Lights 💡 Camera 📸 Action 💥 and Our Broken Biology 🌱
February 13, 2021
If you could solve, or at least work to help resolve mental health problems of today, would you?
What if I told you that you CAN?
If you were able to fix your broken feelings, or others’ broken feelings, how you would you do so?
What if I told you that you already ARE?
If you could help heal the wounds of our mental health crisis, would you?
What if I told you that it’s EASIER to help than what you think?
The Common Experience
In our modern world, we have too many distractions. I’m not here to present a new invention or tell you a story you probably didn’t already know. No, I’m here to help shine a light and connect the dots for us to listen to the music that’s already been playing in the background, but we were just too focused on distractions to pay attention to what matters. I have so much I could say today but I’ll keep it short with 3 quick bullets to think about. If you want to carry on the conversation about these topics specifically, I encourage you to open the discussion over at our Community page with other like-minded readers.
Let’s dive in. last week I left you with the fact that you are a human being. and not much has changed for you, I hope?
Still a human? Okay, good, thought so. 🧬 Just wanted to check!
LET’S ENJOY THIS MOMENT
💡 Shining a Light 🔦
I don’t have the time to bore you with the details of the nitty-gritty science and the research that I delved into for years with a passionate interest in mental health and overall holistic health and well-being.
I won’t bother diving into the research publications in the articles that have been written for nearly 100 years or more about the ways in which a lot of our mental health has been misconstrued and misunderstood for generations.
What I will do instead is to present you with brief moments of Health inside for you to consider and how they work in your own life and the lives of those around you – your friends, family, and personal sphere of influence.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s
1) Dementia and Alzheimer’s = Titled Type 3 Diabetes by some. We know that our elderly population crave sweets and often have greater falls, injuries, UTIs and Yeast infections, (maybe TMI today for ya?), greater impaired mental status, more elusive thoughts and feelings, abnormal behaviors when they consume more sugar, highly processed carbohydrates and sugary beverages. More info here, here, and here if you’re interested.
The fact of the matter here lies in the gut-brain connection, the gut health and microbiome considerations, as well as the blood sugar regulation that impacts all of our moods and behaviors. Take notice of your grandparents and your children, we can see the effects much more clearly with them than we can ourselves usually. It’s pretty clear to see when grandma starts telling stories or forgetting where she’s at after an evening milkshake, or when your child decides to eat one too many cupcakes at the birthday party.
We also know many foods to be highly palatable, ultra-processed, quite nearly addictive and damaging to our human body’s biological regulatory systems... (see, the science gets wordy... I’ll try to pull back a bit).
Autism and ADHD
2) Autism and ADHD = hypersensitivity, sensory and processing “disorders” – or as we should be calling them “symptoms” – are commonly thought to be inexplainable and untreatable. That, my friends, is garbage. It’s just as garbage as the common garbage we often feed our kids today.
For instance, I’ve mentioned in a past newsletter how hundreds if not thousands of our common additives and artificial ingredients in America are banned in other countries, like with many artificial food colorings and food dyes that present the facts that they have been found to provoke sensory/stimulatory symptoms in children.
In other words, more artificial colors, dyes, sweeteners and highly refined processed carbohydrate diets lead to more ASD and ADHD/ADD symptoms. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice how foggy our brains may feel or how lethargic our crash might be after consuming a lot of processed junk, candy, and sugar.
👻 🎃 Hello Halloween Tummy Aches…! 🍬 🍫
Many kids and adults who have been disgracefully placed on the spectrum with a “diagnosis” death sentence instead of simply presented with the facts of their symptoms for sensory processing (that can improve and be supported) is disgusting in my opinion. No child should be given a life sentence of “I’m different, and I’ll always be less than everyone else.” That’s ridiculous.
Every child has gifts, some have never had the chance to explore those gifts. Take the statistics for dyslexia for instance, if you were to be “diagnosed” with dyslexia you would be more likely to find yourself as a troublemaker in school, possibly struggle in your grades, drop-out, and find yourself in jail or prison.
BUT, interestingly enough you would also find yourself at greater risk of becoming a high-flying CEO of a company someday. Now tell me why we tell the stories of struggle more than we set the scenes for success? What narrative do we want our children to be inspired by? What potential are we supporting, unlocking for them, or simply throwing away into a cage of strong “diagnostic criteria?” 🩺
🌱 Environmental Triggers 🌱
3) Environmental Triggers = LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!! Have you woken up yet? The simple biological response of reading capital letters with the expectation of yelling in the text can promote alert and awareness for the human. Similarly, artificial lighting, dirty electricity, highly stimulating electrical fields, polar movements from the moon and sun, as well as particular colors and sound frequencies can impact our human biology.
Take your phone for instance, you know that delightful (get it?) little screen filter that you use (or should use more) at night time called “dark mode” or “night mode,” well that’s been put into place after many years of science telling us how artificial lighting can disrupt our biological regulatory systems, through millisecond flickers, bright white and blue lights at odd times of the day.
