SOUL. Changing Your Chemistry.

Just about every one of my patients gets to listen to my spiel on the nervous system at some point (check out my previous post on activating your parasympathetic nervous system here). Reader’s digest version: spending too much time in sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze, freak out) can be damaging to health over the long term, and nervous system flexibility to toggle back and forth between parasympathetic and sympathetic is really important.

However, I am about challenge the above statement just a bit for a paradigm shift. While chronic stress may be damaging to your health, short term mental stressors (physical, too) could possibly be a gift in disguise to change your chemistry for activation.

I’m taken back to the concept of activation energy from basic science class. There is an amount of stress or energy input that needs to go into the system (activation energy) before the downhill reaction and products are realized.

I see it as the necessity of stress to change the chemistry of a system. To create something new. Just like “breaking ground” energy - it starts as an arduous process, uphill, with much uncertainty. Usually, there comes a point where either the reaction will not take, or it begins to release free energy and creates new products.

So why is this in soul? Because I think it is normal to resist stress, mostly being that it is a protective mechanism. I will admit that right now I am going through a period of “I didn’t sign up for this” stress. But I recognize that it is likely priming my own chemistry to be alchemized for something I have yet to understand. And part of “soul” medicine is surrendering into that unknown, and trusting.

Dear Stress, while I don’t love every minute of you, I am grateful for the coming shifts you are bringing. Thank you.