Naturopathic Listening to Your Body’s Signs
Our bodies are constantly giving us messages. Our healing work is to listen. In the book Heal your Headache, neurologist Dr. David Buccholz speaks about the threshold theory of headache. According to this theory, you add enough triggers, including food, sleep deprivation or stress, and your body hits the threshold of having a headache. I have seen the threshold theory apply to many different illnesses including IBS, autoimmune flares, allergies, asthma, and GERD amongst others. If we listen along the way when we are getting out of balance, there is much that can be prevented.
“My migraines are a sign that I’m doing too much,” a patient told me years ago. I have witnessed many times that if you don’t stop when your body asks, your body will stop for you with some kind of illness.
How can we start listening? First by paying attention. In our overly scheduled culture, this can be difficult to do. The late poet John O’ Donohue says that “stress is a perverted relationship to time.” Slowing down, taking time off to be in nature and rest may heal that stress state.
From a Chinese medicine perspective, an energetic imbalance occurs before it manifests as a tissue pathology. For example, a person with a weak pulse, pale tongue and fatigue is showing signs of blood deficiency before an actual Western diagnosis of anemia occurs. By seeing a Chinese medicine practitioner, it may be possible to treat the blood deficiency through nutrition and herbs before it has progressed to actual anemia diagnosable in blood work.
It is also important to listen to foods. Food reactions can manifest as different kinds of physiological responses. With a food allergy, your immune system is reacting to a food. An IgE reaction is immediate and may present as asthma, anaphylaxis, eczema or hives. An IgG reaction is delayed and may take 2 to 3 days to show up as a symptom. The IgG reactions can be difficult to pinpoint and identifying them with testing can be helpful. With a food intolerance, your body lacks the ability to digest a food. For example, people with lactose intolerance are missing lactase, the enzyme needed to digest it. Those with gluten intolerance have celiac disease and have to avoid gluten altogether, or there may be many nutritional deficiencies and other symptoms. With a food sensitivity such as a headache trigger your body is having a response, often to what are called vasoactive amines, substances that impact blood vessel activity. Other sensitivities occur when the body has a response in someway, but it is not necessarily immune-mediated or an intolerance.
Through years of counseling many patients, I have seen that people can also react to toxic people, situations and environments. Our environment has become increasingly toxic. Environmental medicine discusses how some people are the present day canaries in the coal mine. Coal miners would historically send in a canary to assess the toxicity of the mine. If the bird died or collapsed, it was a sign that the mine was not safe to enter. Environmentally sensitive people are our culture’s canaries in the coal mine telling us when our environment is too toxic for health.
As far as toxic people and situations, we are sadly in an increasingly hostile society. Listening to how our bodies feel around someone or a situation may give us signs about how safe you are before your conscious mind knows. Do you contract around someone or feel at ease? Do you feel at peace? Are you drained or uplifted? In the book When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté explores the field of psychoneuroimmunology, how our psyche is inextricably connected to our nervous system and immune system.
I encourage you to listen to your bodies. Ultimately, your body houses your soul, which the accomplished writer and senior Jungian psychoanalyst says, “the soul is the most endangered species on the planet.” Listening to your body can help you take care of your soul, body, mind and emotions.