Happiness – Why Not?

As a chiropractor practicing Neurologically Based Chiropractic, I feel very fortunate. Dealing in functional Neurology, I get to assist patients in reprogramming and tweaking their brain and nervous system, the very mechanism that expresses their humanity. We can take measurements before and after and understand that we have in effect improved people's quality of life and their health potential. It is very humbling and I take little credit for it, except for the fact that I have chosen it and devoted my life to it.

But then the next question has to be; what is it that makes the difference between the ones that get just a little better and those that completely transform and blossom; when we have looked at diet, exercise, fitness, weight, muscle balance, posture, brain waves, hand temperature, galvanic skin response, breath rate, heart rate, and heart rate variability. When we have improved all of those factors, what is it that makes one person feel better than another? What is it that makes one person have more joy and satisfaction in life?

And then it struck me. The answer is happiness. And then I realized - You are exactly as happy as you want to be. When all or most of the other factors are normalized, the remaining factor is the level of happiness that you have chosen.

Now since we're dealing with biology, living organisms and eco-systems, it is not possible to separate the brainwaves, heart rate variability, and health potential from happiness, because as you normalize brain function you will get happier and as you get happier you will normalize brain function. Yet you realize that our outlook on life, attitude, or level of happiness becomes the key factor in our quality of life.

All right then - So just be happy!

Then the realistic, honest person, thoroughly grounded in reality says - Sure, but it's not that easy. You can't be happy for no reason.

And that statement right there "You cannot be happy for no reason" is the problem. That is the grand human delusion. Mankind has been conditioned to believe that you need a reason to justify your happiness. In fact, we even make fun of people who appear to be happier than they "should"; those that are happier than what we think is appropriate or "normal" without a "valid" reason. We say that they must be on drugs, mentally challenged or we ascribe their inexplicable happiness to some other "abnormal" reason.

We have learned to base our feelings and our level of happiness on our circumstances and conditions. We believe that you need a reason to be happy, so we spend all of our time and effort trying to create conditions and circumstances that we define as "good" and "successful" so that we can feel happy when they line up for us. We are afraid of feeling good for no reason, because we think it makes us irresponsible. We believe that we won't get things done unless we worry about them first, during and after. We believe that we are lacking in integrity and character if we go around feeling good when "things are bad".

This belief, that we can only be happy when things go our way, and we automatically need to feel bad, when they are not, is nothing more than a belief, but it is so deeply conditioned that we don't even see it as a belief; we believe it's the way it is; as if it is built into the very fabric of existence.

So let's look at this concept with fresh new eyes. As it turns out there is no official universal law or man-made rule at all on the matter; not only are you free to be happy for no reason what so ever, it is the most natural thing to be.

So try to put aside all your previous notions for a moment and honestly ask yourself these questions.

• All other things being equal, would I rather be happy or miserable?
• When I have a pile of bills to pay; would I rather be a happy person paying bills or would I prefer to be a miserable person paying bills?
• Would I rather have a flat tire and feel good, or have a flat tire and feel bad?
• Would I rather be stuck in traffic and feel great, or would I rather sit in traffic and be angry?
• Would I rather be alone and happy or alone and sad?
• Would I rather be poor and happy or poor and miserable?
• Would I rather be rich and happy or rich and depressed?

You see happiness and the circumstance have nothing to do with each other unless your belief says they do.

When asking the questions like that, the obviousness of the truth shines through like a beam of light in the dark. In every single case; of course we would prefer to be happy. Then why aren't we? Why is it so difficult?

The complete answer is quite long and has been very well covered by many authors. (A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is a great place to start)

The short answer is that there is a mechanism that makes you identify your "self" and your value with the situation that you are in. You identify with it and believe that you have to control it in some way. Then you get frustrated and feel bad when you realize that you can't control it. The whole problem is that you are identifying with the circumstance rather than realizing that you are independent of it.

You are not the traffic situation and the traffic situation is not you, but when you lose your awareness of"being", it becomes you. It has no power over you or how you feel unless you give it that power, and the way that you give it that power is through identification with it.

The mechanism that creates this identification is called the ego. The ego is the sum total of all the repetitious "noisy thoughts" in your head that in the average person goes on pretty much uninterrupted day in and day out.

The ego is not you, but it feels like you when you don't pay attention. You are not the thought. You are the one having the thought. You are the consciousness that can take a step back and question the validity of the thought. The ego has no capacity to step back and question the thought because it is the thought.

When you slow yourself down and observe your thoughts you become conscious. You detach yourself from the situation or circumstance and you are no longer controlled by it.

When you are identified with your ego, your stream of thoughts, it is impossible to feel good for no reason, because the ego only gets its value from identifying with things, concepts, ideas, people etc that makes it stand out and be special.

Happiness is our natural state of being, but the "state of being" is incompatible with the ego. Since the ego can only exist and have value through identification with external things, it can never rest. It needs to find new things and new places to identify with. This is why it is so difficult to be happy for no reason. In order to get to that point we need to create little breaks from identifying with the stream of thought; identification that has been practiced our entire life after age 1 or 2.

First we need to realize the value of feeling good. If we can break away from the ego for just a moment we can realize that feeling good is an end to itself, but if we cannot, the ego will convince us that it is wrong to feel good without having something new and better to identify with.

It is possible to start creating little gaps in the stream of thought, but it requires a willingness to look at things differently and it will take a lot of consistency and practice because we are so strongly conditioned to identify with our thoughts/ego.

Here's a way to start. Tell yourself - I would rather feel good. I realize that the events around me do not need to be controlled by me. They are fine the way they are and they have no desire or need to be controlled or fixed by me. Therefore I am free to let them be as they are.

Whenever I have a chance I will take a break and step back from my thoughts; take a deep breath and experience the perfection of the present moment. Clear your mind of thoughts for just the length of a slow exhalation (6-7 seconds) and ask yourself - How would I like to feel in this moment? Realize that how you feel is a choice and has nothing to do with anything external.

Repeat as needed any time you would like to feel happy. (Every moment of your existence)

Congratulations. You are well on your way to happiness and health.

Yours in Health and Joy,

Sten Ekberg D.C.

What is Stress - Actually?

There is a tremendous amount of information available today about the effects of stress. If you ask the average person if they are stressed, most people will be quick to tell you more than you wanted to know. But what is stress? What are the mechanisms and processes that make it a “bad” thing? Everyone seems aware that they feel bad during periods of stress; hands get cold, excessive sweat in the armpit, students get sick during finals week etc... But how is this all related, and how far reaching is stress?

We will start with the physiological definition and work our way into more concrete examples. Everything that happens in your body without you thinking about it is handled by your autonomic (automatic) nervous system (NS); i.e. growing nails, regulating the pH of your blood, blinking your eyes, the muscle tone in your shoulders, the blood flow through your kidneys. All these things are handled for you and it is a blessing that we don’t have to think about it, because most of it wouldn’t get done.

Your autonomic NS however, gets it done because it is all part of your incredible innate intelligence. The autonomic NS has two branches; the Sympathetic and the Para-sympathetic branch. These two branches of the autonomic NS take turns running the show behind the scenes for you and they have a complementary but opposite function. The sympathetic NS is concerned with responding to threats that are outside of you or that you perceive to be outside you. The para-sympathetic NS responds to threats that are inside you. Here is how it works.

If you encounter a stressor such as a wild animal, an attacker, or a car racing towards you in your lane, your brain sets off an alarm that there is severe, acute danger. If you don’t respond and act within seconds or less, your life could be at stake. In this situation your brain tells the sympathetic branch to fire on all cylinders to mobilize resources to respond to the threat. Within a fraction of a second your pupils dilate, your heart speeds up, your blood pressure increases, your hands get moist , sticky and cold, your breath rate increases and your muscles tense up. This is all part of the “Fight - Flight” response so that you can act quickly and fight or get out of the way. The major chemical released in the body is adrenalin (aka epinephrine) and all the chemical and physical processes initiated are about increasing fuel delivery and generating energy for the anticipated fight.

At the same time the body starts preparing for what will happen if the crisis lasts more than a couple of seconds and for the possibility that you will get injured. The adrenal glands will start producing Cortisol which has a primary effect of raising blood sugar and the secondary effect of suppressing the immune system. In a crisis, we are also likely to get injured, so the body starts preparing just in case so that the wound will stop bleeding faster and there will be plenty of resources to heal the damaged cells. So it increases the amount of clotting factors in the blood and it increases the amount of LDL cholesterol, since LDL is an important component to rebuild damaged cell membranes. (Which means that sticky blood and high LDL are a result of stress rather than a deficiency in blood thinners and statin drugs – Imagine that)

So those responses are all mediated by the sympathetic NS. Now let’s look at the para- sympathetic NS; what does it do.

In a nutshell the para-sympathetic NS stimulates digestion, gut motility, enzyme secretion, immune system, healing, repair and growth. So you can eat a “healthy diet”, but still be under nourished if you can’t digest and absorb the nutrients. You can exercise and eat well and still get sick all the time if your immune system isn’t balanced properly.

So if the body has such tremendous innate intelligence, why would it do a “stupid” thing like turning off the systems that keep us healthy?

The simple answer is that the body will allocate the resources where they are needed the most at any given time; the sympathetic NS acts to keep you alive in the next few seconds, the para- sympathetic NS acts to repair you to function in months and years to come.

So which one is more important? Well, obviously, they are both important, but if you don’t survive the next few seconds, it doesn’t matter how healthy your tissues are. You would just make a delicious meal for whatever was chasing you.

This brings us back to the original question; what is stress?

And now we have an intelligent scientific definition. Stress is anything that activates the sympathetic NS.

This is a very important distinction and the reason I went this roundabout way to define stress is this. Physiological stress is so much more than the emotional state of “stress”. It is estimated that 95% or more of stress is subconscious, and when you start learning more about what activates the stress response, you’ll agree that 95% is a low estimate.

Stress is anything that your body has to respond to. If a cell is required to respond to a demand (signal), the sympathetic NS has to provide a little extra fuel to that cell so that it can do its job. Stress is structural, chemical and emotional. That means stress is; too much exercise, not enough exercise, poor posture, altered joint mechanics, poisons, chemicals, drugs, foods to which you are allergic. Standing after sitting is a stress, moving from heat to cold and vice versa. All of these examples are things the body has to respond to.

So both the sympathetic and the para-sympathetic NS respond extremely intelligently in an emergency situation. They have saved the life of mankind through the millennia. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that these systems are virtually the same in all animals (yes humans are animals) and the serve us well in the jungle, on the savannah and in a hunter gatherer life-style. Our genetic make-up hasn’t changed significantly in the last 40,000 years, but our life styles have. If you are trying to stay alive among predators, your stresses tend to be really large but relatively few. Your system is designed to deal with the crisis and then calm back down and regenerate when the danger was over. Furthermore the increase in blood sugar created by the burst of Cortisol was typically used up by vigorous physical activity while escaping whatever was chasing you or vice versa.

Today, we have lifestyles that create thousands of little stressors; so small that most of them go un-noticed; we just assume that’s how we’re supposed to feel, but they still generate small bursts of activation of the sympathetic NS. Now since our stress response is on a constant state of moderate activation, our para-sympathetic NS is in a constant state of de-activation. The body doesn’t “have time” to digest, heal and regenerate. The result; headaches, skin rashes, chronic infections, allergies, erectile dysfunction, infertility, ulcers, indigestion, irritable bowel, constipation, G.E.R.D., high blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, auto immune disorders, cancer, etc… How many people do you know over 40 that does not have any of these symptoms and who is not taking any prescription drugs. Are you beginning to see the connection?

Yet with all those sources of stress, the largest source of all may be your thoughts. Even though they take place inside you, they are usually dealing with events outside of you that you are trying to figure out how to defeat, control, solve or improve. The interesting thing about thoughts is that even though we believe that we are consciously thinking those thoughts, an estimated 60,000/ day give or take, our thoughts are very habitual. Probably more than 98% of your thoughts today are the same ones or very similar to those that you had yesterday. This makes our thoughts quite habitual and to the extent that we get stressed by our thoughts, we have habituated stress responses molded into our neural pathways.

So even though we have developed lifestyles where our stress is more intellectual than physical, our stress response, which is subconscious, still reacts the same physical way as in all other animals.

The reason I wanted to write this article, is that even though there is much agreement about the effects of stress, there is generally poor understanding about the reasons it does what it does. So here are some important points to remember about stress:

• Stress is when your physiology switches to sympathetic dominance (fight-flight).
• Whenever you have sympathetic dominance, your healing and regeneration (para- sympathetic) is proportionately turned off.
• A stressor can be chemical, structural or emotional.
• Stress responses are often not consciously perceived.
• Stress (sympathetic) is about keeping you alive right now and has nothing to do with health.
• Healing can only take place when the body is not perceiving a threat.
• Habitual thinking is one of the greatest sources of stress.
• Physical activity is one of the greatest relievers of stress

If you read this far you might be saying; well this is all fascinating, but it’s pretty much all doom and gloom; what do we do to make it better?

I thought you’d never ask?

Now we have to ask one more question. What is it, (besides a fear-full environment) that influences the actions of the autonomic NS; i.e the sympathetic and parasympathetic NS?

The answer is – Your brain. The way the brain works is that even though the autonomic nervous system is part of the central nervous system, there are higher and lower levels in the hierarchy. The higher level is called the cortex; that’s the top and outside of the brain. The lower level is called the brainstem and is the lower inside middle portion between the bottom of the brain and the spinal cord.

Whenever there is an emergency, the brainstem, the more primitive part of the brain takes over and runs the show, because now in fight-flight we don’t have to be clever, we just need to survive. Then when the danger is over, the cortex steps in and turns off the stress response. Therefore the better the overall function of your brain/cortex, the smother and quicker your body can leave the stress behind and return to balance. The weaker the cortex and the more often you get stressed the more the stressed state tends to “get stuck”.

So the solution is to learn more about what really are the stressors in your life and try to reduce them, and then to learn what practices you can incorporate into your life in order to strengthen your cortex and your para-sympathetic pathways to break the sympathetic dominance.

Here are some proven suggestions.

• Exercise.
• Yoga.
• Meditation.
• Breathing practices.
• Chiropractic adjustments (actually the fastest and most powerful way to activate the cortex that we know of).

It is also highly recommended to have a Stress Response Evaluation performed. That is a simple and non-invasive test to find out how your nervous system responds to stress, and it can be repeated to see how you are progressing.

Our bodies are really smart, but our life styles have changed so much since our genes last changed that we have to become a little smarter and learn a few tricks to help our bodies out. The good news is that we today have a really good understanding of these mechanisms, so there is no reason to postpone feeling better, getting healthier and gradually moving up to peak performance, joy and full life enjoyment.

If you want to learn more, call 678-638-0898 if you have questions, or to schedule an appointment for a Stress Response Evaluation.