Articles by JoyYou should never take your health for granted.
This has been a hard lesson for me to learn over the years since I was the kind of person who was always so busy I didn’t give myself any time to look after my body more than downing the few odd vitamins now and again or sporadic efforts at healthy eating for a week or two after realising I had been having too much chocolate or too many cakes lately. I think I always assumed that my body would take care of itself. I let myself be driven more by what was going on in my head and all the multitudinous projects that needed my attention, things that needed to be struck off the list ....
Ah-h-h that never ending list!
I used to have the odd pain, stiffness, bout of flu, headache etc but didn’t really take too much notice of them at first. But the trouble with not listening is that, since pain is the body’s way of telling you that something is wrong, it has a tendency to start speaking more loudly to get your attention. In other words, instead of going away as you might hope, the pain or symptoms tend to get stronger!
So my body eventually went on strike and I found myself ‘stuck’ in a state of chronic fatigue that lasted over five plus years, until I really learned to listen and take notice.
It was quite a wake-up call and I knew then that I really needed to start addressing what had actually ‘gone wrong’.
At bottom what I realised was that I had been under a lot of stress and rather than dealing with it straight away had just ‘stuffed it under the table’ so to speak ... actually stuffing the stress and emotional storms down into my body ... neatly tucking it all away, so to speak (or so I thought) so that I could get on with ‘more important’ things like trying to make more money or develop a great career.
I didn’t know then how much the immune system could be affected by things like stress ..... I guess I seriously underestimated it. In fact stress is now well-recognised to be one of the biggest indicators of illness these days. According to a large number of health experts across the globe, the number one killer on the planet,now, is stress and most health and chronic pain problems include stress as a major factor. Phew!
So it is worth remembering just how important our immune system is to our health and well-being. It is the part of the body that not only helps to prevent disease and illness but is also the mechanism which helps us heal from injury and disease too.
Therefore if you are trying to look after your body and health, this is an area I recommend you pay attention to. The good news is, the immune system also responds to the opposite of stress. Numerous studies have shown that even something as simple as the act of laughing can have important healing effects - maintaining a healthy heart, lowering blood sugar levels, reducing pain and giving the immune system a real boost.
Steve Sultanoff, (Psychologist ) Ph.D said that laughing helps to decrease levels of cortisol which is produced in response to stress and which is closely linked to how well the heart functions.
It certainly helped divert attention away from my own chronic aches and pains at the time and gave me the space to think about taking a more positive approach towards my own healing. As Doctor Bernie Siegel once said, ‘happy people generally don’t get sick.’