again as they absorb your healing rays.

Thyroid, when underactive can make you feel depressed and anxious, and when overactive can cause anxiety and insomnia. Send healing, normalizing light and colour to your thyroid. Breathe in and out.

Digestion, reset it to normal now that you are focused on reducing your stress and allowing your body and nervous system to recover, rebuild, regenerate. Send the healing rays to your digestive system too. Breathe in and out.

Liver has to detox the backlog of stress hormones and other toxic wastes. Give your liver a hand with your mind’s focus on sending healing energy to your busy liver as it does its work willingly. Breathe in and out.

Weight, imagine your stored energy in fat cells, being converted, melting, being mobilized to provide extra energy for your body and brain to recover, rebuild, regenerate. Focus the healing, normalizing rays to your fat cells so they readily help the body to restore balance. Breathe in and out.

Water is essential for hydrating every cell so it can do its job efficiently and effectively. Write the word “Love” or “healing” or “gratitude” on a folded paper, making a coaster. Put your water container or glass on that coaster. The water molecules become your healers too when you infuse them with the positive energy of positive words. Direct your healing, normalizing, balancing energy rays to the water in your body too, especially to flush your kidneys.

By harnessing your mind to do your bidding in supporting healing and balancing in your body you can achieve miracles. You can recover, rebuild, regenerate. Take charge or your thoughts. Acknowledge what issues need to be addressed, and put yourself into healing and creative thinking mode to achieve the positive results that will make for a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

If you want more tools for creating health contact me: anna@annamcrobert.com.au
If you want to know and learn more about how to work productively with our body
Register for Touch For Health Workshop on 25 & 26 March by sending an email to: anna@annamcrobert.com.au

Food: Friend or Foe

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Food: Friend or Foe workshop could save a lot of misery for you and your kids. If you want to know which foods are safe and which foods disturb the digestive tract, mess with energy levels, and trigger behavior problems, then this one day course is ideal for you to learn how to quickly and easily test which foods are safe and which are disruptive. That way you can bypass the problems and increase health.

Talking with people recently highlighted some issues around food:
– food reactions are a continuing problem, (worse with holiday treats)
– which foods are your friends and which are a foe?
– how can you choose the best food for your system (not all good food is good for you)
– how can you recognize which food is creating problems (how to pin point them)
– how can you drop the belly fat (expanding more on belly than else where)

Are any of these on your “find the answer” list?
Do you want clear, effective solutions?
Then this can be the most valuable information you’ll come across.

In the workshop coming up I can show you how to:
– identify which food creates which reaction in your body
– pinpoint which foods boost your health and lift your energy
– demonstrate which foods drop your energy and create disturbing symptoms
– find which foods maintain your current state and keep you going

But it doesn’t stop there. I’ll spend 7 hours in a hands-on workshop to train you in a small class, so you get to learn to do this yourself, ask questions and get your answers on the spot. And you’ll get heaps of notes to take away with you.

The topic – Food: Friend or Foe
That’s right, I’ll show you how to identify which food you can trust and which to avoid using kinesiology muscle monitoring, so you can make the right choices for you and have great energy all day.

You see, two of the biggest problems facing people wanting to know what is best for them food wise, is the overwhelming amount of information about food available today, often contradictory, and the time it takes to research and track down what you want to know for your own situation.

There’s lots of piece meal and varied information out there, many options and opinions. But how do you know what is right for you specifically, for your metabolism, for your genetics, for your lifestyle, for your energy level, for you as a unique whole person? And each child will also be uniquely different in their own right as well, so what is right for you may not be right for your child.

When I started searching for answers for myself years ago, everything I read seemed to be written for me and my symptoms, but no matter what I tried, the results weren’t there, I wasn’t getting better. Everything the doctor prescribed added more symptoms. I was still bloated, still starting the day looking and feeling ok to have my belly blow up with fluid and my waistline expand dramatically by lunch time. I was feeling nauseas, even if I didn’t eat or drink. Everything I ate made me feel worse. I felt tired, sick and disillusioned. And I had two young children to care for, one with unresolved health issues.

Where was this fluid that expanded my belly coming from? Why was I feeling nauseas all the time? How come my energy would drain so quickly? Why didn’t the supplements work? Was that the right combination of foods I ate? Am I doing enough? Should I keep going, or should I stop trying this, that, or the other?

And my young son had other issues. He was forever coming down with infections, was on antibiotics regularly, was on medication for asthma, had bowel issues, was exhausted and couldn’t get going in the mornings. He wasn’t enjoying his life and I was stressed watching him suffer.

It took time to find answers, but I did. I studied how the body works, how the nervous system works, how biochemistry works, how it all comes together.

I discovered how to go through information available and sift out what was relevant to my son and myself. I learned how to personalize options presented and address my unique situation. He got better and I got better, thanks to kinesiology muscle monitoring

So, then I could help others too. I have now been running my clinic since 1981, all the while continuing to learn and add to my skills and knowledge. By combining ancient wisdom from traditional cultures, with present day methods, and adding what science is discovering and proving, we can get the best from old and new ways to help the body work efficiently and effectively.

