The Heart Brain: how to restore the electic connection to reduce stress

January 2, 2010 in Alternative Therapies, Anti-Aging, Calming, Education, First Aid tips, Heart Health, Lifestyle, Longevity, Men's Health, Menopause, Mind / Body / Soul, News, Relaxation, Science, Stress, Wellness by Evelyn Vincent | No comments

Much of the anxiety, fear, and depression that we experience and repress, was never meant to remain in our bodies and minds for extended periods. Strong feelings of stress were meant to be experienced as needed, and then to dissipate. During a heightened state of arousal, brought on by a narrow and exclusive focus (who among us doesn’t get hung up on them!?), these feelings are either tormenting us (because they are spotlighted) or chronically blocked from our awareness (because they are avoided or repressed).How we pay attention-and how our attention has been conditioned to react to situations and emotional stress-is at the root of more problems than we realize. Taking medication to mask emotions does not necessarily solve the problem, any more than disconnecting a battery in your smoke detector when there’s a fire in your house. The fact is, strong or powerful emotions are trying to tell us something is not quite right.

There are natural antidotes to hyperactive stress response and saddness or depression. Certain types of meditation tend to rhythmically entrain the brain and heal both body and mind. Music, chanting, and drumming are entrainment rituals that have served cultures for centuries. Many natural antidotes can be used quite effectively with medicines that stabilize the brain. Be sure to discuss these with your doctor before beginning any natural remedies as your doctor may suggest you come in every so often to make adjustments to your medicine, please do not self treat and self diagnose.

Migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, and insomnia appear as disparate symptoms but often they are manifestations of one problem, a stressed nervous system, and all these-and many more conditions-have been helped through attention training. We may ask how a single approach can be effective for disorders as varied as these, but often one medication is used for a similarly wide range of problems.

The brain is not static, and the ﬂow of neurotransmitters is not ﬁxed. When we change the way we pay attention, we alter cortical rhythms—the spark—and in turn alter the chemical (or electrical) response, as well as the brain’s structure.

Excerpted from: “Brain Circuits May Hold Key to Curing Disease: Alternative Treatments for Physical and Mood Disorders”

“In the last twenty years, our thinking has changed to this idea of circuits,” said Dr. Guy McKhann, professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and panelists during a session on circuits at the Dana Center in Washington, DC.

Researchers have found, using ever-better brain imaging and listening devices, that circuits-the minuscule electrical and chemical pathways between parts of the brain-are a large part of how we process vision, how we carry out movement , how we feel our moods. Some circuits affect your heart rate and other maintenance work. Some might somehow fail, and signal the start of a cascade of bad connections that could lead up to an epileptic seizure, or a mood disorder, or Parkinson’s disease.

“Ultimately, we’re going to have to understand circuits to cure disease,” said Dr. Mahlon Delong, director of the Comprehensive Neuroscience Center at Emory University. DeLong was the first to identify and describe a single type of circuit within the brain-”basal ganglia-thalamocortical” circuits, helping to explain the variety of ways those structures affect motor, cognitive and emotional functions.

Different chemicals (natural or manmade) will trigger different states within the brain. Different chemicals will trigger different states within the brain. The number of neurons in our brains is dwarfed by the number of connections between them. There can be as many as 10,000 inputs to any one neuron.

Chloe Wing went to the Mayo Clinic (in Minnesota) to spend time with a team of heart specialists. They had noticed that when you transplant a healthy heart into a body without changing the stressed, unhealthy context in which the heart has to work, the new heart gets sick like the original one. This observation is pretty obvious, but it prompted the medical research team to learn how to help people create a healthy context for the working of their hearts.

people-stress-battery

The doctors’ equipment revealed that there is an electric circuit between the heart and the brain. They were able to photograph this current. In a healthy system, the circuit is complete. That is, the heart supplies electric current through nerves to the brain -for the brain’s functioning- and the brain returns electricity to the heart through other nerves.

Specifically, the brain returns electricity to a group of cells at the base of the physical heart. The research team call this group of cells “the heart brain” (since it has a major governing role in the functioning of the body and brain -including the regulation of blood circulation).

