Creating a healing bubble where you’re promoting the highest chance of recovery for yourself is your next step. This is true if your aim is emotional, mental or physical healing, because as we’re learning, it’s all connected.
What we need to do is create an incubator – with our environment, our food and our mind. If you keep the phrase Do No Harm close by, it will help you re-center on what’s truly important during this time of healing.
Everything you do should be to try and comfort and repair your machinery. No extreme exercise. No harsh chemicals. No processed foods. Not even media that might be alarming, violent or too depressing. (Save the academy-award winning films about war for next year.) Consider limiting online time interacting on Social Media with people that are too drama-driven. Get tons of sleep at night and frequent naps during the day if you can. And take a break from friends (and even family) that only drain your energy. You simply don’t have it to give right now. Drink little to no alcohol. And ween yourself down to one cup of caffeine a day.
Creating this nurturing bubble gives your cells a chance to regenerate to a healthy state. Anything you can do to reduce setting off inflammation the better.
What’s in a cell – Our cells are super smart. They know they have a job and they try their hardest to do that job. Science now shows us that our emotions get stored in our cell’s walls and in our organs and even generationally, we can inherit emotions and likes and dislikes from our ancestors in our cells. How you are feeling emotionally has a very real impact on your health.
Your cells have receptors that send out hellos to signaling molecules that come by, like hormones and cytokines. They are trying to find their matches. If they are successful in finding the right connections, you get a happy, healthy cell that can go and do its job without issues. Love connection!
If your cells can’t find their healthy match, those cells are open to signaling illnesses that are also floating by. Along with specific wellness hormones that match your cells, there are specific matching illness molecules and if your body is run down or your cells are not vibrating at a high level – sending out their many hellos – they won’t get connected to healthy matches and you could get sick.
If you think about when a cold or flu virus comes into the office and half the people get ill but half don’t, those people who don’t get sick have the high-vibrational and healthy cells that are matched up with their healthy hormones and cytokines. So, the question becomes, how do we up our own number of matched, healthy, happy cells and keep them high?
Let’s get just a touch science-y for a minute and talk about glutathione. Your body makes its own glutathione, but if you’re ill, especially for a long time, you don’t have much of it anymore. It’s a natural antioxidant and its job is to help your body detox in other ways besides using the liver. Think of it as the master of your immune system, calling the shots.
One element of a glutathione molecule is sulfur and sulfur will attract and help pull out toxics from the body. Glutathione deficiency is found in almost all chronically ill people and even relatively healthy people could do with a little glutathione increase. In order to heal, we have to help our body produce and maintain higher levels.
The process in your body where millions of your cells are neutralized everyday and removed is called apoptosis. We want to help our bodies perform clean apoptosis. We need high numbers of glutathione to aid in clean apoptosis. We want to keep our happy, healthy cells vibrating at a high rate, which in turn helps the unhealthy and tired, old cells die off cleanly. If the old, tired and sick cells can’t get removed cleanly we get inflammation and worse, cancer.
The toxins in your body run from cell to cell, trying to find an exit. If they can get to a glutathione molecule, they attach and the glutathione will render it harmless and send it to exit through your bile or intestines. At that point, your body actually gets a message to make a new glutathione molecule to replace the used one. If you have a higher-than-average toxic load in your body, your glutathione can’t make as many replacements as it needs to handle the load. At that point we get infections from free radicals, cancers, and chronic illness of all kinds.
To control inflammation and to have healthy immune functions, we have to up our numbers of glutathione molecules. To help your body do the job it currently can’t do on its own, try upping your sulfuric foods intake. That would be all the cruciferous veggies like kale, brussels sprouts, broccoli and cabbage, well-cooked if you’re gut isn’t healed. The sulfur in those foods will help trigger enzymes in the body that detoxify carcinogens before they damage cells, imitating glutathione molecules, and help toxins exit the body. And stop eating foods you can’t digest. Combine that with appropriate body-oxygenation, like deep breathing exercises, and you’ve got a good start.
Other stuff you could do? There are supplements you could look into that support your body’s production of glutathione like liver-supporting supplements like n-acetyl-cysteine.
Dr. Mark Hyman suggests taking an alpha lipoic acid, folates and B6 and B12 supplements as well. Alpha lipoic acid’s job is to help regulate our blood sugar and energy levels and it also helps us detox. Selenium is also important as its job is to help the body recycle and produce more glutathione.
Sleep – If it’s possible, don’t set an alarm. Let your body wake up on its own. If that’s not possible because you’re an actual human being with actual responsibilities, go to bed consistently as early as possible every night to maximize your sleep. Sleep is when your body repairs itself the quickest. All your systems get a chance to do their work without distractions. They get their little workers going smoothly and efficiently without you moving around and adding stress to the body or the mind. The longer hours you can sleep at night during healing, the better.
Sleep is also when the brain sweeps itself of toxins, which is an important process in avoiding mental issues down the road.
If you find yourself consistently waking up at a particular time during the night, you can consult a body clock meridian chart that will help you see what parts of your body might be having a hard time either working or shutting down. Then you can try to use energy work, exercise, essential oils, or supplements to encourage those organs to work more efficiently.
Plan on two naps during the day if you’re chronically ill. They don’t have to be long if your body doesn’t require it. In the beginning you might sleep for 90 minutes both morning and afternoon and a few months later you might find it’s only 15 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon.
Later, you might not actually sleep at all. But when that happens, please remember your body needs about five to ten minutes, optimally both morning and afternoon, where you simply lie still with your eyes closed in a dim room for it to have a little rest. Use that time to do some meditation or visualization or deep breathing or whatever you’d like, but if you skip this step it will prolong your healing. Your body is working so hard and it needs you to take frequent stops, moments where all your movements stop and your engines cool down so it can regenerate. Remember – this time won’t last forever. Try to find what you can enjoy about it.
Maybe your affirmation could be – I’m learning to appreciate the stillness of this moment where my body is free to heal.
In later years, if you do have a flare up, this is a technique you can come back to, but your healing time could be much less because the starting condition of your body will be much healthier.
Keeping a Schedule – Keeping to a schedule could be considered as important as a type of medicine for your body right now when it comes to helping you heal.
Your body needs consistency. It needs things to be easy and promote healing. It wants to know what to expect. When you get up around the same time, go to bed around the same time and take naps around the same time every day, your body knows when to count on that downtime it so desperately needs to regenerate cells.
Along those same lines, I chose to eat the same types of foods over and over again the first few months of recovery so my body would know what to count on. You might choose to do that, too.
You actually have inside you a small group of genes that dictate to other parts of your body when to turn on, turn off etc. There are proven “better” times of the day or night to do almost everything. This includes eating, exercising, creative thinking, napping and studying. Working with your body clock can help your body heal faster. Being predictable helps your body know what to expect.
It can be challenging at first to move things around in a schedule to make room for a consistent, daily routine. But you’ll reap the rewards almost immediately.
Final thoughts: You need information to know if you’re doing what’s best for you. Listen to the doctors. Listen to the homeopath. Listen to the specialists. After you take it all in, check with yourself about your best course of action and then do that. You’ll know what’s best for you.
Drink Something Good
Hydrate with a glass of water an hour before bed. (Closer to bed than that and you might be waking up in a few hours to urinate.) Putting H2O in your system before your body gets to the important work of repairs just makes it that much easier and your sleep more restful.