If you want some guidance, for yourself or your children, including:
– insight on how to adjust foods to suit your health better,
– reassurance that you are on the right track,
– gain ability to improve your results,
– to build your confidence with muscle monitoring
– and to trust your body’s ability to indicate your best options,
then you will definitely benefit from attending Food: Friend or Foe workshop
Because you will get the information, see the demonstrations, and learn hands-on how to muscle monitor foods so you can at any time test if foods are friend or foe.

Food: Friend or Foe Workshop
Saturday, 3rd February 2018, 9am to 4pm.
To Register: email me anna@annamcrobert.com.au for details.

How Stress Can Get To You

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We keep hearing that stress is damaging to our health. Actually stress has its place as a motivator, a stimulator to action. But too much of this useful stress becomes distress – now that’s how stress can get to you. So how do you know when you have crossed from stress into distress, from useful stress into destructive stress?

Under extreme or sudden stress various glands are triggered into action and release hormones to deal with the threat, the sudden demand or the overload in our personal world. It’s the body’s automatic reaction that bypasses rational thinking. This is your fight or flight, self-preservation, knee jerk reaction that floods your body with adrenaline (called epinephrine in USA) and cortisol secreted by your adrenal glands along with other hormones.

Adrenaline is produced during high stress or exciting situations. This powerful hormone is part of the body’s acute stress response system, known as fight or flight.

Under stress Adrenaline:
– stimulates the heart rate
– contracts blood vessels
– dilates air passages
– increases flood flow to muscles

Cortisol is one of the hormones that rises rapidly under high stress and is produced by your adrenals, situated on the top of your kidneys. Cortisol is not a bad guy in the system. It is part of regulating normal everyday activities, like getting you out of bed in the morning. Cortisol tends to peak in the morning and decrease as the day progresses. This hormone is essential for life and is high only under high stress, and is low when you are going about your normal daily business in a relaxed state. It rises and falls according to need.

Cortisol regulates:
– how we use fuel, our glucose metabolism
– regulates blood pressure
– regulates insulin release for blood sugar maintenance
– regulates rapid fat and carbohydrate metabolism in emergency
– impacts on immune system balance
– involved in inflammatory response.

Cortisol increases levels of blood sugar to help the body to adapt to changing situations or circumstances that provoke stress, to stand and fight or take off and escape. Cortisol is responsible for about 95% of stress adaption in your body.

When you are relaxed cortisol is low but rapidly increases when you are under stress so its key job is to keep blood sugar levels appropriate during stress and relaxation. The problem can be that when the stress has passed the cortisol levels may stay high for some time. If stress occurs on a regular basis, like daily deadlines and strict time frames, then the cortisol does not have a chance to drop down in the brief moments of relaxation. This can lead to adrenal exhaustion and chronic fatigue, with blood sugar irregularities, immune system deficiencies, anxiety, panic attacks, depression and various degenerative diseases.

Continuous high levels of cortisol can interfere with serotonin and dopamine production, two neurotransmitters that affect mood and sense of well-being.

General Adaption Syndrome – GAS

It’s important to recognize how stress can get to you. Under stress your body has to adjust or adapt and functions differently from your healthy norm. It does the best it can to regain balance within the changed circumstances. This is known as General Adaption Syndrome and has three recognizable phases.

Phase One – Alarm: immediately activates the nervous system and adrenal glands to increase energy for defence or offence.
Phase Two – Resistance: activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the three primary glands that manage our response to stress, often referred to as H-P-A axis. These glands together regulate energy use, immune system activity and digestion. Under stress they instantly increase energy for fight or flight, and reduce energy to immune system and digestion while you are engaged in survival activity in the moment.
Phase Three – Exhaustion or Overload: prolonged stress, or often repeated stress, without opportunity for recovery, leads to breakdown of the weakest body function and dis-ease. The most common diseases in the developed nations of the West are hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, stomach ulcers, neck and back pain, to name a few.

Signs of Stress

Know how stress can get to you. The cause of stress can be physical, mental, emotional, or environmental and the adaption to the stress will involve all these aspects. The body will do the best it can to stay productive and effective under the stress load. But the signs will become evident, not always to your self, but often to others with whom you interact.

Physically the tension in our muscles can increase and we become rigid, with neck, jaw and back pain as a result. Tension headaches are common, as are twitches and tremors and poor sleep. Dry mouth and throat can indicate very low levels of digestive juices for effectively gaining nutrition from your food, and obesity can result from comfort eating and storing instead of burning foods consumed. Bowels become over active or under active, or both in turn. Cold sweaty hands and itchy skin are further indicators, as are increased heart rate, pounding heart, high blood pressure, and shallow breathing.

Mental stress shows as forgetfulness, preoccupation, lack of concentration, diminished productivity, past focused or future obsessed, disorganized, negative view of everything, undermining self talk, loss of meaning of work and life in general.

Emotional signs of stress can be irritability, depression, angry outbursts, anxiety, impatience, narrowed focus, low self-esteem, loss of confidence, inability to make decisions, lack of interest, tendency to cry easily, compulsive thoughts, and feeling a victim. We become angry or fearful.

