FOHAC News Positive Stress #224a

Published: Wed, 11/27/13

Fair Oaks Health News

Welcome

November 27, 2013

Positive Stress

Hi ,

Everyone is talking about stress these days. Stress has become the new Boogey Man that causes everything from heart disease to middle age spread. There are endless studies on stress reduction techniques proving to have wonderful health rewards. All this is fallout from the "discovery" of stress by Hans Selye as written about in his book "The Stress of Life" back in 1956. It introduced radical new ideas about how the body responds to stress of any sort through the action of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Now the idea of stressed-out exhausted adrenals is typical conversation in hairdresser's salons.

While this conversation refers to a very real problem, the common response has become a negative judgment of all that is stressful. This has in itself created a whole load of unfortunate consequences. Because...

Without stress we curl up and die.

This sounds crazy but it is true. Bones grow in response to weight bearing stress put upon them. If we baby our bones and do not stress them to the point that they think they will fail, they will gradually get weaker until they break just by trying to get up to go to the bathroom. Muscles respond exactly the same way. Without stressing our muscles to their limit, they gradually get weaker.

Our brains operate the same way. It is only through continual challenge that nerves grow and repair themselves. An essential aspect of preventing brain degeneration is to challenge our brains with difficult tasks that stress our limits of current ability. When we keep our brain busy doing simple things it already knows how to do, it is not challenged and it will degenerate.

Your body is very conservative. It lives by the rule of "Use it or lose it." Anything you do not use, your body will tear down and recycle to use the building materials somewhere else. Your body is always assessing "Do I really need this tissue?" That is why you must push your muscles, nerves, and bones to your limits. Your body decides what you need by what you demand from it. If you don't demand much, your body will trim your body down to match your needs. But when you demand more from it, it grows to meet the need as much as it can. Anything less than your limits tells the body that you don't really need as much as you have and it will trim away the excess.

Our lives operate under these same principles. At work, if you are a slacker and do not perform your best, your boss, customers, or clients will expect only a slacker's level of performance. In relationships this exact same thing happens. If you do not accept the challenge to be excellent, you will not receive excellent responses from your loved ones.

Pushing to your limits is by definition stressful. Life is designed to be stressful. There is a secret to stress that was not understood back when it was "discovered" that has since been revealed. Stress in and of itself is not what causes problems, it is failure that causes the problems. Any stressful endeavor that you engage in actually makes you stronger when you succeed. It is only when you fail that the stress tears you down.

Let us use a simple example from the body. If you go to lift a heavy box and you are successful - meaning you had just enough strength to lift the box without injuring yourself - it begins a whole cascade of hormonal events in your body. Right at the limit of your muscle's maximum contraction, chemical messengers are released that signal your pituitary gland to release growth hormone to build more muscle. Your body assesses the stress demand you put on it and responds by building you more muscle to meet that stress.

If you throw yourself into a foreign country where you have to learn a new language to function, you are going to significantly stress your brain. You are demanding that it build new pathways in order to learn a new language. It will respond by releasing BDGF - Brain Derived Growth Factor to stimulate the growth of new connections in the brain to accommodate the new language skills.

On the other hand, if you went to lift a box that was too heavy and you end up injuring your muscles, your body response would be quite different. Instead of trying to build new muscle, it will generate an inflammation response that will support repairing the damaged muscle. During this process, muscle strength will actually be lost and scar tissue will be laid down which will restrict movement in the future.

Anyone who has tried to learn something way over their head will be familiar with the brain fog and brain shutdown that takes place with all the frustration that builds instead of clarity and illumination.

Everything in life works this way. The philosopher Fredrick Nietzche may have stated it best in his famous line "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." He understood that it was the human determination to tackle challenges that makes us great.

Why is this important? Understanding the truth about stress reorients you toward a more successful way to engage life. It is now known that to worry about stress is more dangerous than the stress itself. Fear and avoidance of stress creates more damage than the stress does. When engaged with a positive 'taking on the challenge' mindset, the very things we fear become our growth and eventual strength. A life lived in fear and avoidance of stress only produces gradual degeneration on every level.

