Psychoneuroimmunology & Christian EFT

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is a relatively new branch of medicine, developed because the impact between the psyche, nervous system, and the immune system seemed to be apparent; they are linked in a unique God created way. Early physical feelings of an illness increase stress anxiety, activating classic stress responses, such as cortisol release. There is an entire physiological mechanism here that occurs during sickness or after accidents. Through a series of chemical reactions, the body through the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, figures out something is wrong, revving up the inflammation process, sending the infection or damage repairing cells to the scene. This response somehow makes us change our daily MO of how we operate – we ingest less water and food, we sleep poorly, we move less, and fever begins, in some cases. We just know something is wrong and the stress begins, compounding the body’s response, causing anxiety within the mind-body. It shifts the healing mechanism from the diseased or injured part to dealing with our emotions associated with the problem. All our energy is directed to the wrong place, slowing down us getting well. Emotional stress will cause the same reaction. When we feel isolated, or down, or rejected, the body begins the same stress reaction within our cells, actually making us sick. Science in this new field is showing that if the emotional impact of negative events in our lives is interrupted, the physical reaction is also interrupted, keeping us healthy because the immune system stays strong and intact. The less we are ill, the stronger the immune system remains because it doesn’t need months to recover from a previous illness, accident, or round of recent antibiotics. So what is PNI exactly? By strict definition it is something like the study of the connection between neural and endocrine systems and the functioning of the immune system by understanding how stress reacts within the body. Neural pathway is the way the body communicates within itself, passing all these minute pieces of information among the body parts. Endocrine system is the cortisol releasing part of the process. These appear to interact strongly with how our body uses our immune system to keep us healthy & alive. This is the stuff that makes up mind-body medicine. PNI studies how the body deals with cognitive stress. The way a person perceives a stressful event may indeed be more important than the event or the stress itself. How I would perceive a car accident may not be the same intensity that someone else may perceive it. And a stressful event can literally be simple something perceived in the mind, such as worry, anxiety, or dread over something that may or may not happen. Your subconscious simply doesn’t know the difference between a “made up” occurrence or a real actual occurrence. It treats both equally – it stresses the body equally with both situations. When a stressful signal is recognized by the senses, the hypothalamus begins the processing. Then a series of messages are sent via neuropeptides and neurotransmitters to all parts of the body. It was once thought that each body part had a specific neuropeptides and its accompanying cellular receptors. It has subsequently been found that the body contains a mixed batch of these everywhere. These communications are system-wide. Brain peptides are found in the gut, etc. Few are organ specific. Stress in and of itself is not the issue, but how we deal with the stress is the problem. Some people seem to have no issues dealing with high levels of stress. Somehow they have learned to compensate for it. The rest of us, and that is more of the majority of the population, simply don’t do well with high stress levels, and constantly high stress levels compound the wellness problem. The high stress levels, according to research, are what set us up for diseases such as heart disease, cancer and some autoimmune diseases. Epigenetics shows we can literally turn those disease genes off or on by the way we handle stress in our lives. Our human body functions well in homeostasis. It likes to feel good, running at low stress levels with as little emotional turmoil as possible. Where most humans get into trouble is with cognitive sensory input. We tend to internalize outside sensory information repetitively, embedding that coding into our physiological system. All of that sensory information is processed through the nervous system in conjunction with the endocrine system, and then impacting the immune system. A simple example is this: A child learns early on that when Mom curls her lip at him (her), it means Mother is disappointed. If Mom uses this method of showing disappointment in a child’s behavior over and over again, as an adult, every time the person sees anyone with a curled lip, similar to Mom’s, the adult assumes (perception) it means the curled lip person is disappointed with them. This is cognitive learning. It is a visual or auditory or tactile event where repetition encodes the behavior of another into the psyche of a child, setting up emotional stress for a lifetime. Now, this is a simple example taken to the extreme, but should that same child be exposed to hundreds of such behaviors by his parents and by others that over a course of 18 years of life, it builds up a huge bank of cognitive stress, especially if there is no loving attention added to the child rearing to offset the adult behaviors. Negative emotional responses cause physiological changes. These are the chronic cognitive changes that impact long-term health. Emotions in and of themselves aren’t the problem. How we digest them emotionally is what causes the problems. There is another physical mechanism at work here, too, that is called the HPA axis. These mechanisms can get a bit complicated here. The even more interesting fact is the body does these reactions within milliseconds of a perceived or actual stressor, meaning each of these steps take just fractions of seconds to happen. God created our bodies in a nearly unbelievable manner. Let me see if I can simplify this HPA axis mechanism for you. Stress situation happens, and the body decides if it is a true problem or not for us (remember that a problem can be physical, as it is really is happening to us i.e. accident, illness, death of a loved one, or it may simply be an internal stress i.e. worry about test tomorrow, how our dress will fit for the party tonight, or whether we will be hired for the job we interviewed for today). If a person has a physiological response to the situation, then stress is happening within the body. Physiological response includes elevated heart rate, lack of hunger, dilated pupils, changes in bowel patterns, increased respiratory rate, sweating, etc. Now, the body decides the stress needs to be dealt with. Some short term stress, like a loud noise, is defused quickly once the person recognizes the source of the noise, realizing it is not a problem, and then all the physiological markers return to normal rather quickly. If the situation is deemed stressful, the hypothalamus, located at the base of the brain, is activated. The hypothalamus is the stress judge. It takes immediate charge, sending out 2 signals – one to the pituitary gland (located in the base of the brain) and the other to the adrenal medulla (located on top of the kidneys). 