Behavioural changes include increased alcohol consumption, under or over eating, smoking, withdrawal, carelessness and being accident prone.

To Reduce Stress

Make sure you recognize how stress can get to you so you can stop it and reverse it. Stress diverts energy away from your immune system leaving you vulnerable to health breakdown. Medically prescribed adapaogens have been in common use for stress over the last 50 years but the results are less than favourable with many side effects and long-term problems.

Traditionally herbs from the East and the West have been reliably used in many parts of the world to reduce stress, along with acupuncture, tai chi and various martial arts, meditation and other practices. Psychologists have applied various systems and processes with varying success.

Since the 60s and 70s Kinesiology has provided effective options that allow the body and its nervous system to identify the best way to reduce stress, lift energy, and bring meaning and value back into the events of our days as we each walk our life path.

Also see: 3D “Switch On” for Your Brain http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=289
and Stress Release Process http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118

STRESS, SAM and HPA, What’s That About?

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Stress is blamed for everything now, from forgetfulness to mistakes minor and major, to depression, overweight, poor sleep, emotional meltdown, health breakdown, poor work performance, to relationship breakup. Pioneering doctors of the 1920s to 1940s researched and collated the various symptoms that we now associate with stress, SAM and HPA.

In the late 1930s Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist coined the term “stress” and defined it as “The non specific response of the body to any demand (stressor), whether it is caused by or results in pleasant or unpleasant conditions.” He first wrote about General Adaptation Syndrome, GAS, now generally know as the stress syndrome, in the British journal Nature in 1936.

Walter Cannon in 1932 established that shock or perceived threat quickly release hormones in the body for access to extra energy for survival action. We are designed to either face and attack the enemy or to out run it. Nothing else counts at that moment as all possible energy is diverted to in the moment survival, putting many functions on hold till the stress has gone.

Stress is a natural part of life and cannot be avoided. Stress is experienced when we extend beyond our comfort zone into new territory, be that socially, in our work situation, in questioning our life direction and changing direction.

Stress, physical, mental or emotional, sets off the same reaction in the brain. This reaction is in two parts, the instantaneous flight or flight reaction initiated by amygdala, the SAM axis, and the slower HPA axis triggered by long-term stress. They have opposite symptoms. Stress, SAM and HPA are part of your survival and adaption systems.

SAM – Sympathetic Adrenal Medullary Axis
HPA – Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis

SAM is the super fast fight or flight reaction your amygdala sets into action, totally bypassing any conscious thought process. It’s what happens when driving normally and suddenly a child on the footpath decides to run across the road – without looking – and you slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid hitting the child. That life saving reaction happens in less than the blink of an eye. And you are left with a pounding heart and gulping for breath.

SAM basically reroutes your blood flow to increase your heart rate, feed your brain and the muscles required for action, and limits the activities of parts of your body that are not required in the moment. This reaction settles down once the danger has passed.

HPA on the other hand, is slower in activation and continues to be activated long after the stressor has been removed. Its what happens when you go into “what if I had hit that child,” playing it over and over to the point of being too scared to drive at all.

It is regulated by hypothalamus that sends a hormone to your pituitary gland, both located in the brain, which then sends a hormone to adrenal glands in the body to increase output of cortisol. This is a self regulated system and relies on increasing levels of cortisol produced in the body to feedback to the glands in the brain to suppress the initial hormone cascade. But what if you can’t shut off the thoughts that you nearly killed a child, can’t sleep, can’t eat?

With prolonged stress cortisol initiates breakdown of muscle protein for the liver to convert to essential blood glucose, your brain’s fuel, and for other essential functions to deal with or adjust to the ongoing stress. Cortisol reduces reproductive and immune systems activity until the ongoing stress is resolved, which can be days, weeks, and even years. Stress, SAM and HPA are part of your inbuilt survival and adaption systems.

Who Is At Risk
Any stress you feel is impossible to resolve will keep you in this HPA cycle. This is common with family health carers, those who care for parents with dementia for instance, or for a disabled child. Its common after a failed business venture or marriage breakdown, or dealing with drug addicted teenagers, or post traumatic syndrome of war veterans.

Ask any world class athlete and they will tell you the risk keeping HPA cycle going through over training is very real when the focus is on winning or maintain their world ranking. Over training is a physical as well as mental and emotional stress plus a massive demand on constantly rebuilding the body to keep up with the rigorous training programs.

Even the medical professionals are acknowledging that almost all physical illnesses have mental factors that determine their onset, presentation, maintenance, and susceptibility during illness. Stress, SAM and HPA in active mode means the body is focused on survival with limited resources for recovery from illness.

What’s the Solution

Every body needs recovery time to repair the wear and tear of the day’s activity and life’s stressful experiences. Somehow we need to come to peace with the cards we are dealt in life, change our undermining beliefs and expectations, increase our resilience, adapt and lift our ability to function at our best in varying circumstances, with the least stress possible.

