Return energy

Alpina Plisher Publishing House represents Molly Maluf’s book “Return Energy. How science helps a woman to maintain youth, health and vitality ”(translation by Ivan Bogdanov).

The life of a woman in the 21st century is an endless race in which she solves a huge number of issues every day. In such a rigid rhythm, we do not notice how the supply of internal energy runs out, the forces leave us, and in the morning we feel fatigue. If all this is about you, the book of a consultant doctor, teacher of Standford University and Biohacker of Silicon Valley Molly Maluf, what you need.

Dr. Maluf has created an innovative methodology for the restoration of vital energy and the prevention of chronic diseases for women that her patients successfully practice. The program helps to adjust nutrition, establish hormonal health, draw up a plan for balanced training, learn to control the level of stress and notice the “signals of unsafe” in time that your body sends. On the pages of this book you will find scientifically sound recommendations that have already helped thousands of women around the world.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

Stress plants your batteries

If we talk about health, I categorically deny the common stereotype, as if all stressors are determined pathogenic. Their effect on health can be evaluated only after we study the process of adaptation of the body to them.
Aaron Antonovsky

Life is full of stress, and this is normal. It was always so. Modern stress factors differ from those that our ancestors faced, but our body is designed to cope with all the vicissitudes of fate: the disasters always follow the restoration in a circle. If we did not know how to cope with stress, then our appearance would have died out a long time ago.

By its nature, stress is not always bad (remember about gormisis). They say that intelligence is the ability to adapt to changes. In this case, our health is the ability to adapt to adversity. It is directly related to resistance, and the resistance of the body is produced during the fight against difficulties.

Restoring after stress is the basis for maintaining health and increasing the duration of a healthy life. However, in the modern world, achieving complete recovery is becoming increasingly difficult. The fault of this is chronic, relentless stress that lays down on our shoulders with a stone, preventing him from resting.

Doctors will tell you that stress is the root cause of most chronic diseases. But only a few experts are able to offer effective ways to control your reaction to stress. This happens largely because people often do not notice chronic stress factors or do not even know about their existence. But everything falls into place if you look at the principles of stress.

We study the subtleties of stress reactions

Strong stressors - these include diseases, injuries, difficult periods in life like moving or divorce, as well as positive events such as a wedding, birth of a child or an increase in work - activate the work of a sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the reaction of “Beat or Run”. The body's reaction to severe stress is one of the adaptive answers and serves as the main weapon in the struggle for human survival. Thanks to it, there is a surge of stress hormones (including cortisol), which helps to more effectively defend against danger. Thanks to it, the neural plasticity of your brain improves and you get the opportunity to learn faster. Thanks to it, circus rhythms are violated, allowing you to sit after midnight or get up either light or dawn. Thanks to it, inflammatory processes are enhanced so that the body can better protect against microbes. Thanks to it, resistance to insulin increases and more glucose goes to your brain. Thanks to her, your motivation is growing so that you do not save in the face of danger.

Thanks to it, the digestive, reproductive and other functions of the body are suppressed, which are not important for your survival here and now, and the supply of muscle and brain energy is enhanced. Your body reasonably believes that when you fight for your life or run away, saving it, you are not up to dinner and not up to sex.

The parasympathetic nervous system, which is usually associated with restoration after stress, contributes to survival during stress. If we are threatened with a strong danger from which it is impossible to escape, the central part of the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) gives the body the command to stop and freeze in place. Such a reaction of the PSNS helps to explain why in situations when a woman is attacked or tried to rape, for example, she can simply freeze and stop being reborn. Her nervous system thus tries to protect it in conditions when flight is impossible.

The other, the peripheral part of the parasympathetic nervous system begins to work when a person feels safe. This PSNS department is responsible for the system of social involvement, which helps us recover from acute stress. Its activity is activated when we are safe and surrounded by beloved people we trust. Thanks to the activity of the peripheral part of the PSNS, reproductive, digestive and other secondary functions are again included in our body. This is an elegant survival tool developed by man during evolution. Conclusion: the stressful reaction of the body is not some kind of inconvenience, but an adaptive mechanism that helps us survive in situations when our lives are in danger, recover after experienced troubles and return to normal life.

Useful terms associated with stress

• Homeostasis - the ability of your body to maintain normal body temperature, electrolyte balance, blood sugar, blood pressure and pulse, thanks to which you live and rejoice in life.

• Allostasis - the body's ability to adapt to psychological or external stress, changing its properties for the dynamic maintenance of stable work of internal systems.

