From Amanda's very early writing (1990s to early 2000s), shared as it was originally written.
You can fool your mind but you can’t fool your body. Stress hormones may have been running around your system for years -causing dramatic changes in your body - without you acknowledging or recognizing that you are at risk.
Even if you convince your mind that, despite the four million things that have gone dramatically wrong in your life over the past month, (or even vaguely wrong!) you are feeling fine, all is well and that stress is not a problem for you, you can’t deny it in your body. Your body stores stress. It stores it up in all sorts of ways - tight muscles and ligaments, internal organs may not be functioning too well, chronic fatigue, listlessness, ulcers may be forming, who knows what else?
New research into what makes humans ill in today’s society is demonstrating strong links between unresolved stress and disease. This unresolved stress is buried deep inside you and creates havoc with your body systems and rapidly increases the aging process.
One of the worst effects of prolonged, unresolved stress is damage to the immune system. Your immune system is the part of you that fights off virus and other diseases. It’s essential to have a healthy and strong immune system if you want to be well and free of colds, flus, and any other disease.
So what can you do? This is the start of a series of articles on simple and very effective strategies - that don’t take a lot of time - to burn off stress as it occurs, short circuiting the damage that could have been done.
Firstly, when you stimulate the skin, you release more immune system boosting chemicals into your system than if you stimulate any other structure or organ in your body. In 1976, Doctors at the University of Miami ran an experiment in which they took two groups of premature babies. One group was treated in the normal, super technical, hygenic way and the other group treated similarly except they have “tactile stimulation” three times a day. The results were dramatic. Although fed on demand with the same formula, the touched babies gained 47% more weight every day then the control group; they were more alert and started to act like normally delivered babies sooner. They also left hospital a week sooner than the control group. The only difference between the two was the amount of touching given to the babies.
What a shame these results aren’t publicised more widely. I guess it just proves that love, caring and touching are fundamental for human wellness. I feel sad for the poor babies who were left alone even though the health care providers felt the sanitary , ‘hemetically sealed’ environment was the best thing to do for these new infants.
Many other studies indicate the importance of touch for our health. Having a pet to stroke lowers the blood pressure of the person doing the stroking. (Don’t know about the cat or dog!). Doctors sometimes recommend that people recovering from heart attacks buy a pet and make time to pat the pet as part of their treatment!
If you accept that the body stores stress, and that we may not be aware of this happening , one of the easiest and most pleasant things to do to eliminate that stress is to have a massage once a week! Choose whatever sort of massage you like (probably not from the personal columns!) and make a committment to yourself to have one once a week. Eeek I hear you cry! I can’t afford that. I don’t have time. I only do that when I want to pamper myself. WRONG!
Massage should no longer be considered a luxury or pampering. It’s essential for your wellness if you look at the new scheme of what we understand about the bodymind.
Make the time and save the money so you can have one as often as possible. Massage each other at home - build your relationship while you are boosting your immune system!
Touch your children a lot if you don’t already. They shrivel up and whither without it. What if you are not a ‘touchy’ person? Probably your parents didn’t touch much or touch you much and so you grew up learning from a model where touching was taboo. If that’s the case do whatever you have to do to get over it! If you don’t touch or like it then you are likely to be sick more often than those who do like it!
When you come in the door at night, do you greet your partner (if there is one there) with a with peck on the cheek and then spend 5 minutes playing with the dog or cat? not only does this make the person feel less important than the animal, but it also deprives both of you from a great opportunity to communicate AND boost your immune system at the same time! I have had people at conferences (always women) who have said “do you know, sometimes I lie on the floor next to the dog......just to get the same attention!”. TRUE. The men reataliate with “yea, but the dog’s pleased to see me!”. So perhaps men and women need to talk about the touching issue with each other and see if they need to build more touching into thier relationships.
So here’s another simple way to boost your immune system and improve communication and the relationship between you and your partner....give the person a seven second kisss and hug when you walk in the door! Most people blanch whne I say this and squeak “how long?”! Seven seconds isn’t that long....and men don’t need to be watching their clocks behind their partner’s head! You’ll be surprised at the beneficial results of this new form of wellness prescription! And it really works!
Hugs are great for your physiology - a hug will actually change the chemical makeup of your body. As long as you like the hug-er, your body will fill up with endorphins and you’ll reduce the amount of nasty stress chemicals spreading their chaos! So go out and start touching and hugging people that it is appropriate for you to touch and hug! And next week I’ll cover some more simple and easy way to boost your immune system. In the meantime, stay ‘in touch’ and keep hugging.
