Last night I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s (somewhat) new book, Outliers. I’ve just started, but I’m already enjoying it immensely.
He starts the book out with an interesting story about this community in Pennsylvania with little to no heart disease or any of the other conditions that we Americans have come to associated with modern life. After considerable research, the reason for the lack of these debilitating conditions seemed to be simple — they were happy. They had friends, a strong sense of community, and looked after one another. That was it.
This caught my attention, because last week I was down in the Z-Health offices talking to Alisha, and she mentioned that she was reading a book about depression for the upcoming 9S Sustenance course and the book discusses a REALLY high correlation between depression and these same chronic/debilitating conditions.
I already knew that stress causes all sorts of “un-good” things in the body. Stress releases adrenaline and cortisol throughout the body, which do SEVERAL nasty nasty things to our system when released over an extended period of time. Stress can also cause the brain to trigger pain in the body.
This all makes sense. We are social creatures, so lack of community leads to stress. Stress leads to an unfavorable body response. When it remains too high for too long, eventually something HAS to give.
Just another interesting reminder of the deep, deep inter-relationship between the mind and body. They are one, and need to be treated as such.
About Jen Waak