76 | What is the Nervous System? - The Nervous System Week 1

Hey, guys. I'm not Dr. B. I'm Grant. I'm the editor for the Real Health Podcast. And I am just popping in here real quick to tell you about a little event we have coming up.

There is a back to school event happening at the Health Factory on July 23rd from 4 to 6 PM. There will be free ice cream for the first 50 students, free element samples, a raffle, free scoliosis checks, and more. So bring your kids, bring your family. Everybody is welcome, and we'll we hope to see you there. Anyway, I'll let you get back to the episode.

Catch you later.

Yo. Yo. What's up? Alright. Holla, I can freestyle.

That's a blooper right there.

I think that should just be part of the episode.

Okay. Alright. Well, don't test me, I will make part of the episode.

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. I'm your host, Doctor. Barrett. I'm so excited you are joining us. On today's episode for the month of July, we are gonna cover everything about recovery.

So we're gonna talk about nervous system health as our foundation today. What is the nervous system? We hear about like stress and nervous system health and parasympathetic work and cold plunging and sauna usage and recovery and training, you know, but how do we frame it all out? And so today is gonna be the foundation. The foundational pillar is what is the nervous system?

As we progress through this month, we'll have a couple of guests that'll be joining us and sharing their insight on recovery and training loads. So think of July being all about the health of training, nervous system stress, which is good, and recovery. Right? You need to stress the body, you need to recover, from stress. So today, let's talk about the nervous system.

Again, when you hear nervous system, don't get nervous, inside joke here at the Health Factory. But when we think about the nervous system, what we have to understand first off is what is it, okay, and then what does it do? So what is it? What does it do? So what it is, we're talking about the brain, the spinal cord, and all the nerves that go to every single organ, cell, and tissue.

So the way it's set up is in order for the heart to beat, the lungs to breathe, in order for you to digest the food that you've just eaten, your brain is sending signals through the spine, out through nerves, and allowing all of those organ systems to work. So the nervous system as a structure as a whole is brain, spinal cord, and nerves. And then God created this amazing structure called the spine, and then the skull that surrounds and protects the most important organ in the body, the nervous system. Just think about it. The nervous system is the only organ that's completely encased by bone.

You have your heart and lungs that are surrounded by ribs, but not encased by bone. That's how important it is. And even think of it this way, you can get a new heart, you can get new lungs, you can get a new kidney, you can get a new knee, a new hip, you can't get a new spine, you can't get a new nervous system. It's gotta last you forever. Most of the time, we don't think about our nervous system health or our spinal health until something's wrong, until there's a pain or a problem.

But yet we should be thinking about our nervous system health years before there ever is an issue to prevent rather than to treat. If you look at, like, Alzheimer's research, which is really just neurodegenerative, changes of the brain, what we realize is the 70 year old with Alzheimer's really, their brain neurodegenerative pattern developed 30 years before that. What you do to your brain health in your thirties, forties, and fifties dictate dementia Alzheimer's in your seventies eighties. It's not what you did at 69 that dictates your 70 year old brain. Okay?

It's really it's now. What are you doing to the health of your nervous system now? There are a lot of nervous system triggers and stressors and inflammatory agents that we'll talk about. We'll uncover. We'll talk about toxicity and, but today, the goal is to frame this thing out.

So what it is, we described it. It is the brain, the spinal cord, nerves that control and coordinate every function of the human body. It is the master control system. What it does, like how is it set up? Well, the nervous system is set up in 2 ways.

You have the stress system. So this is- you are training and you need high heart rate, high respiratory rate, or gosh you're in a fight or flight situation because of a trauma, a car accident, an event you have to escape from, we would call this fight or flight or a sympathetic response to the nervous system. The opposite of that is parasympathetic. This is rest and digest. This is sleep.

This is digestion. This is recovery. And there should always be a balance between sympathetic and parasympathetics. There should be a balance between stressing the nervous system and recovering, the nervous system to health and healing. There should be a proper training load and a proper, ability to recover.

So when thinking about how our world is set up today, unfortunately, it's very sympathetically dominant. Just think about kids, for instance. Gosh. Some of my patients just got back and they talked about being in Europe, particularly England, and they said, hey, all of the, like, candies and and Cokes that have artificial colors and sweeteners on it, it says on the bottle, it says on the bottle, can cause your child to develop attention issues and hyperactivity. What is wrong with our country where this is being labeled in other countries but yet here in America, because of big pharma and the financial, you know, input into the FDA, we don't have these labels.

Yet, when you look at a kid today and you wonder why their brain is on fire, why their ADD, ADHD, which let's frame it out. Sugar, candy. Right? Processed foods, hydrogenated oils that that are not healthy to the brain. Tons of media.

Then you put him in a classroom for 7 hours, and you expect a boy who's supposed to be running wild and climbing up trees and breaking bones. You put him in front of a whiteboard and then expect them to sit there, and if not, they're labeled with ADD. It's insane. We are creating ADD. We are creating ADHD at alarming rates, and our diagnostics, are sorry.

The diagnosis is increasing because of the way our country is set up and the way our environment is set up. We are hyper stimulating to the part of the nervous system that is fight or flight, yet we're not supporting rest digest. What's rest digest? Letting a kid run around outside, like, walking barefoot to get healthy proprioception to their nervous system. It's getting 8 minimum to 12 hours of sleep at night.

It's consuming healthy foods that are nourishing to the digestive system that aren't inflammatory to the brain. It's pulling them off of devices and putting them in front of books. That's nourishing a healthy nervous system. What else does it look like? It means getting them adjusted because the spine is the gateway to to encouraging healthy nervous system function and health.

Yet it's not what we're doing. So when we look at what the nervous system is and we look at how it works, synthetics and parasymphetics, the first thing we have to realize is that we are not treating and nourishing and nurturing our nervous system in a way that's promoting health. If you want to age rapidly, if you would like to have chronic disease, stress your nervous system in a debilitating manner, which means unrelenting chronic repetitive stress, chemical, physical, emotional, spiritual stress, puts the nervous system in an alarm state that they never get out of and you're constantly feeling like you're in fight or flight. Rest digest, it's the gateway to help break those neurological cycles. Before we get into how to nurture the nervous system, we're- I'm gonna- I wanna have this discussion on this concept here called the hormesis theory.

And really, what this hormesis or hormetic response is in a healthy person, stress is very good. Stress is a really good thing. What does it look like? Well, it could mean physical stress. So physical stress would come in the form of, like, weight training.

Weight training is extremely beneficial. Yes. It breaks down muscle tissue. Yes. It causes injury to muscles.

But in an environment where the nervous system is set up and primed to heal and recover and repair, guess what? You build stronger muscle. You build bigger bone density. This is fantastic. These are the things that you want.

Or let's just say we put you in a 200 degree sauna. That's great. Sweating, detoxification, heat shock proteins are activated, kills cancer, wonderful things are happening. But if you live in that environment, you'll die. Right?

What about cold plunge? Okay. Beautiful. Yes. Get in that 39 degree water.

Let's activate cold shock proteins, initiate thermogenesis, transition white and brown fat, all fantastic things. Live in that environment and you'll die. So there's this idea of hormesis where we want to actually provide our body with daily stress. But if we provide our body with daily stress that's too much, too soon, or too often, and not enough recovery, it will harm us. So how do we know?

Right? Like how do we know how much stress your body needs, how much recovery it needs? And this is where one of the most important things that I'll encourage my listeners is get under the care with a provider, a coach that's gonna help you in your health journey. It's really hard to be objective about your own health. It's really hard.

You need someone to guide you, to lead you by the hand, to walk you through what does recovery look like, what does healthy stress look like. So the idea here is we're not trying to eliminate stress from the body. We're providing the right stress at the right time, the right doses to create the right response so that we can challenge the body and enable it to heal. That's why training is great. That's why sauna is great.

That's why cold plunging is great because it challenges the nervous system to develop stronger pathways, whether it's within the nervous system, whether it's muscular system, but overall creating more resilient, and actually more stress resilient body. So when talking about nourishing and nurturing the nervous system, we don't want to avoid pain. We don't want to avoid having like challenges and we don't want to avoid stress. We want to take that on. But it is very important that when we take it on, we're taking it on in the right way, in the right dosing.

So what are some things that you can do to nurture your nervous system? Today's episode is all about that. Framing out what is the nervous system, how does it work, and then here's some tips and tricks to nurture and care for the single most important organ in the body. That if you didn't have it in a health- if it's not healthy, no other organ system will be healthy. I hear people talk about their digestive system not feeling great, yet you can't have a healthy gut if your nervous system is stressed.

I hear people talk about high blood pressure and high heart rate. You can't have a low heart rate, a low blood pressure, and a stress nervous system state. The nervous system is the master regulator. So what's the first thing that I recommend to support nervous system health? The easiest thing you could ever do is get under chiropractic care.

Chiropractic care is the gateway to providing relief and healing to the nervous system. The nervous system is so beautiful when it is cared for. And it's cared for through the spine. The spine surrounds and protects the nervous system. And when the spine is unhealthy and diseased, when it is arthritic and not moving well, and it's tight and stiff, it puts stress and triggers stress on the nervous system in such a way that it can put your body in a harmful neurological stress pattern.

Very difficult to get out of and only through chiropractic care can you release the body's innate ability to heal itself. Healing will never come from the outside in. Healing only comes from the inside out. Your body was designed to heal, God created it to heal. Chiropractic care is the gateway to unlocking the innate ability for your body to heal.

So whether it's through a manual adjustment, an instrument adjustment, or any other way of releasing neurological stress, chiropractic care is number 1 in your helping your body adapt to stress and promoting healthy nervous system health. Number 2, you gotta get good sleep. It has to happen. The hardest patients to heal are those that aren't sleeping and resting. So 8 hours of sleep at night is critical to sleeping well.

The nervous system likes cold environments at night. It helps get you into deep sleep. So making sure that we're setting that temperature low if you're restless in the middle of the night, you're waking up in the middle of the night, lower the temperature 1 degree a night for a couple nights in a row to get deeper patterns of restful sleep. Sleep is critical. And if you're still having problems, explore melatonin as a fantastic option to enhance deep sleep.

Number 3, breath work. One of the best ways to promote parasympathetic healing, alright, engaging the parasympathetic nervous system is by breath work. So breath work specifically, I love box breathing where we breathe through the nose for 5 seconds, Hold our breath for 5 seconds. Exhale through the mouth for 5 seconds. Hold our breath for 5 seconds.

This style of box breathing that we see in the military, navy specifically, is a way of calming the nervous system, breaking stressful patterns. And as you may know, throughout the day, when you just feel like you take a deep breath, it just seems like it just resets your, like, balance point. Take deep breaths throughout the day. Do 3 to 5 minutes of box breathing throughout the day. Before bed at night, do some box breathing.

It's a great way to initiate that rest system of the body, that parasympathetic kind of vagus tone to the body. Okay? So that's number 3. Number 4, adaptogenic herbs. Adaptogens are fantastic to help your body become more stress resilient.

We have an incredible formula we use in the office called Power Adapt which is an adaptogenic complex. But adaptogens like ashwagandha and ginsengs and rhodiola and schisandra berries are fantastic to help the body's ability to adapt and recover to stress to be more stress resilient. So number 4, start adaptogens. Everyone can use them. They are fantastic in the body's ability to handle more stress and become more stress resilient.

And my last one, number 5, magnesium. Magnesium is a fantastic mineral that most of us are depleted in, but yet promotes healthy nervous system function. In particular, we love magnesium glycinate. It's a powder that you can add to your water, consume at night to help your body go into deep states of sleep, as well as help your muscular system recover and support a healthy digestive system. Magnesium is fantastic for the nervous system.

So we're thinking through these 5, it's chiropractic care, it's sleep, it's adaptogens, it is breath work, and it is magnesium. Those five things can really help promote nervous system health and nurture your nervous system back to a place of recovery. We're all talking about the nervous system this month. We're talking about stress and recovery and training loads. So hope today was a useful episode for you and can't wait for you to listen to future episodes of The Real Health Podcast.

Thanks again for listening to today's episode.