“I’m just so exhausted all the time.”
“I would love to try to learn something new, but I don’t have time.”
“I’m so overwhelmed, I don’t know how to fit self care into my day.”
I hear this from so many patients when they first come to see me. It’s a trap so many of us have fallen into.
When I was first asked to do the Tour, my instinct was to say no. I’m not interested in just blabbering on about myself for hours. But then the person who asked me about it said, “if there was one thing that you could use this opportunity to teach people, what would it be?” And that got me. I had a giant opportunity to design something that would help a lot of people.
Y’all know how much I love to do that.
So, we’ve been working really hard to create a reliable, easy to learn way to distill a process that I normally take my patients through, that teaches them how to activate their parasympathetic system for healing, but instead we’ve focused on teaching folks how to use it for productivity rather than their sympathetic system.
I’m about to drop just a whole BUNCH of science. Stay with me.
The first thing you learn when you have a brain injury is that stress makes everything worse. Our stress response decreases our brain’s capacity, function and efficiency by 30%. The other thing about our stress response is that absolutely zero tissue healing occurs when we’re using it. None. Tissue healing ONLY occurs in our parasympathetic response - our ‘rest and recovery’ response.
The problem is that most people use their stress response for being productive.
We don’t think of it as our stress response, because we equate stress with the emotional experience of stress, and forget that our stress response is used for pretty much everything.
We typically break ‘stress’ up into ‘good stress’ and ‘bad stress’, or eustress and distress, but here’s the thing - it’s both the same stress response. The difference is whether or not we perceive the outcome of that response to be good or bad. For example, exercise is considered a ‘good stress’. We get a lot of health benefits from exercise. However, it still uses your stress response. The same stress response that happens when you have a huge deadline looming at work.
The problem with using your stress response for productivity is that you always need a recovery time after its use. Always. No exceptions. Because tissue healing only occurs when your stress response is turned off.
That’s why over-exercising leads to injuries. It’s why you feel so exhausted and burned out after a productive day. Your body needs to repair all the micro-damage that occurred from that productivity and replenish energy stores. Without adequate rest in between bouts of productivity, you burn out. That’s your body saying, ‘hold up, we can’t let you go any further until we heal some of this first.’
Normally, we can get away with this. We can take a weekend and recover, or take a vacation. We add in ‘self care’ exercises like meditation and yoga. We try to balance the time we spend in sympathetics versus parasympathetics, and that usually manages the problem.
But what if you get injured? And I’m not talking a broken leg kind of injury. You break a leg, you take a few months off, you heal and recover and fine. I’m talking the kind of injury it will take decades to fully recover from. Or the kind of illness that requires a total life overhaul.
The first thing you learn when you have that kind of injury or illness is that the world doesn’t stop for you. You still have to pay bills, your mortgage, you need an income, and groceries. You need to clean your house, and bathe and brush your teeth. You have to make it to doctors appointments and physio and specialists, etc. etc., you get the point.
Where your body once had a built in wiggle room for recovery, now there isn’t one. Everything you do makes you that much more tired, that much more burnt out, and that much worse, because your body already has this massive backlog of healing it just can’t get through.
That’s the kind of situation so many of my patients are in when they first come to see me. Because we’ve all been taught that the only way to be productive is to use your stress response system. Even those in healthcare and rehabilitation fields will work from a place of trying to balance the two systems instead of realizing that when you have the kind of injuries that will take decades to repair, not months or years, you can’t possibly win that game if you keep playing it the same way.
When I had my accident, I had the kinds of injuries where your recovery is measured in decades, not years. I very quickly learned that if I didn’t figure out how to use my parasympathetic system for the majority of my day, I wasn’t going to make it.
The problem is, most people only use their parasympathetics for recovery and stress relief. They think about it as ‘self care’ activities and so trying to fit in all of these soothing, distracting, non-productive things to manage their stress levels just makes them more stressed out because now they have to try to make up that productive time.
With a brain injury, everything takes you SO MUCH LONGER to accomplish. Even now, my preparations for things start months to years before I’m going to need to be functionally competent at something. The amount of effort, time, commitment, practice, planning, training, that goes in to me being functional daily… There is no way I could pull off any piece of my life if I still used my stress response for productivity. It’s just impossible.
The reason my patients make the kinds of miraculous recoveries they do is because I teach them all how to do this. I don’t always lay it out like that, and it’s always tailored to the individual’s need. But, at its heart, I teach people how to harness their parasympathetic system and use it for healing.
What I’m going to do during my World Record Tour events is teach you how to harness it for productivity.
Why that’s important - imagine that instead of getting through your day, you still have all kinds of energy because instead of your body breaking down and needing to repair, your body spent the entire day healing and repairing, you still got everything done, you didn’t lose an ounce of brain capacity, and you still have hours left to accomplish more. What would you do with your time if you didn’t need to use it for rest and repair? What could you accomplish over a month if you had an extra 2 hours every day? 4 hours? 7? Now expand that out over a year, 5 years, 10 years… What could you get done in that amount of extra time?
And! You’re not only not exhausted, but stronger, healthier, happier, smarter…
What if your life didn’t steal from you and only gave instead?
What could you do? What could you accomplish?
Want to find out?
Join me Saturday, April 20th from 1-5pm at the Mic Mac Amateur Aquatic Club for the start of my World Record Tour and begin your own journey to the kind of life you’ve only dreamed of.
Let me show you how to get there.
You can get your tickets here:
Til next time, folks!