Stress Recap 

Last week here at NGFC we held our Healthy Living Night where we talked all about STRESS. Many of our people weren’t able to make it but it has become clear to me how important it is to talk about stress and the damages it incurs in our lives and in our health. So lets recap the workshop and give you some needed knowledge and tools to stave off stress in our lives.

First things first. There is no such thing as stress. There is only the absence of PEACE in your life. Much like there is no such thing as darkness only the absence of light. No such thing as hatred only the absence of love. No such thing as disease only the absence of health. This if very important to grasp because if you are out there fighting stress its like you are fighting darkness. Until you shine a light the darkness will remain. Until you find peace, the stress will remain. So our aim must become to restore peace in our lives.

There are 3 types of stress.

1. Emotional Stress: This is the one most people think of when they are feeling “stressed out”. It’s the turmoil in your mind. Maybe someone makes a rude comment or cuts you off on your commute. Your boss demands more from you. Your kids are out of control. Your going through a divorce or a death in the family. The pressures of life are real and they are hard.
2. Chemical Stress: Every manmade chemical that enters your body causes stress. This feels different than emotional stress but the results are the same. Chemicals cause damage to your nerves and cells. When your body is being constantly damaged it is in a state of perpetual stress.
3. Physical Stress: The wear and tear of life on Earth causes stress. Every trip, every fall, every car crash, every moment you spend doubled over staring at your phone (bad posture) causes stress in your body.

It really doesn’t matter what type of stress you are dealing with the result is the same. Stress impacts the nervous system. Now if you don’t know, your nervous system controls your life. For you to breathe, think, eat, love, sleep, lose weight, be in a good mood your nervous system has to be on and running smoothly all things in harmony, at peace, stress free.

Now there are 2 parts to your nervous system. Sympathetic and Parasympathetic. Both are good and both are essential.

Sympathetic controls your fight or flight response. When stress comes in fight or flight takes over. In the case of acute stress this is very good! If you are walking in the woods and all of a sudden a bear pops out in front of you, fight or flight kicks in. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure goes up. Your breathing increases and all of the non-essential stuff turns off. You don’t need to pour energy into your immune system if a bear is about to eat you. You don’t need to be slowly digesting food if your life is on the line. Your body goes into emergency survival mode.

Parasympathetic controls your rest and digest response. When you are at peace (no bears chasing you) you don’t need fast breathing and blood pumping. You need to digest food and fight off germs. You need your hormones to regulate and your body to rest and heal. This is where we are meant to spend 99% of our lives. At peace, in harmony, stress free.

The problem is we deal with chemical, physical, and emotional stress CONSTANTLY. Emails, text messages, kids, spouses, slips and falls, bad posture, poor sleep habits, sitting all day, medications, preservatives, vaccines, food colorings, beauty products, city water, man made food…. The list goes on forever. Because of this our nervous system constantly stays in fight or flight. You can easily see this in the chronic disease epidemic we are currently in. Think for just a minute about the warning signs of chronic disease. High blood pressure. Increased heart and breathing rate. Poor digestion. Weak immune function. Imbalanced hormones. Poor sleep. Inflammation. These are all a direct result of chronic chemical, physical, and emotional stress. You are stuck in a perpetual state of fight or flight because you are constantly pouring in more stress. But really it is just the result of a chronic lack of peace in your mind and body. Stress brings sickness and disease. Peace brings rest and healing.

At our workshop we talked in detail about how to reduce stress and increase peace in our minds and bodies.   That is beyond the scope of this short writing. That is why we hold our events! To give you tools. If you are curious feel free to ask any of our team members here at NGFC but most importantly get to our next workshop. Until then, I’ll see you in the bay.

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Healthy Habits

Here in modern America we have largely solved the problems that have plagued humanity forever.  Humans have always struggled to secure for themselves food, shelter, and water.  Not until very recently in the timeline of humanity have we had these 3 things.  Of course there are many right here in COS that still are in search of these basic human needs but if you’re reading this, whether in our office or online, it’s safe to say you have all 3.  You don’t need to worry whether you will be able to find food or water and even if you have to stay in a cheap motel, you will have shelter.  So, with these three major issues solved, we as humans can move on to other problems that require tackling.  We get to solve super fun questions like who am I?  What is my identity?  Now we could spend the rest of our lives philosophizing over these questions, exploring the inner workings of the mind.  But I like more practical and actionable answers.  And the reality is that even these questions have been solved for us.  Who are you?  You are the sum of the choices you make.  What is your identity?  You are what you repeatedly do.  