In stressed bodies, the electric circuit is broken. The heart does send electricity to the brain, but the brain does not return electricity to the heart. Thus most stressed people “live in their heads”. And the result is what the doctor team called a state of “chaos”. That is, there’s a lack of physiological integration in the body.

In studying how to remedy this situation, the doctors came to a three-step method that they now teach to their heart-transplant patients, and which can work for anyone. These three steps restore the circuit of electricity back to the heart. Then a person’s body-functioning changes from a state of “chaos” to a state of “coherence”.

Here’s their easy to do three-step method:

1) Have the person move his/her awareness down to what the doctors call “the cave of the chest”. This ‘cave’ is the whole interior of the rib cage, i.e., all the space around the heart out to the ribs –front, sides, and back.

2) When the person is aware of the whole inside space of his/her chest, have them breathe into and out from the whole chest space. These first two steps bring the person’s awareness down to the area of the heart.

3) Third, have the person think of something wonderful that happened in their life. When they’re in touch with this event, have the person move the “feeling of wonderfulness” down from their head into the cave of the chest.

When step three occurs, the medical ‘photographic’ equipment shows that the missing half of the cycle of electric flow (i.e., from brain to heart) is restored. This is when the person’s body functioning moves from a state of chaos to one of coherence.

Chloe Wing is an Alexander teacher living in NYC and was invited to the Mayo Clinic to teach Alexander as part of their alternative program.

The Workings of the Human Brain

The adaptability of the human brain is called, “plasticity.” Our brains reflect each new experience. As a consequence, we become individuals. Everyone undergoes different experiences, and everyone’s brain develops differently. Of course genes play an important part in constructing the molecular machinery at work on each side of your synapses. But there are about 1 billion more connections in your brain than genes in your chromosomes; it is impossible for each connection to be programmed by a gene. Instead, the connections are shaped by your experiences. The basis of this adaptability is the growth of connections between cells, strengthened and promoted by the activation of the relevant neurons.

Learning doesn’t have to stop in childhood. The plasticity of our brains means that they can usually adapt to further challenges.

Because of plasticity, as we go through life, our brains become increasingly personalized. Everything we encounter will be interpreted in the light of all that we have seen before. It is this personalization of the brain that gives rise to the mind.When the brain perceives a stress stimulus, it immediately releases adrenaline from the adrenal glands, and corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) from nerve cells in the hypothalamus.

Certain disorders can interfere with brain-body connections. Sometimes they originate in the body and bring trouble to the brain, and sometimes it’s the other way around. When this process begins, the trouble it produces can feed on itself in a vicious cycle.

Excerpted from Dana.org, Trouble in the Loop we can begin to better understand the mind-body connetion in regards to our well-being:

Because of the tight feedback between brain and body, what affects one part of ourselves usually affects the other, even if only mildly. A disorder affecting the brain may also toggle switches along the brain’s circuits to the body, and a disorder of the body changes the messages the brain receives. Diabetes provides a good example of how a disorder can create trouble in a feedback loop. Type 2 diabetes, the form that affects about 90 percent of diabetics, is tied to excess weight.

Approximately 20 percent of people known to have diabetes also have depression, about double the rate in the population as a whole. Depression can cue some people to overeat; it certainly makes it more difficult for people to take care of themselves. Thus, depressed people with diabetes are less likely to stick with a recommended diet than diabetics who are not depressed.

In the worst case, the physical and mental troubles associated with a disease can turn the brain-body loop into a spiral. Diabetics who feel too stressed or depressed to control their glucose levels are at greater risk for high blood pressure. That condition in turn increases their risk of heart attacks and strokes, causing more worry in the short term and perhaps serious disability in the long term.

The Communication Center of Mind-Body Interaction

The major command center for our mind-body interactions resides in the hypothalamus and works with the pituitary gland to regulate our body’s hormones. When we find ourselves in a ‘stress response,’ the hypothalamus and pituitary gland put our adrenal glands into high gear, for “fight or flight.”

The Stress Response of “Fight or Flight”

In the early 20th century, physiologist Walter Cannon fed dogs their food mixed with barium then, using a fluoroscope, watched the progress of the food-laced barium move through the dogs’ intestines. He discovered that whenever a dog perceived a threat (fight or flight), the barium would stop moving. In effect, the dog’s gastrointestinal tract shut down.