Kinesiology recognizes any imbalance will impact the physical, mental, emotional, biochemical, and spiritual elements of a person and they all need to be addressed and rebalanced for holistic wellness. The body will indicate the path to solutions through muscle response monitoring.

www.annamcrobert.com.au

Exhausted Adrenals

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Do you suspect you are dealing with exhausted adrenals? Here is a test you might like to do for yourself to get some idea of the state of your adrenals so you can choose the professional health advice and support you need to pursue.

Pupil Contraction Test for Exhausted or Under Active Adrenals

Hold a small pencil style flashlight near the outer corner of your eye so the light shines across the eye not straight on into the eye. Watch what happens in a mirror.

A normal reaction is for the pupil, the black part in the middle of your iris, to contract in reaction to the sudden flood of light.

With exhausted adrenals this initial normal reaction does not hold and the pupil will start to dilate again, become larger, letting in more light, the opposite of normal response. The pupil can also fluctuate, dilating and contracting, and then settle remaining dilated. This is an indicator of exhausted adrenals.

The iris responds to varying light conditions. The iris is muscular and contracts in strong light and relaxes to let in more light when in dim or poorly lit situations or outside at night. Like any muscle if your pupil muscle is over worked or exhausted it can’t hold a contraction for long and will need rest to recover.

Time It

If your pupil fluctuates and then dilates and stays that way instead of remaining contracted when you shine a light across your eye, time it. It may take 30 to 45 seconds before it can contract again. This will give you a marker to check against down the track when you have been making adjustments to your stress levels, lifestyle, nutritional needs, rest, sleep and exercise.

Adrenal function extremely low is labeled Addison’s desease and extremely high is Cushing’s disease. They account for the 5% of adrenal abnormalities. The remaining 95% represent adrenal hormone levels considered “normal”. As a result most laboratory tests will indicate “normal” if you are in the 95% range, in spite of any symptoms you may be experiencing that are clearly linked to low adrenal function. And of course, your individual biochemical make is not taken into account or considered in any way.

One of the most authoritative texts in medicine, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, states, “Most hormones have such a broad range of plasma levels within a normal population. As a consequence, the level of a hormone in an individual may be halved or doubled (and thus be abnormal for that person) but still be within the so-called normal range.”

Rebuilding Adrenals and Your Health

Each person’s experiences that lead to exhausted adrenals will be unique. But there are patterns to check to help identify the best way to track the improvement as recovery strategies are applied. How you feel is your most valuable subjective measure as only you live in your body.

Changes in lifestyle, including specific foods to support health and adrenal recovery, adequate rest alternating with gentle and gradually increasing exercise is important, building expectations and harnessing beliefs that promote a future of wellness are keys. Any action that can reduce stress is valuable.

Tuning into the body language of posture and muscle response testing with kinesiology is invaluable to recognize which internal organs and glands are struggling to maintain their health. Boosting them with specific acupuncture points for lymphatic clearance, for circulation improvement, and for meridian energy distribution enhances recovery. Emotional Stress Technique will reduce stress, releasing energy trapped in past experiences and make more energy available for your exhausted adrenals on their journey of recovery.

Your thoughts impact on your brain and body and kinesiology muscle monitoring can identify which thoughts and self talk lifts energy and which drags it down.

For more insights and strategies contact me for a discussion of your situation.
Cheers
Anna

www.annamcrobert.com.au
See Stress Release Process http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118

Tension, Pain, Thinking – What Is The Link?

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Are pain and tension linked to thinking? How? Do we experience physical pain more than mental emotional pain? Is limited body movement and limited thinking inevitable as we age? Which comes first, the body’s lack of flexibility or fixed and limited thinking? Is rigid body and thought pattern a sign of aging? How much of our physical and mental deterioration is our stuck thinking based on childhood belief and expectation? Do you ever ponder these questions?

These are the kind of questions you may not ask yourself until your body is in pain. Then the questions come unbidden. What have I done? How bad is the damage? Am I getting old? Can this be fixed? What do I do to fix it?

So, what do you need to know about your body and aches and pains to stay healthy and to repair readily when there is a mishap, overload or accident? How can you avoid a recurrence of the pain? What do you need to know?

Habits Serve and Shape Us
All of us have habits that serve us well and other habits that get us into trouble or limit our progress. These habits will shape our body, our thinking, our health, our relationships, our joys and our distresses. How can we increase the life enhancing habits and identify and reduce or eliminate the life sapping habits?

Teaching kinesiology and stress managing skills I interact with people of all ages. Some are dealing with young children and want safe and simple techniques to help them. Some are looking to change career or add to their existing health care training. Some have had a health wake-up call and want to make changes. Some are curious about how the body works and want be more aware of the best ways to improve energy and health or to stay healthy as they age. Many are interested in how their thinking influences their body function.

Habits Grow With Us
As we grow older our habitual thoughts and emotions make their stamp more and more visible on the shape of our muscles, our posture, walking gait and range of flexibility in movement. How does this happen?

As a baby, a toddler, a youngster we were curious, instinctively experimented, reached for anything new on our horizon, till we became familiar with what was constantly in our home world. This became our comfort zone, a place to retreat to when outer world was too difficult, too demanding, or too stressful.