Yes, you should be monitoring your screen and light exposure closely if you have a sensory sensitivity or simply want to get a good night’s rest this weekend. If you work in an office building, a hospital, a kitchen, or somewhere else with bright white lights that are pulsed on at a high lux (light brightness) all day... it can solely wear down your body’s ability to process and manage the relentless push for your stimulatory awareness.
Yes, what I’m saying is that surrounding yourself with bright white lights throughout the day will burn your engine out of fuel without you even realizing it.
Every time you see that bright white light your body says receives a signal of ALERT, PAY ATTENTION, STAY PROTECTED, ACT NOW.
Don’t you think you’d get tired of listening to your smoke alarm going off endlessly throughout the day. It would be disastrous if we had to listen to that right? Well, our light exposure is just one other human experience for the sensory processing and stimulatory effects we need to consider.
I’m sure you’re well aware that lights that flicker can sometimes provoke seizures for some people. Many tv and film reels would often have to put a disclaimer up at the beginning of the show to warn the audience just in case anyone were to have the potential heightened sensitivity.
[Many of the best world-class hospitals today have made changes to natural lighting, more plants, natural water streams within the facility, more architecture inspired by nature to help the body experience greater innate healing abilities.]
Now, why do we think that the biology for one person doesn’t work the same for all of us? It does, but in differential sensitivity response mechanisms. Everyone may not be provoked into a seizure response, but the same flickering light or flash scenes in a movie will likely provoke your stimulatory and survival instincts for heightened awareness, attention and focus – aka PAY ATTENTION.
All of these exposures are simply described as human biological systems experiences that we cannot deny to be true. We’ve all seen examples of these experiences described above if not all of them. There’s an excruciating long list of other exposure related content I could share with you and hope to continue to expand on in the future.
OK I will just leave you with the consideration of the three experiences outlined above. These may affect certain people within our society that we often times overlooking misunderstand, but these experiences are not isolated, they are shared and lived experiences we all can be aware of.
We are humans 🧬 designed to be humans, built for mother earth, and with a modern industrialized, artificial and constantly changing world, we need to reconsider what our human biology is best suited for, what it needs and what it craves?
Things like: 🧘
Time in nature and time in quiet
The chance to smile and laugh and see others do the same
Time spent with others, animals and people to build empathy and affection
Darkness at night time to help us sleep
Light in the morning to help us wake up
Real soil, real food, real ingredients to nourish our human biology inside
The chance to socialize, share experiences and build a safe “tribe” of protection and support
Some time off from the increasingly distracting news, “lights – camera – action” culture we live in
Time to rest and relax, to just listen to our breath in silence and reconnect with our spirit and soul inside
And much much more...
Moving Forward
I hope today’s newsletter sheds some natural light on your own lived experience and that of others. You can take part in the healing of this modern world by continuing to learn, grow, adapt and adjust your life and lifestyle along the way that is better aligned with your biology and your biological needs day to day and week to week. That’s my hope with this newsletter and every publication, to share some info, education, and encouragement for you to consider the who, what, when and why, of how we live and what we can do to take our lives in a more positive, beautiful, and prosperous direction than before.
Mental Health is near and dear to my heart and the fact of the matter is that it is largely misunderstood and overlooked. An artificial environment is one that simply does not support the natural and biological needs for a human to grow, learn, and cultivate a healthy lived human experience. The more we can reconnect with our bodies, our spirits, and the planet we live on within our communities, the better we can get a grasp on the actual realities of mental health struggles like anxiety and depression, our epidemics of loneliness and self-harm, distorted self-images and poor self-esteems. We are one, but we are also many. We are individuals, but also a community.
You yawn, I yawn.
You smile, I smile.
You laugh, I laugh.
We inexplicitly connected with infinite potential to positively impact one another – and that’s a beautiful truth my friend. 💙
I send you off today with the peace, love and encouragement I hope you rise your eyes and ears to believe in for yourself each day.
May you be blessed in your household this week, embracing your biology and how we can support those we love – and that includes ourselves too.
What I’m Watching & What I’m Listening To 🎧
Natural health expert Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Dr. Alexander Wunsch about the hidden dangers of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting.
TEDx Talk: ADHD As A Difference in Cognition, Not A Disorder: Stephen Tonti at TEDxCMU
Faster than Normal – Podcast, Blog, Resource sharing on all things success stories with the gifts of ADHD/ADD
📘 What I’m Reading 📘
Gentle reminders from Nourishing Hope: Helping by Dr. Julie Matthews, helping families navigate the world of bio-individual nutrition for both children and adults with some misunderstood mental health challenges and sensory processing difficulties.
Delivered from Distraction - Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD)
What I’m Doing 🤸 🤸 🤸
Bouncing on my new rebounder I told you about last week. I put it together Monday morning and it has been quite the fun addition to my day-to-day grind behind a computer. 🦘🦘🦘🦘
Continuing my breathwork routines of [3-6-9] breathing 🗣️ and trying to stay focused on the future that I believe in and the creativity and education I want to present through writing, speaking, and more.
Stay Warm, Stay Well, and Have Fun!