This is the beginning of an experiment to organise a notebook that will make some sense of my personal journey and learnings on health.
posts written on this topic
- searching for an enough in health
- making sense of health
- improving hormonal imbalances with cardiac data
- on exercising with data from the heart
- my blood as data
- my long, winding, challenging road to healing
- on coping with emotional dysregulation
- on the effects of being sick
- ruminating thoughts on inequality, mental illness and what it means to be human
- What I learned after 60 consecutive days of running
- accumulating data for health
- Running as an experiment to reduce anxiety and facilitate healing
- The connections between health, conflict avoidance and trauma
- On running, fitness and the narrative of sadness
- Chronic patterns
- what therapy gifts
- psychotherapy in the process of becoming
- How I finally learned to meditate
- Practicing the ability to wait
- disability
- Quitting coffee
- Understanding mental health with systems thinking
- Self-quantifying to better health
- Truthfully exhausted
- Getting healthy is really hard
- What I learned from cultivating self-compassion
- personal infrastructure
- the now, the limbic brain, and the fear of abandonment
- on being chronically depressed and suicidal
- Building resilience through a sustainable self
- Piecing myself together after burnout
- Recovering from chronic depression
- one step forward, two step backwards
- being conscious: self-quantifying & positive reinforcement
related collections
selected resources
Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
completed: 11 Dec 2015Amino acids are the letters. Peptides, including polypeptides and proteins, are the words made from these letters. And they all come together to make up a language that composes and directs every cell, organ, and system in your body.
She was the scientist who discovered the opiate receptor. This book is partially a memoir and partially a breakdown on how emotions can affect our physical health. You'll have to read this with an open mind, as she goes into new-agey stuff. I discovered this book through reading "My Age of Anxiety."
view meta | in 1 collections | 43 highlights | 0 responsesSpark
completed: 12 Jun 2016They don’t know that toxic levels of stress erode the connections between the billions of nerve cells in the brain or that chronic depression shrinks certain areas of the brain. And they don’t know that, conversely, exercise unleashes a cascade of neurochemicals and growth factors that can reverse this process, physically bolstering the brain’s infrastructure. In fact, the brain responds like muscles do, growing with use, withering with inactivity. The neurons in the brain connect to one another through “leaves” on treelike branches, and exercise causes those branches to grow and bloom with new buds, thus enhancing brain function at a fundamental level.
I didn't consider incorporating exercise into my routine until I read this book.
view meta | in 2 collections | 20 highlights | 0 responsesselected highlights
“…conversely, exercise unleashes a cascade of neurochemicals and growth factors that can reverse this process, physically bolstering the brain’s infrastructure. In fact, the brain responds like muscles do, growing with use, withering with inactivity. The neurons in the brain connect to one another through “leaves” on treelike branches, and exercise causes those branches to grow and bloom with new buds, thus enhancing brain function at a fundamental level.”
The scientific name for the disorder speaks volumes: hypercortisolism. Its symptoms are eerily similar to those of chronic stress: weight gain around the midsection; breaking down muscle tissue to produce unnecessary glucose and then fat; insulin resistance and possibly diabetes; panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and increased risk of heart disease. One of the many correlations Starkman has shown is that the extent of hippocampal shrinkage and memory loss is directly proportional to elevations in cortisol.
Regular aerobic activity calms the body, so that it can handle more stress before the serious response involving heart rate and stress hormones kicks in. It raises the trigger point of the physical reaction. In the brain, the mild stress of exercise fortifies the infrastructure of our nerve cells by activating genes to produce certain proteins that protect the cells against damage and disease. So it also raises our neurons’ stress threshold.
…the value of exercise has less to do with building muscles or burning calories than it has to do with getting your heart to pump faster and more efficiently and thereby increase blood flow to nourish and cleanse your brain and all your organs.
When stress prevents the molecules of emotion from flowing freely where needed, the largely autonomic processes that are regulated by peptide flow, such as breathing, blood flow, immunity, digestion, and elimination, collapse down to a few simple feedback loops and upset the normal healing response. Meditation, by allowing long-buried thoughts and feelings to surface, is a way of getting the peptides flowing again, returning the body, and the emotions, to health.