In familiar territory we didn’t need to make an effort to master something new. We could switch off, relax, zone out, and do only what was comfortable. Our comfort zone is a useful place to rest and recuperate in but once recovered, got our second wind, we need to venture out again and engage in the unfamiliar, the difficult, the new, to stimulate and expand our ability and capacity. This is our life journey of self-discovery and self development. Along the way we learned to recognize stress and tension.

We Know More Than We Realize
Have you ever looked at a person and thought, “he/she is tense,” even before you spoke with the person. What made you recognize and use the work “tense?” We are often good at reading body language. It’s not an intellectual process but an immediate and instinctive assessment of a person’s current state. We know the signs even if we can’t articulate them.

Chronic anxiety for example, wreaks havoc with muscle tone, tensing muscles not for movement or work activity, but as a reflex to the anxious thoughts. We tighten muscles of the body to create a hard shield against the world, against fear of emotional pain, “holding our self together” physically, in an effort to counter or avoid the emotional “melt down” or to prevent “falling apart”.

Our Language Reveals Our Knowing
The common expressions in our language are metaphors highlighting just how familiar this experience is for many of us, either living in anxiety our self or recognizing it in others. Chronic anxiety can set our body tone and over time becomes our habit and our norm to the degree that when our muscles are not tense we “don’t feel our self”. It becomes part of our internal feedback system and self-image and we only recognize self through the anxiety produced body posture, tension, aches and pains.

Our entire history is progressively recorded in our muscles. Each stage of development of physical and mental habits is the foundation for further postural habits that reflect the impact of life events and how we coped.

As the years go by the stress patterns bow us, bind us, trap us in degenerative habits within ever narrower ranges of comfortable activity. We avoid what is not comfortable, what stretches our capacity because it’s uncomfortable. With narrower ranges of extension and flexibility we lose power and strength and become narrower in our range of thinking and effort and connection with our outer world.

Awareness Opens Solution Options
Without awareness of this process happening we make no attempt to slow, stop or reverse this linked mental and physical decline. Releasing the limited muscle range can also release the mind’s range of thought, allowing for new mental exploration, for creative invention, and shifting our view to new or different possibilities to engage in for fun or interest or other benefit.

Various styles of hands-on bodywork like massage and kinesiology address the body/mind habitual patterns, releasing stress held in the physical tissues caused by our challenges, anxieties and fears. Bodywork is not just physical, it also moves the stuck energy patterns and supports the release of body/mind tension.

Regular Body Care
A regular appointment for de-stressing the physical and mental/emotional body accumulations is anti aging and health and energy preserving. Regular muscle and energy rebalancing prevents habits becoming dis-ease. As your body loosens under the influence of caring hands so does your thinking and your interest and choice of activities that you can include in your life regularly.

Attend a workshop in Touch For Health Kinesiology to learn safe and effective stress reducing skills for tension, pain and thinking. Your health and life can become better with Touch For Health Kinesiology.

Why is Good Sleep Essential?

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We all know good sleep makes the difference between having a good day and coping with everything that happens or collapsing under the demands of a day’s events. And being sleep deprived increases pain intensity. Good sleep serves many purposes that contribute to physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, both short term and long term. In fact, good sleep is essential.

Sleep and Problem Solving
It’s no accident that a good night’s sleep often provides solutions to problems. While worrying or fretting about an issue the answers just don’t seem to come. Once you finally give up stressing and trying to resolve it and go to sleep, your subconscious has an unimpeded opportunity to put together the solutions, and you wake with the answer. That is a common experience.

Sleep and Brain and Body Maintenance
A good night’s sleep allows your body to repair the wear and tear of the day and to rebuild energy reserves. And it is also the time your brain sorts the day’s activities and files the experiences into your longer-term memory banks for later retrieval. Our dreams appear to be part of that process and are essential to mental and emotional wellbeing.

Sleep and Brain Function
Sleep deprivation results in fatigue, contributes to human error related accidents, misjudgments, poor focus, memory lapses, personality changes, thought disorders, depression and other mental disorders.

Scientific studies show that sleep is as important to health and wellbeing as diet and exercise. If you’ve had a good night’s sleep you handle all kinds of stress far more effectively in your daily waking hours.

So how much does poor sleep contribute to poor health and degenerative diseases?

Sleep and Diabetes
Eve Van Cauter, PhD, reported at the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting, that people who regularly do not get enough sleep can become less sensitive to insulin. This increases their risk for diabetes and high blood pressure, both serious threats to the brain and to health in general.

Sleep and Age Related Ailments
Previous work by Dr Van Cauter, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, found that, “Metabolic and endocrine changes resulting from a significant sleep debt mimic many of the hallmarks of aging. We suspect that chronic sleep loss may not only hasten the onset but could also increase the severity of age-related ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and memory loss.”

Sleep and Cortisol
Researchers have found impaired sleep results in increased cortisol levels, and decreased levels in growth hormone. This drop in growth hormone is associated with an increase of fatty tissue, weakened immunity, and a decline in general health. As people age the quality and quantity of their sleep is diminished, so the cortisol levels rise compromising their immune system. This may be the cause of many diseases associated with aging, including impaired memory.