Eventually, Cannon linked this effect to the secretion of a hormone he called sympathin from the adrenal medulla, a gland in the abdomen closely controlled by the autonomic nerves. He theorized that by halting the digestive system, this hormonal signal freed up more of the dog’s energy to either fight or to run away. Cannon termed that response to stress “fight or flight,” and it has become a basic part of how we think about our own brain-body connection.While our genetically programmed response may help us face an attacker, the stresses we encounter in our daily lives do not often demand an intense physical action. Nevertheless, our bodies may still respond that way. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, one in four employees views his or her job as the number one stressor in life, that number may even be significantly higher now due to economic and political developments during the past decade.

Chronic stress, as well as anger and hostility, may increase the concentration of acid in the stomach, leading to many different diseases and illness. Stress may be what makes some individuals more susceptible to disease and/or the healing of an illness or disease than others. This can be a reminder of how the brain affects the body at many levels. And how the body’s general well-being affects the brain.

The Brain-body Circuit: Mood and Emotions

“Mood” to a scientist is more often called “affect.” Whereas, “emotions” are the mental states related to specific chemicals and pathways in the brain. And because these brain circuits undeniably communicate with the body, researchers are beginning to look for potentially important connections between mood and health.

Many studies show, depression is an independent risk factor for heart disease. In a study of nearly 1,200 male medical students who enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine between 1948 and 1964. About 12 percent of these students eventually developed depression. These men were more than twice as likely to have heart attacks as peers who were not depressed, even decades after first being diagnosed with the mood disorder.

After suffering a heart attack, people with depression also tend to be sicker than people whose moods remain stable. A group of researchers analyzed data from 8,000 people enrolled in the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I). Participants were healthy when they entered the study between 1982 and 1984 and completed a standard test for depres sion. The researchers assessed their health again in 1992 or after they had had a heart attack. Depressed people proved nearly twice as likely to have suffered a heart attack as those who had no depression. Other studies have found that depression also hastens death from heart disease.

Which comes first, depression or heart disease? The fact that the two appear together so often suggests the existence of a distinct brain-body circuit. Scientists do not yet know what such a circuit might consist of, but they have identified several chemical messengers that may be involved. It has been reported that specific neurotransmitters—serotonin and the catecholamines epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline)—are found in reduced levels in the cerebral spinal fluid of people with depression or anxiety.

In one large study, researchers followed nearly 13,000 healthy participants for six years. These people completed a self-test by responding to statements such as “I am a hotheaded person” and “When I get angry, I say nasty things,” ranking their experience with anger on a scale from “almost never” to “almost always.”

Those who identified themselves as highly prone to rage proved nearly three times more likely to have a heart attack in the following years than people with even tempers. A high propensity for anger, the researchers found, put people at higher risk of heart attacks regardless of whether they also smoked, were obese, or had high blood pressure.

Enhance the Method with Young Living Essential Oils

I personally enjoy including my Young Living Essential Oils into any alternative therapy I use. I find the results are faster and more long lasting. In general, I find the shift can happen more completely. I get the physical action of the therapeutic essential oils and the olfactory benefits, both can have very powerful on the human body.

When I’m feeling stressed and like my heart-brain is not connecting well there are a couple essential oils that I turn to to help me get back on track. They are:

Stress Away RollOn (essential oil blend created to reduce stress)
Orange and Lavender oils diffused together (in equal portions), or mix a couple drops of each in a teaspoon of carrier oil for massage, such as V-6; or to use as a perfume**

I find these essential oils work the best. Plus, they are well known for helping to reduce stress and anxiety, as seen in this study on Orange and Lavender. Stress Away (fact sheet), at least for me, brings almost immediate calming and a sense of well-being, and the scent is divine.

I think knowing this simple 3 step method will be most useful for helping us set our lifestyles on track and provide us with a sense of empowerment to take on those more challenging times with greater ease and clarity. Not to mention, being very helpful for those New Year resolution goals! May you have a wonderful and balanced 2010.

** All citrus oils and bergamot can cause photo-sensitivity, so don’t smear this on your skin that will be exposed to sunlight within 24 hours. Instead apply it topically to areas that will not be exposed to sunlight (such as the feet, chest or back).