Your Body Speaks: What is your body trying to tell you about your health?
Over the last 20 years of working with patients on their health issues, I have been continually amazing at the wisdom of the body. The body has been designed with a built in mechanism to let you know when something in your body/mind is overstressed and out of balance. Symptoms are the body’s warning signs to you that there is a problem.
Similar to having your check engine light come on in your car when there is a problem, symptoms are letting you know that something is wrong, something is out of balance.
There are literally thousands of symptoms that can occur, some subtle and mild, while others are quite severe. Common ones include: fatigue, headaches, weight loss, weight gain, anxiety, depression, pain, spasms, loss of motion, arthritis, gas, bloating, headache, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol. The list goes on and on.
Learning to pay attention to the subtle changes that are occurring in your body and correcting the issues early on, will save you from having bigger and more serious symptoms later. Your body’s symptoms are actually giving you great insights into your mind/body health. If you ignore the small warning signs your body is giving you, it will give you bigger ones like heart attack, immobility, chronic pain, or cancer.
I encourage my patients to appreciate their symptoms. Your body is doing its job by giving you these warning signs early on before there is a major problem.
The wise thing is that when your body is giving you a symptom is to investigate the underlying cause.
What I have noticed over the years is that a great number of people will have symptoms, but just ignore them or may just mask the symptoms with drugs or medication. This is like unplugging the annoying engine light forcing it to go off while ignoring the underlying issue.
Imagine if your body gave you no warning signs - You could simply fall over dead one day for no apparent reason at all!
Basically, there are 3 reasons your body will give you symptoms.
Physical stress relates to what you are doing or not doing to your body that creates imbalance. Examples are: having an accident, not getting enough rest, not getting enough exercise, having your spine out of alignment and poor posture.
Chemical stress has to do with what you are putting in or not putting in your body. ermedication, drugs, alcohol, smoking, poor diet and nutrition, poor hydration and toxicity can create stress on your body.
Emotional stress has to do with your thoughts and how you feel about your life. How much emotional stress a person is under can directly effect the physiology of the body. Feeling of guilt, shame, anger, resentment and fear can have adverse effects one your ability to feel your best.
In future articles, I will be going into details of the three areas of stress and give you insights on how to help maintain a healthy balance of all three.
In the mean time, be a curious patient. Ask questions. If you are having symptoms, keep asking questions as to why they are occurring. There is always an underlying reason. Keep searching until you find an answer that makes sense for you. Once you can get down to the underlying issue, then you have a chance to correct the problem at its source.
I say, appreciate your symptoms and that your body is doing its job by letting you know there is something that is needing to be addressed. It’s giving you a chance to fine-tune your body/mind, and help bring about better health.
Life can be more fulfilling when you are healthy enough to keep doing the things you love doing no matter what you age.
Yours in Health,
Dr. Dave Tuck