Sleep and Middle Age
“The increased prevalence of insomnia in middle-age may, in fact, be the result of deteriorating sleep mechanisms associated with increased sensitivity to arousal-producing stress hormones such as corticotropin-releasing hormone and cortisol,” Dr Alexandros Vgontzas and colleagues suggest. It seems it’s not just that middle-aged people worry more, but a disorder of sustained hyper-arousal of the body’s stress response system. What that means is that in middle age when you are all stirred up it just takes longer to settle down.

Sleep and Cancer
Dr David Spiegel of Stanford University has been conducting studies into how sleep and cancer can be related. He concludes that sleep problems actually alter the balance of at least two hormones, cortisol and melatonin, that influence cancer cells.

Cortisol is an adrenal hormone with two jobs. It is part of the stress response and kicks in dramatically when your “alarm bells” go off and you need to be extra alert. And cortisol is also a normal part of day and night rhythms of you body. Cortisol governs your level of wakefulness, reaching its peak early morning to get you up and moving for the day. It declines as the day goes along, being lowest in the evening so you can rest, relax and sleep.

Cortisol is vital to the regulation of the immune system, including the release of “killer cells” that destroy cancer cells.
Melatonin, produced by the brain when you sleep, is one of the strongest antioxidants that helps prevent damage to cells that can lead to cancer. Lack of restful sleep goes with too little melatonin and higher estrogen, which is linked with breast cancer in particular.
“The bottom line of this report is that there is enough information to take seriously the idea that how our bodies respond to cancer is influenced by more than just the surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. It can be influenced by stress and sleep, and these are two pieces in the puzzle that shouldn’t be overlooked,” says Len Lichtenfeld, MD, of the American Cancer Society. We are getting closer to mainstream medicine becoming more holistic in its view of illness and disease.

Sleep and Children’s Behaviour
A Northwestern University study of 500 preschoolers found that those who slept less than 10 hours in a 24 hour period, including daytime naps, were 25% more likely to misbehave. They were more likely to be aggressive, oppositional or uncooperative.
The research shows that sleep disturbances in children are also associated with health disturbances, like allergies, ear infections and hearing problems, and also with social adaption.

Bottom Line is – Good Sleep Is Essential
So no matter what your age, through out your life, good restful and recuperative sleep is important to physical, mental, emotional and social wellbeing. Kinesiology balancing can help to make good sleep possible.
Cheers
Anna

Holistic Approach for Holistic Health

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It’s happening. What has been so obvious to natural therapy practitioners all along, the essential need take a holistic approach for holistic health, of treating the person and the body as a whole, is progressively being acknowledged and validated by universities, scientists and researchers. Health comes with respect for the whole person, the physical, biochemical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects, and better education to understand and meet needs holistically.

Medical interventions have focused on symptoms and block those with drugs, and they see detrimental side effects as an acceptable payoff, which they countered with further drugs. This does not create a healthy population, just drug dependant people. Side effects of multiple drugs are creating as many problems as they relieve. There is no possibility of cure or wellness in this.

Lifestyle diseases remain the leading cause of death in Australia. These are the diseases that are largely preventable by changing lifestyle factors. Australian Bureau of Statistics lists heart disease as the most prevalent, followed by strokes. Diabetes 2 has increased dramatically, and liver disease is climbing the ranks as cause of death.

Research is showing some cancers too are related to life style. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer. Poor diet is associated with bowel cancer. High blood pressure increases chance of heart attacks, stroke, and kidney disease. Being obese doubles your chances of developing all these diseases. Excessive alcohol consumption is leading cause of liver disease. The list goes on. Lifestyle diseases are on the increase world-wide.

I read, “The University of Sydney’s new centre will deliver coordinated education and research in basic sciences, biomedical sciences, nutrition and exercise science, coupled with clinical and community studies.
”

The University of Sydney is taking a more holistic approach for holistic health insights, and acknowledges, “Environmental, social, economic, and behavioural factors are all involved in the increasing prevalence of lifestyle diseases, all against a background of biologic mechanisms and genetic susceptibilities.” This is quoted from the website of University of Sydney.

As human beings it is essential we to take a holistic approach for holistic health, and take care of all health issues by integrating knowledge from all areas of understanding, traditional and modern. Scientists are providing more and more research to prove what we logically and instinctively already know and that natural therapies have always encouraged.

The physical body is designed for movement and functions at its best when we exercise, and it willingly responds with increased circulation and oxygen uptake, and increased muscle tone and mass, and increased physical fitness. Exercise enhances mental fitness too.
The biochemical body thrives on nourishing food, including water, with abundant energy at cell level for organ function and increased sense of wellbeing.

Holistic Approach for Holistic Health
Just exercising and eating well is not enough without also including how we think and feel. We also need to care for the mental, emotional and spiritual body. The brain generously builds brand new neural networks when we engage in new interests, in new learning of any kind, and effectively maintains the networks we actively engage regularly. Brain networks fall apart, actually disintegrate, when they are not stimulated by regular activation. Use it or lose it is a fact, not just a game with words.

Emotionally satisfying relationships in our personal world and our work world, with family, friends and colleagues, are essential to our emotional wellbeing. A life of meaning and opportunity to contribute our strengths, skills, knowledge, insights and energy is a basic emotional and spiritual need.

We know that constant, unrelieved stress is energy sapping and soul destroying. It squeezes the life out of our dreams and de-motivates and de-presses. Stress relieving strategies are important in our tool box for daily life.
(see links to previous articles giving stress reducing strategies at end of article)

The Emotional Body
Learn to communicate with your important people, your spouse, siblings, children, and extended family in a way that nurtures relationships. Become fascinated by how different we all are, even coming from the same parents and raised in the same environment. Discover the strengths in each person and explore what each holds dear. Doing a course like The Dynamic Communication Program can introduce you to ways to see and understand the world through your own eyes and through the eyes of those your value.

Socialize to keep your emotional brain healthy. We are designed to interact with our own species. Interacting with people opens doors to new experiences, fresh ideas, and different worlds. This builds new brain networks as face-to-face discussions and connections link parts of the brain and touch the heart in very special ways.

There is an energy exchange that can boost your wellbeing in ways a text message or email cannot. This is already showing up now as a lack of empathy and compassion in our up-coming generation of computer and mobile obsessed youngsters. Reduced focus of learning with and through others allows disregard for their impact on others wellbeing. This disregard leads to bullying, physical aggression, to criminal activity, and harm to others property. Only people with no interest, concern, or regard for others, no feeling of connection to others, can deliberately harm another. Socializing, sharing interests, being a part of interacting circles keeps us aware and mindful of behaviours and the ongoing impact. Only self centered, unconnected people can plot to cause distress.

The Mental Body
Learn something new. Take up a sport, learn to play a musical instrument, plan a trip where you will be exposed to new language and customs, learn the language basics. Learn a craft. Start tracing your family tree. Get curious and explore something new.
All these will build new brain networks ands stimulate new brain cell production. Your brain does regularly birth new cells, but with no new activity they have nowhere to belong. With no “family” to include them, to train them for a task and include them in an active circuit, they die. (see links at end to my articles on new brain cells)

Relax and rejuvenate – breathe, meditate, spin and weave, do pottery, paint, garden, sing, walk, dance – all reduce stress, change gear, shift thought patterns, quieten the Left brain chatter and allow the Right brain to dominate for a little while. Peace lives in the right brain.
Words live in left brain hemisphere so when you shift to right brain focus you find greater awareness of colours, shapes, textures, patterns, rhythms, relationships, connections, within your self and with nature. Enjoy and absorb the right brain experience. If you are engaged in brain chatter, self talk, you are engaging in Left brain.

Singing will engage more R brain, toning, singing non-word sounds, puts you further into Right Brain. Here is where you experience peace, joy, belonging in a world of vibrational energy, in sync with self and your world, present in the moment.

You Can Do It
You are not doomed to dis-ease nor do you have to “lose your marbles”. You can honour the amazing service your body and brain provide, and keep all your marbles and even add to them.

Take a holistic approach for holistic health. To enhance and maintain wellness of body and soul: exercise to improve circulation, breathe, drink water, be grateful, eat colourful foods, communicate and connect with family, socialize, learn something new, relax and rejuvenate, exercise, sleep and let your body recover from the day’s wear and tear.

You can do it. Create and live a holistic wellness life style.
Cheers
Anna

PS.
See http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=118 Stress Release Process
and http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=336 Shift Your Focus
See http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=271 New Brain Cells On Demand
and http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=278 Exercise Rescues Baby Brain Cells

Walking – 50 Benefits in 7 Categories

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Walking has many benefits for the body and brain, heart and soul.
Below is a list of 50 benefits in 7 categories:
physical benefits, health benefits, nutritional benefits, emotional benefits, mental and creative benefits, electro-magnetic benefits, economic benefits, and more.

Physical Benefits:
– low impact form of exercise
– gentle on joints and your whole spine
– improves flexibility
– is a cross patterning movement to improve co-ordination
– start at own pace to match fitness level
– easy to control increase of intensity, distance and frequency
– stimulates body-brain communication
– improves recovery from injury and surgery
– resets muscle use after trauma
– integrates healed muscles into team work again
– improves fitness
– increases lung capacity
– builds spare capacity for emergency activity

Health Benefits:
– speeds healing
– good for cardiovascular fitness
– can assist in lowering blood pressure
– reduces cholesterol
– improves bone density
– reduces risk of osteoporosis
– improves sleeping patterns
– assists in weight loss
– increase energy
– strengthens your immune system
– reduces risk of cancer
– increases lymphatic clearance of cellular waste
– gets you outside regularly
– extends life

Nutritional Benefits:
– increases oxygen intake
– improves digestion and elimination
– better nutrient assimilation
– allows exposure to sunshine and vitamin D
– draws attention to need for hydration and increasing water intake

Emotional Benefits:
– lowers stress levels
– elevates mood
– releases feel good hormones as you walk
– settles the mind
– is meditative
– can be shared

Mental and Creative Benefits:
– stimulates left and right brain integration
– encourages whole brain thinking and creativity
– aids problem solving
– activates new brain cells
– builds brain circuits

Electro-Magnetic Benefits:
– barefoot on wet grass or wet sand is grounding
– barefoot will discharge build up of positive ions in body
– barefoot will absorb negative ions from the Earth’s field

Economic Benefits:
– very economical as is free, just get good walking shoes
– cheaper than any gym
– keeps you healthy so saves on medical bills
– is insurance for healthy later years

I totally believe if you appreciate and honour your body’s intelligence, do what keeps your body well, provide quality food as fuel and building material, and take charge of your thoughts, beliefs and expectations, your body can then be your willing and able servant all your years so you can have the life your choose and love the life you have.
Einstein explained, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” So keep walking.
Cheers
Anna

PS See Article: Walking Benefits Body & Brain, Heart & Soul http://annamcrobertblog.com/?p=349

Energy Medicine


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Chinese Traditional Medicine, the use of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs over thousands of years, has gradually become more accepted, even among doctors. Acupuncture uses needles made of two different metals. These are inserted into the body at specific points, depending on the health state of the person in need, and act as electrical conductors to help the body discharge or redistribute blocked energy or recharge depleted energy. This is energy medicine.

Kinesiology

A whole new branch of energy medicine sprang into being in the 1960s combining the knowledge of the Chinese meridian energy system with Western understanding of anatomy and physiology. This became Applied Kinesiology.
Chiropractor George Goodheart created Applied Kinesiology when he combined his knowledge of the body and muscle systems with meridian energy influence on internal organ function. He also added the work of Chapman and Bennett to activate lymphatic waste clearance and influence blood circulation.

John Thie, fellow student and colleague of George Goodheart, assembled key strategies for muscle and meridian balancing and made this health care system available to lay people the world over. And so Touch For Health kinesiology was born and did its part to help more than 10 million people in over 40 countries since early 1970s.

People round the world have learned the ever-growing variations of Kinesiology and applied their new found knowledge at home, in the playground and in class rooms, in offices and in clinics. This has been one of the fastest expansions in natural therapies and over 120 different specializations of Kinesiology have developed worldwide in the last 40 years.

Power in Your Hands

Can you imagine how powerful it is to be able to settle down stress reactions, lift tiredness, lighten your mood and reduce your pain, all by touching a few points that change the energy flow in your body. Energy Medicine was revered by our ancestors and continues to be a blessing in our times. And science is progressively discovering why and how it works, giving it credibility in the eyes of more and more of the world’s population.

Touch For Health and Three In Once Concepts kinesiology have proven to be valuable foundation programs for every day folk to gain a personal experience of the life changing impact of moving energy in their body. It is a most wonderful experience to be all het up about some issue, or feel anxious about a coming event, and have that just dissolve with an energy balance.

A shift in energy can change emotional wellbeing, can strengthen internal organ function, can increase tolerance to a larger range of foods, can make relationships flow more smoothly. As stress dissolves our natural nature of curiosity, imagination, inventiveness and problem solving comes to the fore. I encourage everyone to attend at least one Touch For Health or Three In One Concepts workshop.

First Hand Experience

I wouldn’t tell you to go and learn Touch For Health if I hadn’t proved the benefits first hand. I proved it to myself first by helping my son get better when doctors said surgery was the only way to go. This was a drastic and distressing option, yet watching him suffer and have a restricted life was even more distressing. If you are a parent you might relate to what I was going through at the time.

What is it that helps you know whether you should find another way for you or your child to be well? You don’t have to decide now, I told myself. We took time out as a family and eventually decided I would continue learning Kinesiology and use that to help my son. And he gradually got better. Where doctors saw no way of strengthening his genetic weakness, nutritional supplements, herbs and kinesiology worked the miracle I was praying for. This is the every day miracle of the body’s capacity to self heal when given the right internal conditions.

Touch For Health Workshops 

So why is it that some people don’t see the value of discovering and learning how to bring out the best in themselves, the best in their body, the best in their mind, the best in their children? Touch For Health does just that, with simple, easy to apply techniques that activate the body energy systems and turn health issues around gently. Would you like to see better energy and health levels? Would you like to feel more energetic and vibrant? Would you like to help others feel better too?
I don’t know if signing up now is what you want to do. Would you like to see more about Touch For Health kinesiology and its benefits? Would it surprise you to know that you don’t need to have any background in health or how the body works to learn Touch For Health and get results straight away?

Imagine what would happen if you knew how to activate the body communications systems and enhance cell repair programs, increase energy, support the body’s healing mechanism, reduce stress, improve posture and stop pain.
The body is very willing to respond if you know how to communicate with its balancing programs. That’s what Touch For Health can teach you.

The next Touch For Health introductory Workshop is coming up 4th & 5th February 2012. Reserve your place now. Lock in your commitment before Christmas gets you side tracked.

Go to the Touch For Health notice with this December News and sign up now. As soon as the kids are back at school in 2012 its your time to learn how to empower your kids and yourself too, using the TFH strategies for health, for learning difficulties, for stress relief, for food testing, for sports performance.


Sign up now. You’ll be glad you did.

Cheers

Anna