Boost Your Immune System
& Your Overall Health
Yes, we talk about a lot of things to do for your health or to avoid getting this virus or if you do contract the virus, how to keep your body super healthy, and strong, so you can overcome it. There's really only one and it's take care of your master system, your nervous system. Especially your autonomic nervous system, the part that's automatic, that you don't fully control consciously. So our autonomic nervous system controls every single function in our bodies. From our digestion to our hormones which influence our immune system to especially, they very directly control our immune system by signals from our brain through our spinal cord out through these nerves to radio control all these immune cells, and also, as we mentioned, influence the hormones that influence the function of that. For example, if you just a few days of six hours or less of sleep, if you're exposed to a flu virus, you are more than four times more likely to contract that flu virus, study show, than you were if you're getting eight hours of sleep at night. So sleep dramatically influences that.
How does it influence it? The autonomic nervous system. What we call the fight or flight or wine and dine nervous system. There's two sides to our autonomic nervous system. There's, "I'm really stressed out," so that's the fight or flight. There's the, "I'm relaxed," and it's the wine and dine. So they're both designed amazingly to keep us healthy and happy. For the sympathetic nervous system is if a t-rex crashed through this wall right now, I either have to fight it or I have to run away from it. My whole body is gonna be geared up toward that emergency survival situation. So that it's autonomic because it's automatic. My brain sees a threat, therefore my entire body gears up for that threat. We're gonna release adrenaline, we're gonna shunt blood toward the periphery so I can fight or run away from it. We're gonna avoid digestion, we're gonna avoid the immune system, it doesn't really matter as much right then. We're focused on clotting our blood if we're bleeding out or running or fighting that thing, so that's autonomic. The body creates systemic inflation. Well, am I thinking just economic terms right now?
The body creates systemic inflammation so that we can do all the things that we need to do to survive an immediate threat. That inflammation can save your life if you're actually in mortal danger. But the problem is when we're in that constant fight or flight state, then we will constantly be producing inflammation, hormones of stress that increase our cholesterol, they increase many, many functions that create disease processes in our body, including shutting down the immune system. Chronic inflammation has been shown to shut down the immune system. On the other side of that, if we can stimulate the wine and dine or the parasympathetic nervous system, then our immune system increases, our sleep improves which improves our immune system. We feel more like exercising which improves our immune system. It has a huge influence. This is probably where your greatest bang for your buck is, is in figuring out what we can do to help the health of your autonomic nervous system. So what do we do to do that? Well, the keys are as we've mentioned, regular exercise, eating great foods, but one of the biggest things you can do is to change the way you're thinking.
I believe it was John F. Kennedy who said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Or Jesus said, "My greatest fear came upon me." So when we think stressful thoughts, that's the best way to stimulate that stress fight or flight part of our nervous system, that stops our bodies from functioning because a stressful thought will create a shut down of our immune system. So when we fear this virus, or we fear our neighbors or we fear anything, that's the greatest way to have our body not work the way it's supposed to. So, we're gonna do an exercise right now that can help you stimulate your autonomic nervous system, the healthy side of it, the parasympathetic side for when we're not an emergency state. It's called box breathing. If you've ever been to any of my talks that are over a half-hour, we're always doing box breathing because breathing itself calms our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system down, stimulates that immune-boosting, wine and dine or parasympathetic system of our body. So box breathing is very simple. Most people when they breathe, we all of course breathe, but we breathe very shallow and it's just a...
Especially when we're stressed out. If a wolf came running after me, the first thing my body's gonna do is change my breathing rate, because the thought stress me out so my breathing rate quickens, that's what stimulates the adrenaline and the cortisol and all the body chemistry changes to create that fight or flight system in our body. We can create the opposite effect by influencing our breathing. So if we can slow down our breathing and do what we call diaphragmatic breathing, where our belly expands as we breathe in, and contracts as we breathe out, creating that relaxation response in our body, we are gonna get our immune system to respond, our whole, entire autonomic nervous system to respond. So how do we do that? Breathe in slowly for a count of five seconds, hold the breath in slowly for a count of five seconds, breathe out for a count of five seconds, and hold the breath out for a count of five seconds. The shape makes a box. That box breathing will automatically put you in a greater state of that parasympathetic wine and dine system and stimulate that immune system.
So here's what we're gonna do, let's do a couple rounds right now. Breathe all the way out, breathe in and out through your nose, breathe out, breathe in, hold in, breathe out, hold out, breathe in. You may notice that you can hear my breathing, and when you hear your own breathing, it slows down the breathing itself. Breathe out. One more round. Hold. Even though I'm sitting here talking on a camera, which always makes me a little nervous, I already feel more relaxed. If you did that with me, I almost guarantee you felt more relaxed. Program it into your phone or your Apple watch, or whatever, three, four times a day, just spend three to five minutes in that, you will calm down your autonomic nervous system, you will relax your brain, you will improve your sleep, you'll improve your energy and you will be way less susceptible to this nasty virus. Hope this has been super helpful. If you like it, comment below. You know how to reach us. We're at the office, 243-0889. We are on the web and we are open for you and we have very special protocols to help the other way of stimulating this system to be healthy, which is get adjusted. Bless your day.
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