I call it the biggest secret in healing because if you talk to most health care professionals, mainstream and alternative, you won’t hear much about it. And since it’s the foundation of NeuroStructural care, I believe it should be talked about and recognized much, much more.
Have you ever wondered, and it’s good to wonder, why when you cut your finger, it heals, but when you develop arthritis, it doesn’t heal?
Why is it that when people develop health problems, the problems will often not “go away”, and they can’t seem to recover fully? Whether it’s an old injury from when they were younger or something more systemic such as gastric reflux or high cholesterol or sciatica.
The answer lies in a part of the nervous system called the AOS or Automatic Operating System.
The AOS is made up of two systems that run parallel to each other. One is called fight/flight and is designed to help us through stressful times. The other is called heal/recover and is designed to help us regain our energy and health after a stressful time.
The fact that we have these two systems of the AOS running parallel to each other means that we are not designed to be in constant alert, constant stress, constant vigilance.
Imagine back in the day when we lived in caves. Imagine yourself sitting in your cave knowing that just outside is a predator, like a cougar or a grizzly bear waiting for you to come out of your cave.
There seems to be more and more a state of emergency: we are able to tune in any time we want to find out more about war, government corruption, the environment just to name a few.
Do you remember when the weather was just that? Now we get snowfall warnings and watches, snowpocalypse and snowmaggedon. The messaging has become closer to apocalyptic/biblical.
This constant message of emergency is meant to appeal to the lower parts of our brain stems where we experience fear. It is a constant attack on the senses and creates a continuous fight/flight response to the point where we don’t even notice the response in our bodies anymore.
In the next few articles I’d like to delve into the repercussions of this on our bodies, on our health and on our future.