You Can Fix Your Brain by Tom O'Bryan & Mark Hyman MD

Author:Tom O'Bryan & Mark Hyman, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

8

THE POWER OF MIND-SET

Our beliefs are our destiny.

—MAHATMA GANDHI

In 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop of pharmaceutical industry leaders, doctors, and public health policy experts. They met to solve a single problem: Compared with other disease areas, central nervous system disorders have had the highest failure rate for new medications in advanced clinical trials. Most of the drugs that are meant to treat diseases associated with the brain, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, and even depression, fail.1

This is the truth of 21st-century medicine. We cannot count on a single pill to solve most of our brain health problems. The medications we have available are, at best, the life jackets that will keep us afloat. However, this does not mean that we are destined to live with poor brain health. While big pharma continues to look for a better life jacket, I believe that one of the critical ways for changing our brain health is changing how we think about brain health, including our mind-set, i.e., the way we think about the possibilities of transformation, and the attitude and awareness we carry as we take care of ourselves. As we move away from the hope that one pill, one drug, will fix a lifetime of brain degeneration, we can approach regenerating our brain health as an everyday effort, where the base hits of lifestyle changes—diet, exercise, and holding onto a calm and present mind-set—can really make a difference.

From Day 1 in my training, addressing the mind-set has been an integral part of the Triangle of Health, and now, the Pyramid. How we think about our health—how we rationalize the foods we choose to eat (“I can have a little once in a while”), how we choose between going to bed to catch up on sleep or getting worked up late at night watching the evening news (which is all stress-enhancing, terrible information)—has a great deal to do with the types of brain hormones we produce, and which of our two nervous systems is dominant. The difference is whether we are in an anxious mind-set all the time, or a more relaxed, health-promoting state.

The sympathetic nervous system is exclusively designed to be used as a response to stressful, life-or-death situations. We know this because its nerves are quite thin compared to parasympathetic nerves. As an analogy, sympathetic nerves are the width of your pinkie, while the parasympathetic nerves are the width of your thumb. Both sets of nerves run parallel to each other, connecting the brain to every organ in your body.

Any electrician will tell you that the more current you send through a wire, the hotter the wire gets. So when we look at our two nervous systems, the thin sympathetic nerves and the thicker parasympathetic nerves, it makes common sense that the thicker parasympathetic nerves are supposed to run most of the time. Hans Selye, MD, PhD, who first associated the concept of “stress” with health concerns back in the 1950s, told us that the parasympathetic nerves are supposed to be running 90 to 95 percent of the time.

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