• Allostatic load is all stress accumulated in the body. Imagine that you fill the bowl with your experiences. Their volume is an allostatic load. The dimensions and capacity of the bowl reflect your allostatic potential, which directly depends on your energy capabilities. The fullness of the bowl depends on how well you have recovered from the experienced stress.

• Allostatic overload - what occurs with the overcrowding of your bowl: violation of the work of different systems of your body. It is at this moment that stress begins to have a serious negative impact on your health.

Chronic stress is usually not as intense as acute, but in the absence of space for recovery, you can soon feel that they are stretched like a string and are constantly in a state of fear, even when nothing threatens you. The thing is that when the sympathetic nervous system is overloaded, it becomes excessively sensitive to any hint of danger.

Chronic stress harms the brain and the body as a whole. It devastates the functional reserves of organs, weakens the immune system and rebuilds the structure of the brain, depleting the hippocampus and reducing synaptic plasticity. Moreover, due to constant stress, circus rhythms are lost, the level of inflammation in the body and insulin resistance increases, and motivation, pleasure center and a remuneration system are suppressed. Thus, the long -term activity of the threat detection system ultimately undermines the resistance of the body and reduces the capacity of your bowl, which threatens to end with allostatic overload. In this case, you can become irritable, aggressive, depressed and sensitive even to the most insignificant threats. Your pulse and blood pressure will increase too often. Your blood sugar level will also be higher than the norm. Over time, these negative changes can lead to the development of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension or diabetes. This is how chronic stress causes chronic diseases.

Hidden sources of stress

There are several varieties of chronic stress that people usually lose sight of. The detection and control of such stressors will help to release a large amount of energy and reduce the total stress load.

The first type of hidden stress arises due to external conditions that make us feel not safe. It is better to understand this phenomenon allows the theory of stress as a common unsafe (GUTS). According to this concept, the perceived insecurity of the internal or external environment affects your level of chronic stress.

Another type of hidden stress is the totality of children's psychological injuries, which include difficult events known as “negative children's experience” (NDO). Such situations have serious consequences for human health and are often associated with the development of chronic diseases in adulthood.

Feeling of unsafe: the theory of stress as a common unsafe

The classical theory of stress claims that stress arises under the influence of accumulating stressors: one, another, third - and now you already feel overstrain. The disadvantage of this concept is that it does not take into account the many small stressors surrounding us that overload our nervous system.

Of course, large sources of vital stress affect the overall level of stress. For example, if you have lost your job or a partner has left you, you will definitely encounter strong stress. But do not forget that allostatic load is like a bowl. If your bowl is almost crowded with small household troubles, then large stressors will not need a lot of time to cause you allostatic overload.

According to Stephen Porjes, the director and founder of the consortium on the study of post -traumatic stress at the University of Indian and a professor of psychiatry at the North Caroline University, we automatically experience a sense of security, being among people (because we evolved as flock animals). And our modern lifestyle in isolation from other people, according to the theory of stress as a common unsafe, contributes to the emergence of a sense of unsafe.

Defenders of this concept believe that our brain constantly checks the surrounding reality for threats and relaxes only when it feels that it is safe. Violation of our social ties - loneliness or isolation - immediately causes us increased anxiety. Therefore, stress arises not only as a response to external threats, but also as a reaction to a sense of unsafe in general, which appears during the distance of a person from society.

Modern life in general is an order of magnitude safer than in the days of our ancestors, but in many respects it is much more dangerous - or at least it seems to us so. Not only life in a dangerous, polluted, dark or noisy place, but also frightening plots of news reports, health problems, economic and social instability, systemic racism and social bias, stress at work and at home, a sense of loneliness and isolation from society, and many other, less obvious signs of insecurity, can prevent your brain.

I learned about the theory of stress as a common unsafe when I lived in San Francisco. I lived then, in my opinion, a rather happy and safe life, but at the same time I woke up a broken one every morning and could not understand why this was happening. I never managed to relax normally. In fact, the reason for all this was the disadvantages of urban life: constant noise, dirty air, lack of communication with neighbors and problems that only a woman living alone faces. Although I never deliberately worried about these aspects of my environment, the study of the theory of stress as a common unsafe helped me to understand that it was my cup that gradually overwhelmed the subconscious sense of anxiety.