As I have already said, failure is not good for us as an endpoint. It's better to understand that all of life is a process of failing until you succeed. This changes the mindset about the process of failure. Like learning to ride a bike - nobody starts out with perfect balance. Consequently small failures are a requisite part of the learning process. This is natural for all learning. The trick is to take on challenges in small bites. Use your intelligence to assess your tolerance for risk, which is another way of saying, how far can you fall and still get right back up to retackle the challenge. Don't take on a challenge that will devastate you if you do not succeed the first time. Success is gained by successive approximation. That means you reach success by getting a little closer to the goal with each attempt.

So when you walk up to that big box, give it a push to see how heavy it is before you try to really lift it. If it is right on the edge of your strength limit, play with body position and leverage. Exert your muscles gradually so that you can put the box down if it is too heavy and approaches damaging you. Be smart and you can keep yourself in the zone of positive stress that builds you up. Avoid the big failures as best you can and let the successes build you up more and more each day.

Take care,

David

New!

Memory Strengthening Program

Free Symptom Questionnaire to diagnose causes for memory problems available at the front desk - just ask for it. With this we can find out what is needed to improve your memory. After the questionnaire you take the memory test to determine how bad your memory is getting to be and to give us a way to measure improvement as you correct the underlying causes.

Ultrasound Physical Therapy

Now available in the office

Tuesdays and Fridays

On the Wire

Sleep critical to health

Three recent studies showed that poor sleep due to sleep apnea raised all-cause mortality by 2.5 times and risk of cardiovascular death by 4 times. Interestingly these numbers were for sleeping both not enough - less than 6.5 hours a night, and sleeping too much - more than 9 hours a night.

Sleep

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"Fatigue is the best pillow."
~ Benjamin Franklin

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Belly fat linked to memory loss

People with high amounts of abdominal fat in their middle age are 3.6 times as likely to develop memory loss and dementia later in their life. A chemical called PPARalpha controls fat metabolism in the liver and when it is low you get increased belly fat. Well the same chemical is responsible for stimulating the production of memory proteins in the brain. Low levels in the liver also mean low levels in the brain, so the high belly fat is a red flag for low memory protein production.

Fat and memory

"Sleep is the twin of death."
~ Homer

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40 years of federal nutrition research fatally flawed

One of the joys of reading scientific research is trying to figure out if it is true or valid. In the world of nutrition research the most common method of collecting data is simply asking people to remember what they ate. This is the method used by the CDC for the largest collection of nutritional data ever in the US called the NHANES study. Well guess what - people lie, people don't remember, and people just don't understand. Self report based studies are horribly inaccurate. In a recent analysis of the NHANES study data comparing the reported calories in compared to the calories out it was found that most people in the study would not have survived if what they reported were true. Their report of calories consumed was as high as 41% lower than what had to have been consumed and still be alive. The data from this study has been used for years in making government policy and recommendations. So the next time the government comes out with a dietary suggestion, think of this.

Bad Data

"Living is a disease from which sleep gives us relief eight hours a day."

~ Chamfort

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Our address is 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd.

Finding the new location is very easy. Coming from highway 50 up Sunrise Blvd, you turn left and go up a block. We are on the right hand side - the building just past the Subway Sandwich shop. If you are coming down Sunrise from the Mall area then just turn right on Fair Oaks Blvd and up a block on the right.

If you are coming from the Roseville area you could come down Sunrise Blvd, but that is a long trek. It is probably shorter time wise to come down Auburn Blvd - San Juan Ave like you have been for the Sunset office, but instead of turning left at Sunset, keep going straight 3 more lights to Fair Oaks Blvd and turn left. Go down 2 lights to New York Ave, go through the intersection, and immediately turn into the turn lane once the center divider ends. We are on the left.

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About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years. He began experimenting with medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis. In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education. Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic. He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice.
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health.
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities.
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth. The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework. Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Fair Oaks Healing
& Arts Center
Staff