That being said, who we THINK we are drives our choices and who we SAY we are changes what we repeatedly do but it is our ACTIONS that define us.  You can think and say you are a mountain climber but if you have never actually climbed a mountain can you really be a mountain climber?  You can say you are a runner but if you never run are really you a runner?  

It is our habits that define us.  Knowing this is powerful because it gives us a roadmap to becoming whoever or whatever we choose in life!  If you want to be a runner all you need to do is start running!  If you want to be a mountain climber all you need to do is climb mountains!  Easier said than done BUT anything is possible simply by changing what you habitually do. 

I used to hate working out in the morning.  All through undergrad and chiropractic school I would always workout in the early afternoon.  Around 2 or 3 PM was my time.  It felt good, I had plenty of energy.  The mornings were terrible!  Low energy, stiff muscles, and zero motivation.  But when school ended and I started working full time I realized that my afternoon workouts were done.  So for a long time I simply didn’t workout!  I couldn’t workout in the afternoon and I certainly wasn’t going to do it in the morning.  “I’m not a morning person,” I told myself.  That didn’t serve me at all.  I was getting out of shape, feeling tired and sluggish all the time.  Finally one day I drew a line in the sand and forced myself to wake up earlier and do my workouts first thing in the morning.  At first I hated it.  I made all the excuses in the world, but it was important so I pressed on.  Slowly it got easier and easier.  Until now, I really enjoy my 5:00 AM workouts!  I have become a “morning person.”  How?  By changing my habits.

Becoming the person you want to be is just on the other side of changing what you habitually do.  Do you want to be a better Christian?  Make a habit of reading your bible every morning instead of scrolling social media.  Do you want to be a better spouse?  Make a habit of kissing your spouse good-bye every day.  Do you want to be healthier, have more energy, and feel good about yourself when you look in the mirror?  Create healthy habits!  Bring your lunch to work.  Wake up early to work out.  Do your spinal exercises while the coffee is brewing.  Making and sticking to small changes will have massive impact over long periods.  What would your life look like in 1 month if all you did was commit to eating a salad every day?  Just that small habit would create major change.  

Now there are rules to habits and identity.  The rules are: It takes 21 days to make or break a habit and it takes 90 days to change your identity.  Meaning that if you stick with something for 21 days it becomes so much easier!  It’s now a habit.  But when you stick with something for 90 days you have become the person who (fill in the blank).  After 21 days of waking up early to exercise, it got way easier but then after doing it for 90 days, in my heart I became the person who worksout at 5 AM.  

The question then becomes: who do you want to be in life and what habits do you need to change to become that person?  

On Saturday February 11th from 9-11:30 AM we are taking a deep dive into Healthy Habits.  We will be going over the WHYs, WHATs, and HOWs of healthy living and how to sustain a healthy lifestyle forever!  We will also be kicking off our 21Day Healthy Habits Challenge that will lead into our 90-Day Healthy Identity Shift!  You don’t want to miss it.  Seats are very limited so see the NGFC team to get signed up!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Was Jesus Subluxated?

This time of year I tend to think about Jesus a lot.  Hopefully that’s the case for all of us!  He is the reason for the season, as we all know.  But beyond the manger and the cross I like to imagine Jesus’ life.  Not just what we are told from the Bible but I like to imagine the stuff in between.  What was He like, what hobbies did He enjoy, what was His favorite food.  But as a chiropractor, I wonder about His health!  Did He ever get sick?  Stub His toe? Break an arm falling out of a fig tree?  Was He subluxated?  As a human we have to assume that He had to deal with the physical difficulties of our world but as God on Earth with a world-changing mission, was He protected from such things?  Let’s think about it.  

If you have a spine in our modern world you have been subluxated.  Research says that 87% of newborns are subluxated.  And if it doesn’t start at birth, the years of falling on your butt and off of furniture while learning to walk, run, and climb will certainly have done the job.  Subluxation is any misalignment of the spine causing interference to the nervous system and they are caused by STRESS.  There are 3 different types of stress:  physical, chemical, and emotional.  

