The UltraMind Solution (82 page)

Energy is something we lose with age. But it can also be lost because of anything that triggers more free radicals and oxidative stress or damage to our mitochondria.

Even as we are learning how mitochondrial injury is one of the final common pathways in so many neurological and psychiatric disorders, we are also learning how to protect and defend ourselves.

Getting a metabolic tune-up is not only possible, but also necessary for most of us. Thankfully by eating a colorful plant-based diet, reducing toxic exposures, and supplementing with mitochondrial protective and antioxidant compounds we can protect and restore our energy metabolism to optimal function.

In the last chapter of Part II (chapter 12) we will look at how the mind influences the body. You have learned all the ways so far in which the body affects the mind. But remember, the communication is bidirectional: top down and bottom up. The body affects the mind
and
the mind affects the body.

Thoughts, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and life traumas can all trigger damage to the brain. This brain damage occurs because stress itself causes depletion of nutrients from the body, changes our hormones, creates inflammation, damages the gut, has direct toxic effects, and increases oxidative stress.

Wow! All that just from negative thoughts.

As you learned so far, if you change your body, you will change your mind. In the next chapter, you will learn that if you change your mind you will also change your body.

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Stress is the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego.

One man’s meat is another man’s poison.

Thoughts are things. They can heal or harm. Beliefs mold your brain. Perceptions can please or paralyze your nervous system. Life traumas and experiences rewire and reorganize your brain’s connections and communications systems.

Other than eating breakfast regularly, and eating more fruits and vegetables, the one characteristic that is present in all the healthy aged is resiliency. Resiliency is that hard-to-measure quality of adapting to change, shifting with changing tides rather than drowning, seeing the glass half full, or knowing how to turn lemons into lemonade.

Plasticity is another way to describe this quality—being adaptable, changeable, and malleable. Remarkably, the nature of the brain mirrors the nature of our thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. A stiff, rigid, “hard” personality is reflected in stiff cells, hard, rigid plaques in the brain, and a general loss of resiliency and the ability to renew, remember, and repair.

This is not just a figurative metaphor for what happens. Your brain literally stiffens, slows, and loses function in direct relationship to your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes about you and your place in the world. How each of us responds to our life—to our perceptions—has enormous implications for how we feel, how we age, and the health of our brain.

Why is it that some can emerge from enormous strife and conflict, such as war, violence, abuse, and rape, with a deeper sense of life and beauty and connection to meaning while others are debilitated from minimal life traumas such as a minor car accident?

Victor Frankel, the internationally renowned psychiatrist and author of
Man’s Search for Meaning,
is an interesting example of a man with extraordinary resiliency. Not only did he survive the Holocaust, but he used the horror he experienced to create what was in his time a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy
and
he wrote about his experience to try to help heal the world.

Whether you are consumed by the traumatic experiences in your life or ripen and learn from them is largely a question of perception, thoughts, and your sense of control and place in the world. How each of us measures our life, and creates meaning and purpose in the small and large things, determines, perhaps more than anything, our capacity for resiliency and wholeness.

Your mind affects your body. Your mental health affects your physical health. This in turn affects your mental health again. These are not two separate systems. They are intertwined and interconnected in subtle and sophisticated ways you need to understand if you are going to achieve UltraWellness.

While not all of the ways in which the mind influences the body are fully understood, in this chapter I will give you an overview of what the research does tell us and explain some of the ways your mind affects your body.