Another summit about Longevity is coming up in May and this is one area which will be covered.
Dr. Sachin Patel 00:00We have a system in our body, part of our central nervous system called the autonomic nervous system. And this system just like it sounds, automatic, autonomic, it automatically takes care of 95 to 99 percent of the functions that we need to survive. It doesn’t do the conscious thinking for us, it does the subconscious thinking and process for us, so our heartbeat, our blood pressure, our digestive function are skin cells replacing themselves. All of these things are happening for us passively and automatically.
00:30Now that system has two modes. It has a high-stress mode and it has a low-stress mode, so we call the high-stress mode sympathetic, we call the low-stress mode parasympathetic. When somebody is under stress, stress is really all about perception first and then chemistry secondarily to that. So when we perceive a stressor based on our past experiences or understanding of the world, it goes to a part of our brain called the Amygdala.
00:54The amygdala then makes a decision for us to determine if it’s a stress response that we’re encountering or if we can relax. That decision is made and instantly hormones are flooding our bloodstream, changing the function of every cell in every organ in our body, and as a result of that, everything in our chemistry changes to go into a state of fight or flight into a self preserving state. What happens when we do this is blood flow that’s normally going to the trunk, now starts going away from the trunk in preparation for fight or flight into the arms and legs. So now we’re not sending blood to the trunk. We’re sending it elsewhere in the body because we’re pairing the emotion with our physiology. So if we are under stress, if we need to be in fight or flight, our brain senses that before we can even consciously think of it, it creates this physical and chemical response in our body, channeling blood to where we want to send a function and creating the perfect environment for us to then internally then to survive our external environment, which is threatening us. So we want to pair our physiology with the action that we’re going to take a that’s going to take place. So that’s what we refer to as autonomic pairing.
02:05Now, the opposite side of that is where healing takes place. So healing takes place, not when we’re sending–there’s no organs in our arms or legs– so when blood is going to our internal organs that’s when healing takes place. That’s when our physiology starts to go into a state of repair and healing. And so in order to do that, we have to be on the opposite side of that high stress fence. Now, what I mentioned earlier, the brain makes that decision for us based on subconscious programming and our understanding of the world. So what we first need to do instead of trying to get better at managing stress, is we actually need to change the perception of our environment. And, uh, that can happen consciously. Mainly it happens subconsciously. And once that happens, then we stopped responding the same way chemically and physiologically to that same stimulus.