Physical stress is straightforward.  The stress of the medically assisted birthing process, car accidents, your sleeping position, playing sports, poor posture, or sitting for multiple hours.  It’s clear how physical interactions with our world can misalign our spines.  

Emotional stress also makes a lot of sense.  When you are feeling overwhelmed, depressed, angry, sad, what is your posture like?  Standing tall, chin up, shoulders back looking like superman with an awesome spine?  Nope.  More like hunched over, head forward, shoulders rounded over.  Your emotions can dictate the alignment of your spine.  Not to mention, when you are dealing with emotional stress, your nervous system gets stuck in the sympathetic state of fight or flight which in turn changes your muscle tone, blood flow, and breathing patterns which all change the shape of your spine!  

Then there is chemical stress.  Imagine putting your spine in a barrel of acid.  What will happen to the bones, ligaments, discs, and muscles?  Not good.   What if it’s just a tiny little bit of acid?  Overtime, the bones wear down, the ligaments and muscles lose their elasticity, the discs waste away to nothing.  That’s exactly what happens to your spine when there are outside chemicals on the inside.  Your body turns acidic and devoid of essential nutrients.  Your joints and soft tissues slowly waste away.  If your spine begins to waste away it begins to interfere with the nerve system.  Boom!  Subluxated.  All because of the Diet Coke you can’t seem to give up.  

But more important than how subluxation occurs is what it does.  When there is interference to the nervous system it can absolutely cause pain.  And that’s where most people’s minds go when we think about a misaligned spine.  But only 6% of our nervous system feels pain.  So there can be all sorts of interference to the other 94% of your nerves and you’d never know it if you were waiting to feel it.  The fact is that your nervous system controls every aspect of your life.  It controls your health.  It controls how you experience the world around you.  How you think, what you see, hear, taste, smell, your emotions, your sleep and energy.  Your nervous system controls every aspect of life!  At NGFC our driving goal is to help people experience God to the fullest.  We do that by helping you remove as much interference from the nervous system as humanly possible so that you can experience all of the good things that God has in store for you.  When you are subluxated your experience of life and God are diminished.  When you are subluxation free that’s when you get to experience life and experience it abundantly! 

But back to our question, was Jesus Subluxated?  Did He deal with physical stress?  It’s hard to imagine sleeping in the back of a boat in the middle of a storm and not waking up with a kink in your neck!  Chemical stress?  Luckily there was no Monsanto back then with their poisonous pesticides in His food.  All of His fish was wild caught.  And His wine was heavenly! So I think He’s good with chemical stress.  What about emotional stress?  The bible says that He felt strong emotions to the point of weeping at times and sweating blood.  And if He was human at all I’m sure He became frustrated with His disciples and the people He came to save with all their doubts and questions.  

To me it is clear that many of the causes of subluxation were present in Jesus’ life but in His Godliness, did they interfere with His life, His experience, His connection to God?  For me that will be the first question I ask when I get there.  But what I know is that throughout His entire life Jesus did everything He could to experience more of God.  He studied the scriptures and laws, He sought after and served the broken, lost, and hurting, He took time to fast, pray, and meditate.  Everything He did, He did in order to experience more of God.  Now here in our modern world our efforts should be for the same end.  Though our struggle may differ slightly from Jesus’, the goal is the same.  Remove everything that interferes with our ability to experience God to the fullest.  

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!

Dr. Marc

Life In Your Years

The other day I found myself in a conversation with a lady who was telling me about some of the health issues that she has struggled with over the years.  Constant sinus and breathing issues, regularly high blood pressure, and what the doctors told her were bad kidneys.  She told me of all the medications she had been prescribed and how they made her feel.  One in particular that was deemed essential made her feel so miserable that other people simply couldn’t stand to be around her.  She felt secluded and alone, stuck with her own thoughts and misery but felt like she had to take the drugs that were causing the suffering.  Until she said no.  On a routine visit to her MD, she told the doctor that she could no longer stand taking the drugs because they were ruining her life.  The doctor bluntly said, “Well, you can either have quantity or quality.  It’s your choice.”  The lady boldly said, “ I choose quality”,  and left without her drugs.  

