The X-Factor for your Health

How was your Thanksgiving?  I spent mine with friends and it was the perfect combo of easy & fun, staying up late & sleeping in, enjoying good food and wine & drinking lots of water.  I was feeling protective of my respiratory system after the smoke cleared so I brought my Gan Mao Ling herbs with me and took a few here and there, but I didn’t hear about any colds actively going around so mainly I relaxed about it all.  That may not sound like a very special plan to support my immune system, but let me explain what I mean by relaxing about it.

From my experience with myself and my patients, I can tell you there is an x-factor that will boost your immune system way beyond any supplement or herb—your state of mind.  I think of it like this:

Imagine your body is a vessel.  A very sophisticated vessel.  And stressful thinking (that activates physiological processes of cortisol and inflammation) degrades the walls of the vessel.  If the stressful thinking is short lived, the body has the resources to repair the walls of the vessel.  But eventually, with repeated over thinking and stress,  the inflammation and irritation will cause holes in the vessel.  You can pour as much herbs and supplements into the vessel, but if it is filled with holes, all the good stuff will just wash through you.  Just a few minutes of agitated stressful thinking is enough to start a physiologic cascade response that will cause you to start leaking out your good health.  And the real bummer is that our culture has adopted an attitude that frequent stressful thinking is normal.

But I’m here to tell you that you already have within you all that you need for wellbeing.  And every moment that you drop your stressful thinking, you enter the healing zone.  The healing zone is your birthright.  You know to trust it when you get a paper cut.  You don’t have to organize your clotting factors and your white blood cells to take care of the cut.  You just have to make sure the area is clean and remind yourself to stop picking the scab.  The body will do the rest.  I have the same trust in my immune system during cold and flu season.  Yes I wash my hands, get enough sleep, and drink lots of water.  And I remind myself to stop fretting over catching a cold.

Mind Experiment: Over the next 2 weeks every time you catch yourself worrying about colds or flus (anything for that matter), allow yourself to take the necessary precautions (like washing your hands), and remind yourself to put that WORRY ON THE BOOKSHELF for later.  You can pick it up any time you want—but who wants to read that book again?  Been there, done that.

Use your free will and grab a different book off the bookshelf that’s more enjoyable.  Maybe even grab a blank book and invite some fresh thinking in.  This takes less effort than you think.  Because if we wait just a moment we’re sure to have a new thought, and another, and then another.  We can’t stop the thoughts from coming.  But we can choose which ones we spend more time with and which books we want to read a second time.

As any good librarian would, keep putting the worries on that same bookshelf for later, and see what fresh new thoughts come through you.  Sometimes it takes practice to break the worry habit.  But even a momentary pause allows more room for fresh thinking and the opportunity for you to enter the healing zone. 

Give it a try and see how your body feels.  Can you tell when you’re in the healing zone?

I can tell you I used to have a lot of worry about getting sick.  Sometimes that habit creeps back in.  Then I remember to stop “picking the scab” and let my body’s immune system get to work.  There’s been many times I can instantly feel my scratchy throat start to clear or my achey neck relax as soon as I drop my worries, and I know I’ve entered the healing zone. 

Resiliency 101, The Art and Science of Thriving
November 27th from 9:30-10:30 AM