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

Facial Expressions Convey Feelings

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We know facial expressions convey feelings. Key facial expressions are universally recognized as expressing specific feelings or emotions, whether you are young or old, from the city or country, from developed nations or the untamed jungle.

We form impressions of the people we encounter. We take in their posture, their gait, their gestures, and we see their facial expressions. All contribute to conveying their energy levels and their feelings.

Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of inferences and insights about what that person is thinking or feeling.

When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that afterwards, even though they may have spoken in a normal and friendly manner, we may say, “Something’s not right there,” or “I don’t think she’s very happy.”

What is it that we instinctively recognize? What are we reading on an unconscious level that gives us a sense of other emotions underlying the seemingly polite and socially acceptable facial expression? Is it real or is it put on?

When we get it right and read the facial expression accurately it helps us understand where the person is at, be appropriate to build rapport and interact effectively. When we get it wrong and misread the facial expressions, this can easily lead to misunderstandings, hurt feelings, accusations, arguments and disagreements.

Silvan Tomkins worked as a handicapper for a horse racing syndicate during the Depression. He spent hours staring at horses through binoculars. Tomkins believed that faces, even the faces of horses, held valuable clues to inner emotions and motivations, and he learned how to predict behaviour and outcomes from his observations.

He had a system for predicting how a horse would do in a race, based on what horse was on either side of him, and on their emotional relationship. His prediction rates were impressive and lucrative. If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would do poorly if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the line up.

Tomkins was honing his ability to read facial expressions and graduated in Psychology at University of Pennsylvania.

Charles Darwin noted in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: ” ...the young and old people of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.”

Silvan Tomkins later did his postdoctoral studies in Philosophy at Harvard and joined the Psychological Clinic staff in 1937. He went on to teach psychology at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology and Rutgers and became a much quoted author.

Over the years his ability to read faces and the emotions that created the facial expressions became renowned. He could say what crimes various fugitives had committed from looking at their police photos, could pick people who were lying on TV shows, watched interviews of political candidates, including Bill Clinton, and could give predictions of the outcomes.

So what was it that Silvan Tomkins could see and read accurately in faces? What does our facial expression relay to others? Why would a past win or lose experience, or which horse is in the next box, make a difference to the performance of a horse at a race? How does all this relate to humans?

These are some of the questions we explore in Dynamic Communications Program to uncover the secrets how facial expressions communicate emotions and how you can benefit by reading faces accurately.

Join the Program now and get access to more insights to increase your awareness . When you join the Program you’ll be excited with the results you’ll achieve because it will benefit you, your business, and your family in ways you can’t imagine – till you attend.

If you missed the start date on 29th April find out how to catch up. Contact me straight away by email: anna@annamcrobert.com.au
Cheers
Anna

Facial Muscles Express Feelings AND Create Feelings

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If facial muscles express feelings AND create feelings, then can we choose how we want to feel and arrange our face muscles so we feel joy instead of sadness, peace instead of anger, confidence instead of fear? Is that possible?

Paul Ekman is a psychologist, researcher and author, and is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relationship to facial expressions. He showed that facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal across human cultures and thus biological in origin. This was contrary to the widely held view in the anthropology world prior to his work.

How did he decide that these facial expressions communicate the same emotion no matter where you were raised?

In early 1960s Paul Ekman was a young psychologist just out of graduate school. He was Silvan Tomkins’ pupil in studying faces and had completed his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Adelphi University, New York in 1958. Ekman traveled to Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, to remote tribes in jungles in Papua New Guinea, carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive facial expressions. To his amazement everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant.

The universal expressions Ekman tested over many cultures are:
fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise.

Ekman proved that Tomkins was right and facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal across human cultures and so are biological in origin.

Babies as young as two weeks old smile at the sound of their mother’s voice. Within a few months a baby will pull faces and show disgust in reaction to bitter or sour tastes. Even blind or disabled children smile with happiness, show disgust, cry, glare with anger.

Facial Muscles Express Feelings and Create Feelings
When Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen were working on expressions of anger and disgust they had an unexpected experience leading to new insights. They were cataloging which muscles were involved in various facial expressions. This meant making those expressions themselves, over and over, while watching in the mirror and watching each other.

“What we discovered is that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system. When this first occurred, we were stunned. We weren’t expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us. We felt terrible,” reports Ekman.

They were actually experiencing the emotions as they repeatedly made the facial expressions as they learned to activate one muscle at a time and then groups of muscles for more complex emotions. When generating the facial expression of anger the heartbeat went up by ten to twelve beats, circulation increased in the hands, which become really hot. This was stunning to the scientists.

Pulling Faces Increases Heart Rate
To check their findings, Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen and Robert Levenson set up an experiment with volunteers hooked up to monitors for measuring their heart rate and body temperature. Half the volunteers were asked to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half of the volunteers were told which muscles to activate, to pull faces, to create the facial expressions that corresponded to emotions, such as anger, sadness and fear.

The results showed the second group of people, who were pulling faces, arranging their muscles without specific emotional input, registered the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group who were recalling a particularly stressful experience. Voluntarily “putting on” an expression can actually create the associated emotional reaction in the body, and of course, change the biochemistry too.

The findings clearly point to the two-way nature of emotions. We can be chatting easily and with pleasure over a coffee, till someone mentions a specific topic or person or event that is stressful to us, and immediately the emotional reaction kicks in, changes the facial expression and activates the physiology of the body.

We have all experienced that at some time in our life. “Why did you have to bring that up? I was having a pleasant time till then.” The reaction comes unbidden, and totally displaces the pleasure of the chat. No doubt the face muscles say it all, even without the words. But we can also start with a particular facial expression and the physiology of our body will change to match. That’s worth checking out for yourself. It’s actually a powerful self help strategy in times of need.

Which Comes First
You could expect that the experience, feeling let down, rejected or disappointed, tired or exhausted, all associated with a drop of energy, would came first, then the hang-dog facial look to express the emotional feeling follows almost instantaneously. But if you feel fine and spend time with a depressed friend or family member and show your concern and rapport by mirroring their expression you could end up feeling as low as they do. Uugg!

Whichever comes first, if we keep holding the hang-dog look we keep feeling low. The face is communicating the emotional state and it’s also creating and maintaining that low feeling. It becomes self-perpetuating. If we can create the feeling, can we un-create it? Can we put on a smile and change our biochemistry? Is this a case of fake it till you make it?

The Solution
One thing is for sure. In terms of Chinese meridian system, activating and using different muscles in the face and body will help to promote meridian energy flow needed for change. And of course, if you don’t move your face muscles, you are not pumping the circulation to bring oxygen and nutrients to face cells, nor clearing the lymphatic wastes products, so tissues progressively more stagnant.

A Touch For Health Goal Balance can support making the shift from low energy to higher energy and better lymphatic flow. Facial Harmony also is a gentle way to release emotions held in the face muscles. Make an appointment to experience the shift for yourself.
Cheers
Anna

Communication in Challenging Situations

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We are indeed remarkable beings. But that doesn’t mean its plain sailing or easy at times. Each of us is here to learn, earn, grow, achieve, contribute, within our local community, and beyond on a broader basis. And through all life experiences communication in challenging situations can easily create rifts and emotional pain.

No doubt you have discovered that often it is within our family situation that we have our greatest challenges. But as we master relationships and communications at home we often have the template to contribute at school, at work, and with people of varied cultures from round the world.

One of our biggest challenges is to create harmony and mutual growth among family members. Each person will have their own values and priorities at various stages of life. And also, we start with genetically built in preferences and behaviours, which further complicates matters to the n-th degree at times.

We are familiar with opposites:
– introvert versus extravert
– talks constantly versus rarely speaks
– lots of detail versus bottom line
– never gets to the point verses only sees a point in the point.

When there is no one else to consider, we suit ourselves of course. There is no need for conflict and negotiations. However at work we need to consider the team and harness everyone’s effort to pull in the same direction at the same time, at least some of the time.
It’s the same at home. Some tasks or projects will be a group effort and require group co-operation, working as a family team with a reward the whole family appreciates. Some projects will be for self, for self-expression, for self-exploring, for self-development, to then bring what you learn into the team to the benefit of all.

So what do you do when you feel answering questions or including others needs feels like an imposition, a waste of your time, an intrusion, or unproductive?

I guess it depends on the purpose and who is being fulfilled:
– you yourself by getting on with what suits you
– or the person you want to encourage to increase their confidence
– or the person with whom you want to cement your bond.

It takes a conscious choice in the specific situation. You choose whose fulfillment is the priority to you at the time, in that circumstance, the spouse or partner, the child, the friend, or colleague, the boss or yourself. You get to choose, once you are aware there is a choice.
And also, you will be responsible for the consequences of your choice, that is the outcome that follows from the choice you made on which behaviour to adopt. One of the simplest ways to handle this kind of situation is to include the other party in your truth.

“I’m in a conflict here. I can see what you want to have happen and I have a different preference from you. So I’m not sure how to proceed so we can both be OK. Can you see a way to make it work for both of us?”
Or
“As much as I can relate to what you would like to have happen, right now I have a different priority and can’t accommodate your need this time. Can you cope with that for now? We can have another look at options a little down the track.”
Or
“I see what you are wanting. I have a different preference for myself, but to achieve our common goal, I am prepared to go your way. If the circumstances change I may come back to this point again and reconsider options. Is that OK?”

The Dynamic Communication Program specifically tackles those tricky occasions when having a deeper insight and effective strategies engaged from a balanced state can turn potential disaster into a win/win outcome.

Learn the magic of having the right tool for the right moment. Be at The Dynamic Communications Program and discover how communication in challenging situations can flow smoothly and productively.

If you missed the start date on 29th April find out how to catch up. Contact me straight away by email: anna@annamcrobert.com.au
Cheers
Anna

The Face Is A Goldmine Of Communication

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Silvan Tomkins, psychologist, personality theorist, author, with a PhD in Philosophy, believed that faces held valuable clues to inner emotions and motivations and could predict behaviour.

Paul Ekman, a pupil of Tomkins, found the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. He claimed the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind, it actually is what is going on in our mind. The facial expression is a goldmine of communication, both conscious and unconscious.

The key universal emotions, validated by Ekman’s research with people from different cultures round the world, are fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise.

So we are likely to recognize each of these facial expressions of feelings, but there are time when the facial expression and what we say do not match, because what we are saying is not what we are feeling.

What Happens When We Lie
Put simply, there are times we lie. Whether it is just wanting to be polite, or to cover up a mistake or to avoid creating a scene, facial expressions can give it all away, without your even knowing it. You might say, “Thank you, that was lovely,” or “Nice meeting you,” when you don’t feel that at all.

Whenever you experience a basic key emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face – it’s involuntary so can betray what you want to hide. That expression may be on your face for just a fraction of a second, just a flash. You may immediately use your voluntary muscles to try to suppress the involuntary reaction when you want to hide our true feelings, but the truth is already out.

Ekman reported on facial micro-expressions which could be used to assist in lie detection. Videos slowed down to frame-by-frame viewing clearly capture the fleeting involuntary facial expression that betrays the automatic reaction and the immediate recovery using consciously controlled muscles to hide the existence of the original expression.

That micro expression may be too fast for most viewers to pick out consciously but the amazing thing is that the subconscious can and does register it. That’s why we can get a sense that something is not right, not congruent, even if we can’t put our finger on why we have that feeling. So pay attention to your instincts on this. Your instincts can be spot on.

Dr David Craig wrote Lie Catcher and collated just what to look for to pick when someone is lying to you. Developing your eye to notice key tell tale signs can make all the difference between being taken for a ride or getting someone you can trust in a business deal, between knowing when your kids are going to visit friends versus slipping into town, or hiring the right person for the job who can do what they say they can. David Craig’s book provides clear photos of the facial expressions and body language that are a give away when all is not as open and honest in communications as others would have your believe.

And it may make you more aware of your own facial expressions too. When you are in two minds about something, it can show. When you are holding something back, it can show. When you are covering up, it can show. The face is a goldmine of communication and honesty may well be the best policy.

We are not always aware of our expression, yet others observing us can notice. “You look upset,” may be countered with “I’m not upset, just thinking,” and quickly the topic is changed to distract from further prying. So what we may think was hidden from others may not be so.

An incongruent reply, where the face and body language say one thing and the words another, can throw doubt on your truthfulness, create distrust in communications, and block open and effective communication from there on. Your facial muscles express feelings and create feelings that are real.

How can you avoid creating distrust, and how can you repair the damage and continue to build rapport? These questions can be answered in the Dynamic Communications Program. Attend now and learn more
.
If you missed the start date on 29th April find out how to catch up. Contact me straight away by email: anna@annamcrobert.com.au or phone 07-3378 2050
Cheers
Anna

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.

Emotional Stress Release for Stress and Muscle Tension

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It is natural for muscles to tense up when there is stress on line. It is also natural for muscles to release and relax when you are not in stress. So tension can come and go with different ups and downs of life. Muscle tension is how your body tells you that you need to do something to change what is going on so you are not wearing yourself out or making yourself sick.

Trouble is we often don’t recognize that we are carrying stress as muscle tension. Because it can be such an every day part of life it feels “normal”. We are often hurrying to get things done, get kids off to school, be on time, arrange events, keep appointments, complete work tasks, plan projects, or whatever. We may be dreading some coming meeting. We may have stirred up old fears. Our thinking and self-talk can easily reinforce stress and make it all worse.

Some people are habitual worriers and always stressed to some degree, and it shows in their muscle tension. Our muscles can be 75% contracted and that tension can still be out of our conscious awareness, till someone touches a tight muscle and we become aware it is hard as a rock. Or we are snappy or irritable and realize we are “holding our self together” with muscle tension.

So once you are aware of muscle tension, or stress, or worry, you can consciously choose to do something about it. Sometimes it is when there are headaches, or shallow breathing, or tight chest, or some other symptoms that finally you have to take the time to deal with the cumulative effects of daily stress.

When you realize muscles are tight you can take the tension out of the tight muscles with Emotional Stress Release, a technique from Touch For Health Kinesiology, as a first step to reduce muscle tension.

For Example, you may have been rushing to get things done before closing time. Following is what you can do to ease muscle tension gently.

Emotional Stress Release technique for Stress & Muscle Tension

First is always to acknowledge what is, the truth of your current experience.

Place one hand across your forehead and say to yourself:
1. “My muscles are tense, and my breathing is shallow and tight. (breathe in & out).
2. “I can feel the tension as I focus on it and realize my breathing is tense too. (breathe in & out).
3. “I recognize the tension has been building for a while.” (breathe in & out).
4. “The tension is adding to my tiredness / irritability / muddle-head feeling / etc.” (breathe in & out).

Acknowledge till the tension in your thoughts and your body starts to reduce and your breathing becomes a bit easier. You may need to repeat steps 1 to 4 a couple of times. Be sure to pay attention to your breathing between each statement. You may notice the warmth increasing under your hand on your forehead. That’s a good sign.

Next accept what is.

5. “Its not surprising there is tension in my muscles, its been a busy time, I’ve been rushing.” (breathe in & out).
6. “I’ve got some things done and there’s more to go.” (breathe in & out).
7. “I’ll be glad when its done.” (Breathe in & out)

Notice as more of the tension leaves, your voice becomes less harried, your body eases and your breath slows down.

Next look forward to when you will be more at ease.

8. “The more efficiently I get it done the sooner I can wind down.” (breathe in & out).
9. “Then I’ll have a cup of tea / glass of wine / ring a friend / smell the roses / or whatever.

The stress goes down as you acknowledge the problem, accept it, and look forward to when its over and dealt with. You have diverted your brain blood flow away from stress survival program area to problem solving front brain.

I may not have covered your particular cause of muscle tension so I hope you can get the idea of the process that you can apply to your situation. There are more techniques in Touch For Health Kinesiology you can use to help yourself.

Let me know how you go with this.
Cheers
Anna

PS. Emotional Stress Release was covered in a recent Touch For Health 1 workshop presenting several ways to rebalance stress and tension. Contact me for more on theses workshops.

Patti wrote: “Thanks so much for the wonderful learning experience, I thoroughly enjoyed it and am so looking forward to our next course.”

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.
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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

Maintain Your Brain – Keep Your Marbles In Good Shape

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We all dread “losing our marbles” as we age. Watching someone you love with Alzheimer’s disease progressively deteriorate before your eyes is heart breaking. But even if it runs in your family, it’s not inevitable. Watching others decline is a great incentive to maintain your brain and keep your marbles in good shape.

Dr Bruce Lipton in his book The Biology of Belief presents his scientific research and clearly shows we are not the victims of our genes. The environment we create in the cells will determine which part of our genetic blueprint we turn on. We have a choice. We do not have to turn on a weakness or activate a tendency. We are not doomed to dis-ease.

Yet some people are definitely doomed to disease, often by their own making and lack of interest and knowledge. But for most of us, no, we are not doomed to disease, if we take charge of our wellness. Thank goodness we can learn from those who go before us, can choose to adjust our course of action, and reap the benefits from what we have learned and applied.

“For years, scientists thought that Alzheimer’s was primarily genetic,” said Gary Wenk, professor of neuroscience at Ohio State University. “We now believe that, while there’s a genetic component, Alzheimer’s is primarily a lifestyle disease.”

Science is proving that lifestyle diseases are our major causes of decline and death. Diseases are linked to wear and tear faster than repair and attempted repair going haywire. Why is that? It’s becoming clear that decline is about stresses we create, physical stress, mental and emotional stress, and nutritional stress. We are not paying enough attention to what the body requires to stay well.

Our cellular environment needs to be conducive to healthy cell repair and replacement to avoid setting up dis-ease and declining function. Being overweight, inactive, eating a poor diet, and stressed to your eyeballs, all contribute to Alzheimer’s and numerous other diseases associated with aging. But you don’t have to go down that track.

Your Brain Needs Oxygen And Water
All the researched indicators point to recognizing that the state of your body reflects the state of your mind. Brain cells need more oxygen than any other part of your body and that’s why exercise is so important.

Exercise increases delivery of oxygenated blood to your brain so that the brain can effectively monitor your entire body and its functions, from breathing to digestion, liver detoxification, kidney filtration, immune response, to elimination of waste materials … and all the rest.

A sluggish brain means sluggish organ function too. Turning to sugar to lift the sluggishness is not the answer, as long term this sets up conditions for dis-ease in the form of diabetes, with further serious side effects from that too. Letting your brain dehydrate compounds all ills.

Your brain is 75 to 80% water. Even a 2% reduction of brain hydration reduces efficiency of the whole body. With even mild dehydration your concentration can decrease 13% and short-term memory 7%. You become irritable, heavy headed and clumsy. No wonder your brain seems sluggish – it ‘s thirsty and needs at drink of water.

Your Brain Relies On Your Heart
It’s your heart’s job to get blood to every part of the body, including your brain, to deliver essential nutrition, including water. Dehydration can have an impact on the mechanical function of your heart. Cells shrink when dehydrated which may affect the transmission of electrical impulses that stimulate your heart muscles to contract.

Your heart will beat about 100,000 times in one day, about 40 million times in a year, and about 3 billion times during your life. It will pump blood through 60,000 miles, or over 96,000 kilometers of tubes, your veins and arteries. How far is that? About twice round the world. Your tubes for blood circulation range from nearly the diameter of your garden hose to capillaries so fine that it takes ten of these fine capillaries to equal the thickness of a human hair. What a phenomenal effort your heart puts in!

Be Grateful and Exercise
Day in, day out, your heart keeps working for you! Your brain keeps working for you. Your organs keep working for you. This happens without your conscious awareness or command. So what is your part in all this? All you need to do is exercise your body, provide quality food for maintenance, repair, and replacement, and give your body some down time to rebuild what you have worn down during the day. And, you need to stimulate and exercise your brain as much as your body.

Dehydration means waste products in cells and around cells accumulate and clump instead of being diluted for easy collection and elimination. No wonder your brain and organs become sluggish. Dehydration leads to thicker blood. With less fluid in the arteries the artery walls adjust by constricting. Yet the volume of blood cells and nutrients for delivery to organs, muscles and other tissues remains the same. So the viscosity of the blood has gone up. Your blood is thicker.

Now your heart has to pump harder to drive the thicker brew to every destination in your body. Thick blood is one of the main reasons for high blood pressure. Doctors prescribe blood thinners when you might need water first. The other causes for thick blood come from what you eat. Be aware that some drinks actually dehydrate your system. Coffee is a diuretic as is alcohol and sugary soft drinks too.
So often people are on blood thinning drugs, which have disturbing side effects, instead of drinking more water, breathing more fully more of the time, and adjusting their food choices. So now the medical drugs add to liver’s load, which sets you up for liver issues. Drugs of any kind always add to liver and kidney load, and add to brain deterioration, just as surely as poor diet undermines brain cell function.

Choose Brain and Heart Enhancing Foods
Cut out sugar saturated fats and trans fats. They are bad for the brain and all cell membranes in your body. The double layered membrane of cells is filled with essential fats. This cellular skin has to allow in what feeds cells and supports function and allow waste out. With the wrong kind of fat within the double membrane it becomes harder to discriminate what to allow in and what to dump.

Specific foods can boost and protect brain and cells. Include omega 3 rich foods like fish, nuts, seeds and their oils and antioxidants, the plant nutrients evident in the colour of fruit and vegetables. Fat soluble vitamins like E come from the yellow of egg yolk, and Vitamin A from avocado. Both are protective and aid skin and tissue healing. Yellow, orange, red fruit and vegetable provide fat soluble carotenoids to protect your brain and cell membranes, and the dark coloured ones like beetroot, black grapes, blue berries, provide water soluble antioxidants.

So to maintain your brain and keep your marbles in good shape: exercise, breathing, water, and nutrition, all enhance the life of the cells in your body and in your brain, keeping them healthy and productive. Even if there are various tendencies in the family you are not doomed to disease. By maintaining a healthy environment in your cells you don’t have to be a victim of your genetics nor of lifestyle diseases. You can keep your marbles in good shape in old age.
Cheers
Anna