In our modern world we have done a great job of keeping people alive.  And thank God!  That is the God-sent side of medicine.  In life or death situations we have the tools to save lives like never before in history!  But instead of using medicine as a crisis care solution we have used it as a band aid to avoid taking responsibility for our own health and do the work we know is necessary to be healthy.  As a consequence, people live longer BUT they live less life in their years.  I have seen this first hand in the lives of my own family.  My grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was eight years old.  She lived another 10 years but she lived those years on the couch in pain and drugs that completely changed who she was.  Similarly I watched as my grandfather’s prostate cancer turned to bone cancer which caused so much pain that he was prescribed constant morphine until it damaged his brain so much that he could no longer remember who his family was.  The treatments kept him alive but that is not the kind of life we all envision for ourselves or our loved ones.  Both of my grandparents lived long lives with the help of a lifetime of medication but there was very little life in those years in the end.  Now please don’t get me wrong, when faced with life threatening situations, do what you feel is right, but when you take account of where you are and where you want to be with your health, do what you KNOW is right. 

That doctor giving an ultimatum that you can either choose quality or quantity is mind-blowing to me.  I do understand that in her limited perspective of health and healing, drugs being her only tools, that notion makes sense but when you think it through she is dead wrong.  What would happen to the quality of your life if today you chose a salad instead of a burger and fries or water instead of soda? What would your life look like if you chose to exercise 4 days a week?  What if you woke up 5 minutes earlier to write down 3 things you were grateful for?  Or got adjusted and did your home exercises consistently instead of just when you were hurting?  Do you think you would feel better? Have more energy?  Sleep better?  Have less pain?  Lose weight?  Do you think your risk for heart disease, cancer and diabetes would go up or down? Likewise, how would making those changes affect the quantity of your life?  Do you think you live more or less years?  You see, you don’t have to choose.   When we live a life in alignment with how God created us, we live long, abundant, health filled lives.  But there is a choice we must make.  You must choose to do the hard things.  Choose to say no to bad foods.  Choose to wake up earlier to workout and pray.  Choose to invest your time and money into your health early in life as opposed to sickness and disease later in life.  But the hard choices you make today set you up for a life full of quality AND quantity.  

So today, let’s choose to live in such a way that we KNOW will bring health, energy, and joy.

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

 

Are You Rich?

Happy Thanksgiving Week!  I love this time of year.  It always brings fond memories of years past and the excitement of new memories to be made.  But as the holiday reminds us it is important to pause and count our blessings.  The human mind has a tendency to focus on our lack and our insecurities.  We tend to see all of the things that we don’t have and all the things that we wish were different in our lives.  But the fact is, if you live in America, especially here in Colorado Springs, you are blessed beyond measure.  I encourage you to take the time this year and write down every blessing in your life and hang it on your refrigerator so you can see every day just how much God has given you!

Below is one of my favorite short stories. Enjoy!

 

“Lady, Are You Rich?”

They huddled inside the storm door — two children in ragged outgrow coats.

“Any old papers, lady?”

I was busy. I wanted to say no — until I looked down at their feet. Thin little sandals, sopped with sleet. “Come in and I’ll make you a cup of hot cocoa.” There was no conversation. Their soggy sandals left marks upon the hearthstone.

Cocoa and toast with jam to fortify against the chill outside. I went back to the kitchen and started again on my household budget…

The silence in the front room struck through to me. I looked in.

The girl held the empty cup in her hands, looking at it. The boy asked in a flat voice, “Lady… are you rich?”

“Am I rich? Mercy, no!” I looked at my shabby slipcovers.

The girl put her cup back in its saucer — carefully. “Your cups match your saucers.” Her voice was old with a hunger that was not of the stomach.

They left then, holding their bundles of papers against the wind. They hadn’t said thank you. They didn’t need to. They had done more than that. Plain blue pottery cups and saucers. But they matched. I tested the potatoes and stirred the gravy. Potatoes and brown gravy — a roof over our heads — my man with a good steady job — these things matched, too.

I moved the chairs back from the fire and tidied the living room. The muddy prints of small sandals were still wet upon my hearth. I let them be. I want them there in case I ever forget again how very rich I am.

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc