WHOLE-istic Health and Healing Chronic Stress

What is health? Where does it come from? And how can you support the internal mechanisms within yourself to embody health?

These are questions that often come up—and we’ll begin to untangle them by starting with the concept of homeostasis.

What Is Homeostasis?

Homeostasis is a term that’s often overlooked, yet it’s key to understanding how the body works. Simply put, the body is constantly working to maintain balance—especially in four main areas: temperature, pH, blood volume, and blood concentration. I’d also like to add a fifth: muscle contraction. Muscle contraction directly impacts the ability of our joints to move properly and allows us to carry out the tasks we need, love, and want to do each day.

Our body is constantly regulating this balance, but what happens when it can’t keep up? That’s when you go to your doctor, get some lab work done, and they tell you what’s “out of range”. You’ll be given something to treat the out of range marker and be sent on your way, but the trick comes down to looking at why your homeostasis has become imbalanced in the first place. This can lead to consequences in our joints like inflammation (itis) or premature degeneration.

So ask yourself: 

If your internal balance can’t keep up, what are you doing (or not doing) in terms of food consumption, emotional stress, or physical/structural stress?

How Stress Impacts the Body’s Balance

Stress comes in three forms: chemical, emotional, and physical. When we look at these three core principles, we can start to better understand what symptoms truly are. 

First we can look at the concept of the internal environment and the body’s need to maintain its components. This is one of the most important ideas when trying to understand how organ systems function and why symptoms arise. We also need to remember there are no new body processes in disease—only symptoms being produced by normal homeostatic processes that are either going too fast, too slow, or are out of sync with other functions. The final important component is remembering that all symptoms are caused by stress, also known as energy deficiency.

Energy deficiency is a byproduct of either prolonged chronic stress or acute stress. When this happens, the body's ten organ systems begin to send stress signals to the brainstem. In response, the hypothalamus relays instructions back to various tissues to resist or compensate for that stress.

Healing Through a WHOLEistic Approach

These signals travel through the nervous system and can affect the skin, mucosal linings, muscles, and organ systems. By testing muscular contraction, we can detect some of these stress responses from the outside.

When I palpate or examine a patient, I’m evaluating where their body is under stress. The muscle contraction tells me which organ systems are deficient. From there, I can correct neural pathways and help the body realign to continue healing.

This is what I call a WHOLEistic approach—looking at the whole body rather than just the symptom. It’s about tuning in to what your body is trying to say.

My goal in explaining all this, is for you to begin to see how brilliantly designed your body is and how much adaptive potential you really have. 

Health and healing do not come from outside of you. They come from within.

Want to go deeper into the healing intelligence of your body? Tune into Life Force Radio for more insights into holistic health, homeostasis and creating your freedom lifestyle.