2 different responses could be triggered depending on whether the stress is short-term or long-term. Short- term stress is dealt with by the Sypathomedullary Pathway (SAM) and long –term stress is dealt with by the HPA System (HPA). Within the SAM pathway the hypothalamus activates the adrenal medulla, which is part of the autonomic nervous system that controls most of our bodily functions without us thinking about them, such as breathing, heart rate, digestion, etc. The adrenal medulla activates the release of the adrenaline hormone. This hormone gets the body ready for the flight or fight response by pumping large volumes of blood to our larger muscle groups in our legs and arms, getting us ready to start punching or start running fast to avoid danger. Once the threat is over, the parasympathetic nervous system once again takes over, calming us back down into a state of homeostasis, or calm. There are few ill effects from short-term stress. It is simply a life protecting mechanism built in by God for survival. For another article another day, there is a huge problem when we do neither fight nor run, but instead we freeze. Negative memories are snapped into place in the body-mind when we freeze. The freeze mechanism is we human’s biggest problem. The Hypothalamic- Pituitary-Adrenal system is somewhat similar. The stress situation activates the HPA with the hypothalamus stimulating the pituitary gland which secretes ACTH (adenocorticotropic hormone) with the ACTH stimulating the adrenal glands to produce the hormone corticosteroid, or cortisol. With long-term stress such as abuse, the cortisol level never returns back to normal, producing an accompanying cascade of physical problems, such as diabetes, because the blood sugar remains elevated, obesity because the fat metabolism is disturbed, adrenal fatigue because the adrenals are constantly working, and many other issues causing heart disease and cancer to occur. All the while the immune system is also distressed allowing infectious diseases to enter the body, too. This all leads to permanent HPA dysregulation simply by the magnitude of the chronic cortisol release by that same HPA system. When intense negative stress (distress comes from Latin word districtus, which meant “to hinder”) events happen, traumatization occurs, and the HPA axis is activated. The traumatic events that we can recall tend not necessarily to cause us any intense problem. The problem occurs when we bury the trauma in our subconscious. This causes dissociated traumatic memories (DTM). The DTM are stored in the subconscious mind and are not accessible to the conscious mind. They do cause physiological responses that seem to be associated with absolutely nothing environmentally, or anything outside the body, but most anything can trigger them. Your subconscious remembers every single detail around the trauma, so when we encounter something that is similar to a traumatizing detail the subconscious will cause us to react again, just like we did when the trauma actually occurred. We may have absolutely no idea what is actually happening because we aren’t consciously aware of the memory. The limbic system stores all these memories in different parts of the body, not just in the brain. Any of the 3 parts of the traumatizing event, cognitive, emotional or sensory, can act as stimuli. We end up with bewildering behaviors that we cannot seem to break, such as an over-reaction to something minor, a crying jag over spilled milk, or anxiety because we see a blue car. Until some sort of energy technique is applied that will help the person root out of his or her subconscious the basis of the emotional response, the behavior tends to continue, wreaking havoc on life of everyone around him or her, mostly themselves. This problem is often extremely disturbing. Research seems to suggest that at least 15% of those experiencing long-term chronic trauma can develop PTSD. If the stressful situation seems life threatening, the hypothalamus tosses the problem over to the amygdala where the fight or flight mechanism is activated to decide if the problem is really life threatening. The amygdala is also located in the back lower brain. It appears it is the amygdala (and parts of the brain around it) and hippocampus, which seems to be responsible for memory retrieval, helps write the emotions upon the mind-body, as it experience the emotions about the occurring event, as one of the functions of the amygdala is to prepare us for survival. The amygdala recognizes guilt, fear, anxiety, remorse, etc., along with body pain issues and these emotions are then encoded as body sensations when they are chronic, causing long term pathological issues. The 5 senses are directly connected to the amygdala, so they add their input into memories, too, helping to permanently encode them. Negative memories in the amygdala encryption have been shown to require both protein synthetic and neurochemical processes to happen. This is where neuropeptides and neurotransmitters come into play. This is also where the protein sheaths around disease genes can be turned on and off. It’s a pretty complicated physical process. Now, not every negative traumatic event is encoded permanently, only those in which we feel unable to escape, causing us to feel helpless and powerless, and without any available resources to assist us, or it is an event in which we feel some responsibility for the outcome. This is where the “freeze” part of the flight, flight & freeze mechanism enters. Many times one single event is sufficient to cause great emotional damage, especially if the person has suffered multiple early environmental events, which can include earlier abuse that then set the stage for just the perfect emotional storm. This is particularly possible for children, who are subjected to chronic stress, early in life. If the trauma is so awful, the person then completely disassociates the memory to protect themselves. The memory is so unbearable that survival to the subconscious comes into question; however, the emotions around the event are buried deeply within the body and each time a triggering event that the subconscious recognizes as part of that early pattern occurs, the physiological symptoms and feelings reoccur. The subconscious keeps replaying the event in the hope of changing the outcome. Our imagination does just as well at triggering out physiological response as the actual event does. The memory just doesn’t die. It is repeated in our subconscious mind as if it is happening at this very moment. This is cognitive pattern learning at its finest. As you can see our emotional response to events is a complicated process. PNI is one of the new fields of medicine that is responding to this information in an attempt to uncover all the aspects of how this unique body system works. PNI’s primary thrust is investigating the connection to cognitive stress. Since it is apparent that our emotions greatly impact our immune system, in particular, and all the other body systems, we must learn how to disarm all negative emotional events in our lives, if we choose to stay healthy & vibrant in our daily life. Hopefully, this is where EFT or some other energy coaching appears on the scene to assist the person in deactivating this neural response to the negative memory or memories, giving them back an abundant life that Jesus talks about in the Gospels, both physically and emotionally. For more information, go to www.eftforchristians.com To schedule a free EFT consultation coaching session, email me at: eftforchristians@gmail.com Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.