Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Android | Email | RSS

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 40 million Americans are affected by a number of mental or emotional conditions that affect the quality of life. These conditions are depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, dementia or Alzheimer’s. There are conditions that are more of a dotted line than directly fall under the title of mental health since these have a mental component. These would be insomnia, fatigue, learning disabilities, Attention Deficit Disorder, eating disorders, alcoholism, addictions, PMS and aggressive behavior (Bartholemy, 2012).

The National Institute of Mental Health also suggests that an additional 50 million people suffer from intermittent occurrences of one or more of these different health conditions. That puts the figures close to a third of the entire American population that is personally dealing with some kind of a mental health concern.

The nervous system consists of the brain, our spinal cord and motor and sensory nerves. This system collects information from the environment, both our internal environment and external environment. Then it translates any information that is coming into our bodies and coordinates communication with the rest of our body. It does this through chemical (which we call hormones that are produced from neurotransmitters ) and electrical signals (Bartholemy, 2012).

These transmitters look for a place to land on the receiving cell (receptors). Each of the receiving cells has thousands of receptors that are ready to catch its neurotransmitter. The receptors are uniquely designed to fit only specific hormone/transmitter. Just thinking about the 1000s of different types of transmitters in your body and they all have their own unique match,  just like a puzzle piece, except these pieces are at a microscopic level! ( so sweet!). The message is passed from cell to cell until it finally reaches its destination and the communication is complete. When it completes, a message is sent for it to stop sending the message along with an enzyme that breaks down the straggling transmitters. This happens at a blink of an eye.

When this process becomes unbalanced, our brain tries to compensate for the problem in 3 different ways: down-regulation, up-regulation and withdrawal.

In down-regulation, receiving too much of a message/hormone/transmitter has the ability to be confusing to the brain. It doesn’t like to be overwhelmed or overloaded. The receiving cell will close down some of its receptors to limit the number of hits that it can receive. So think of things like tolerance to medication( such as pain killers), pain, sugar (diabetes) as well as salt or caffeine. Where you initially needed one cup of coffee but now you need 3 to receive the same results.

The balancing system works in the other direction as well. If your levels of specific neurotransmitters get too low and there is a call that there’s a need for them in the body, your brain will open up more receptors on the receiving cells so that they can actually get more hits.  A deficiency of a specific neurotransmitters can happen genetically. Children of alcoholics, drug addicts or diabetics can have too few neurotransmitters. As you’ve noticed, these are children of parents who experienced down-regulation. When they ingest certain substances, like sugar or alcohol for the very first time, they could have an extreme reaction to it.  This also happens with people who try other things that stimulate these receptors to give you a high, especially for the 1st time. This is also what causes the addiction.

The third way that our brain attempts to recover from an imbalance is by initiating withdrawal symptoms. When a person develops a physical dependence on a substance, whether it’s a medication, foods or other substances and have constant consumption of it. This alters your system natural state. The brain gets used to having extra substances that mimic those transmitters. When those substances are stopped, the body tends to initiate withdrawal symptoms.  Withdrawal symptoms present themselves in the form of headaches or flu-like symptoms. People feel more irritable and sometimes have joint pains or gastrointestinal problems and as soon as you take whatever caused that imbalance again the symptoms go away. So a popular one would be a coffee headache.

The relationship between the brain and all of your organs is so close they really shouldn’t be looked at separately. Your brain gets its oxygen from your lungs, it’s nutrition is received from your digestive tract. The healthy natural fats that you eat create healthy functioning neuron cell membranes. We talked about this before. That all of your cells have membrane made of fat (it is normally referred to as phospholipids). Your digestive tract also keeps bacteria and viruses from accessing the brain. The heart pumps blood to the brain. The liver provides the amino acid pool for the creation of neurotransmitters. It also produces bile that allows the fats to be broken down and used for our brain structure. The liver also detoxifies toxins produced by bacteria as well as the ones created by the environment like plastics, heavy metals, pesticides and any substances that are potentially harmful to the brain. Your kidneys remove toxins from the blood stream and you pancreas stabilizes your blood sugar (Bartholomy, 2012).

When you are trying to fix something like addictions, mental conditions or dotted line conditions mentioned earlier. It shouldn’t surprise you that a person’s organs may also show a problem.

• Alcohol and caffeine dehydrated brain tissue and when you dehydrate something, it shrinks which can cause the cells to degrade and actually become damaged.
• Sugar depletes, magnesium, calcium, copper and b-complex vitamins which is why people associate sugar with tooth decay, but all the things mentioned is really your whole skeletal system. Sugar also imbalances your hormones.

• Heavy metals have the ability to deposit right into the brain and interfere with communication of the nervous system. This is done by preventing your cells from breathing properly. If they can’t breathe, you can’t remember, you can’t learn.

• Waste created by bacteria (internal) or external factors (your environment) over-stimulate your nervous system. That’s what they do to bugs when we spray pesticides on them. When we talk about herbicides, the block the plant from absorbing nutrients.
• We don’t hear too much about this but electromagnetic fields (EMF) or simply frequencies given off my electronic equipment. So think of your cell phone, microwaves, circuit panels, televisions, wifi or any piece of electrical equipment that gives off a frequency can alter the response pattern of human brain activity and I know what you are saying on this one. What can I do about this, even if I don’t have it, it still affects me. At least that was my question and we’ll tackle this a little later in the talk.

So what do we want to do if we feel that we have some of these symptoms or anything that is hormone based? We want to detox and build back up our organs, nervous system and cells. This is our brains defense system. Our nervous system needs amino acids, vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids. Our organs require B-complexes, vitamin C, E, K2 and don’t forget A. Our brain? Antioxidants think of berries, fresh fruits, vegetables and essential fatty acids because it’s 60-70% fat (Chang, 2000). Think of all the other things mentioned earlier that you deplete when you eat them and add that as well. I should say amino acid on here 10 more time just to emphasis it’s importance.

There are multiple way to detox. I won’t go through those since there are many articles on them, but depending on what you are detoxing from, be conscious of how much your liver and kidneys can expel things from the body in a certain period of time. Especially if they are over worked and deficient. This is where listening to yourself comes into play because it will let you know what the proper pace is for your. You can even build up while you’re detoxing. Some that have been known to be affective:

• Activated charcoal ( my least fav)
• Calcium bentonite Clay
• Chlorella
• Aloe
• Herbs
• Juicing
• Psyllium hulls