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Survival and Safety
My approach to health is similar to my approach to just about everything... Break it down into its simplest parts and take it one step at a time.
So what are the simple foundations of health? I came across a staggering statistic that 75-90% of all Dr. visits are directly related to stress. This blew my mind and set me on a journey to discover why. The oversimplified answer is that our bodies exist in one of two modes at all times. Either it is in a stress mode (sympathetic nervous system) or it is in a growing/healing mode (parasympathetic nervous system). A deeper meaning emerges when we look at the design and reason behind these modes. In a more natural setting, when facing a threat, our bodies have the ability to immediately divert valuable resources to where they are most needed in order to survive that threat. This is why I call this the Survival Mode. The word stress has become rather trite in the last couple decades and is very hard to define anymore. Survival mode is simply defined as any activation of the sympathetic nervous system in response to a threat, whether actual or perceived. The intent of this mode is to allow us to escape the threat. Survival mode is designed to be the superhero that takes us to safety. This is why we call the parasympathetic activation the Safety Mode. We struggle in our modern, unnatural cultures with activating the Survival Mode for interviews, dates, deadlines and other random situations that do not actual pose a threat to our lives. We then stay in that mode for long periods of time which is the cause of 75-90% of our health issues. I believe that much of the reason we stay in our survival state as a default is because most of the things we stress over are not actually life threatening, and so we do not look for a safe place. The point of survival is to get us to safety. We need to be aware of our Survival Mode and start moving toward Safety so that we can heal and grow.
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