Moving to the community helped me feel much better. But only having left at the beginning of 2020 for several months on the island of Maui, I finally realized how much city life - associated with noise pollution, smog and a high level of crime - undermined my psychological health. Chronic signals of unsafe have had a negative impact on the state of my nervous system.

According to GUTS, there are three most common reasons why we feel general unsafe.

• Health problems. When the capabilities of your body are limited, you instinctively feel in danger, even if you have no injuries and diseases. The reason for this can be a poor physical form, obesity, decrease in mobility, weakness, old age or a set of several factors. If you are physically unable to fight for your life or save it, it begins to seem to you that in the event of a physical threat you will have big problems. Your body also understands this perfectly, so you have a feeling of unsafe.

If you want to send a signal to the body that it is safe, you should engage in training your strength and cardiorespirator endurance, improving mobility, normalization of weight and tracking the pulse and variability of heart rhythm (links to the tools that I use, you will find on my site). All this will help you turn on the security mode, because your brain will understand: if something happens, you can easily survive. And this is actually so. You never know whether you will ever have to run away from danger, whether it be a car, a robber, a flood, a forest fire or another natural cataclysm. Yes, no one is 100%healthy, and we all get old. You cannot turn back the time - but you can feel safe, and for the sake of this it is worth working on your health.

• Violation of social ties. A sense of belonging to a cohesion community is the most important source of our sense of security. Previously, our ancestors lived with tribes, because the probability of surviving surviving, but now our social ties have become much weaker, and some have no at all. This, along with other reasons, led to the decline of the nuclear family and close friendly ties. All this is no longer required for us to survive - at any level, except for instinctive. That is why the human body sees a threat alone.

Loneliness can be perceived as a primitive pain signal, designed to bring you closer to your environment, because in ancient times the "single wolves" were more dangerous to attack animals and representatives of other tribes - and premature death. People fought with loneliness for the same purpose with which they fought with hunger and thirst - to increase the chances of survival.

The instability of our close relationships (for example, problems in marriage, parting or divorce) exacerbates a sense of lack of control over personal safety and uncertainty. Many people have lost the feeling of involvement in the general rituals and do not feel comfortable in their social roles - the position of “neither in those nor in the SEC” also deprives them of a sense of security. In people suffering from social anxiety, the variability of the heart rhythm decreases, which means that they will adapt worse to stress. Social factors such as discrimination, racism and financial instability (especially poverty) are also associated with a violation of public relations and cause a sense of unsafe.

We saw how the discrimination of entire generations by ethnicity caused an increased risk of hypertension in the black population. I assume that it also led to many other diseases, because racism is associated with chronic stress, and it, as you already know, is the root cause of the development of many chronic diseases.

To convince your body that it is safe, take up the restoration of family and social ties, take part in society more often, pay more attention to personal relationships and avoid your departure during the fight against stress. Tactile communication is especially good at handing the brain to the brain signals. Therefore, even the appearance in your life of a four -legged friend can become a sign of the lack of threat.

• uncomfortable atmosphere. These are problems of the world: a dangerous urban environment, the lack of greenery (torture from nature is always associated with stress) and noise pollution (it interferes with hearing danger signals, for example, the quiet steps of an approaching predator).

Существует множество доказательств, подтверждающих связь между шумовым загрязнением окружающей среды, проблемами со сном и возникновением у людей сердечно- сосудистых заболеваний. При шуме мозг вынужден постоянно проверять звуковые сигналы, пытаясь вычленить скрытые в нем потенциально опасные звуки. В результате мозг постоянно находится в возбужденном состоянии. Раньше, когда наши предки жили в лесах или в саванне, мир вокруг них большую часть времени пребывал в тишине, а шум ассоциировался с крадущимся неподалеку животным. Темные, накрытые смогом, загрязненные пространства тоже представляют собой опасность: вы не можете разглядеть, что происходит вокруг.

Кроме того, к этой категории также относится и напряженная обстановка на работе. Если ваш босс — тиран, у вас появляется ощущение нестабильности, так как вы никогда не можете быть уверены в том, что завтра будете работать на этом же месте и получать привычную зарплату. Но и домашняя атмосфера тоже может быть сверхнапряженной, если в семье сложились абьюзивные отношения или постоянно возникают перепалки (все это может привести к тому, что у всех членов семьи появится повышенная реакция на стресс). Причиной стрессовой домашней обстановки также может быть неблагополучный район или неуверенность в безопасности жилища.

Некомфортную обстановку бывает тяжело исправить, потому что человек редко имеет возможность просто взять и сменить работу или переехать.