How to reset your body from chronic stress Dr Gabor will uncover reason why we get chronic illnesses

the book the book and this talk are based on my work as a family doctor which I did for 20 years and seven of those years I was also medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver Hospital caring for people with terminal

illnesses

and people who die from cancer. neurological diseases and so on and what I discovered in all those years I learned all those years what I had not been taught in medical school is that who gets sick and who doesn't is not accidental, although we tend to think about cancer and multiple sclerosis that I mentioned last night or rheumatoid arthritis or

chronic

asthma psoriasis eczema colitis Crohn's disease any number of

chronic

diseases are somehow random events that unfortunately and mysteriously affect a person and occasionally we think we can explain the cause by the lifestyle of the A Individuals like smoking, of course, and its connection with lung cancer, but other than that, we think that these diseases are mysterious and inexplicable misfortunes or are caused by people's genes and what I find is quite the opposite, that who got sick and who didn't was not random and that there were certain identifiable patterns certain personality traits and forms of behavioral behavior that people unwittingly unknowingly unintentionally but brought the illness on themselves and that was not It's their fault, they didn't know what they were doing, which you'll see, but since we're talking about caregivers and let me tell you a little fact, and since the book was published, which was about 10 years ago, I think, or nine years ago, there have been much more evidence pending.

In the same direction, a little bit of evidence about the caretakers is that there is a structure at the end of our DNA, our chromosomes, chromosomes are the strands where our DNA is found in our cells, in the nucleus of our cells and these strands of Chromosomes have a structure called a telomere at the end. A telomere is like the glue at the end of my shoelace to keep the strands from fraying and hold it together when we are born. Telomeres are a certain land and as we gradually age. they get shorter as we get older and until the end of our life that we get rid of, at which point we too now looked at it, but it's a mark of aging, in other words, they now looked at the mothers' telomeres. caring for children with chronic

illnesses

and found that these women in their 30s and 40s had telomeres 10 years shorter than their chronic chronological age would have predicted;

In other words, the chronic

stress

of caregiving aged them 10 years now, that doesn't mean Of course, we shouldn't care for children or other people who require our support, but it does mean that the way we provide care and the type The amount of support we receive makes a big difference in our health and that is what my topic is about this morning. so I said that there were certain patterns of being, behavior and psychological relationships that are associated with chronic illnesses and again, when I say chronic illnesses I mean everything, practically everything, what were these patterns that I saw, I

will

identify them or at least identify them.

I

will

illustrate it to you through newspaper clippings that I will read to you while I give this talk. By the way, my advice is to relate to

your

self. Don't you see it as an academic exercise? There is storytelling, but just make sure to what extent you recognize these patterns in

your

self, so the first clipping here is from a woman writing the article herself. These are all from the Globe and Mail and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her name is Donna so she was diagnosed with breast cancer and her doctor's name is Harold her stalker's name is hello and Donna is the second wife the first wife died of breast cancer now Donna the second wife is diagnosed cancer and that's why Donna writes Harold tells me that the lump is small and surely not in my lymph nodes unlike the robbery first first wife whose cancers had spread Everywhere when they found it you are not going to die it reassures me but I am worried From above I say that I wanted the strength to support him and what do you notice?

His first automatic thought is how can I emotionally support my husband while I am dealing with a life-threatening illness? So this compulsive, automatic concern for the needs of others while ignoring your own is a major risk factor for chronic diseases. The other clippings I have You will read their obituaries, all from Global Mail. Obituaries are fascinating because they tell us not only about the person who died but also about what we, as a society, value in other people and, often, what we value In other people it is exactly what kills them. the first place you heard the expression Good Die Young they do it and there are

reason

s for it, many of you are breathing a sigh of relief, okay, I don't worry about myself, so you're saying, but listen to these obituaries, this is a doctor who He died at age 55 and I'm talking here about people who die before their time, this guy dies at age 55 in Toronto from cancer, the obituary says and this is written as if it were a good thing, he never in one day contemplated giving ended the job he loved so much at the Toronto Sick Children's Hospital, continued his duties in his year-long battle with cancer and stopped just days before he died, now think about that.

If she was diagnosed with cancer or if her friend's friend was diagnosed with cancer, would you tell him and her? Hey buddy, this is what you do: go back to work tomorrow and the whole time you're having chemo and radiation and whatever else you're going through, just work every day until you die so this compulsive, rigid identification with duty and responsibility rather than the needs of the self is a major risk factor for the disease. The following obituary was written by a husband about his wife Naomi, who died at age 55 also of cancer and writing. In her entire life she never had a fight with anyone that Russia could tell she was phui or something like that.

Alonso more in that sense she had no ego, she simply blended in with the environment in a modest way now the suppression of another with whom she never got angry anyone, the suppression, the repression of healthy anger is a major risk factor for the disease , it actually suppresses the immune system for

reason

s I'll tell you later, so there are basically three ways to deal with anger, one is to suppress it like this woman did, so these are the people who are always kind, you know, They are always friendly. I care about really nice people. The other way is to give in and behave strangely, get angry.

That's not healthy either. First, repression of anger leads to autoimmune diseases. Cancer, when you're angry all the time, that increases your risk of heart disease and stroke, so after an angry episode, your risk of having a heart attack doubles over the next two hours. The healthy way of expressing anger or the healthy processing of anger, which most of us don't know how to do, we do one or we do the other. I'll talk to you about healthy anger later, but how do we deal with anger? This has a crucial effect on our health and this guy writes: you know he had no ego, he just blended in with the environment without assuming anything and it's supposed to be a good thing now.

My wife's name is Ray and she is an artist. and it's one of his paintings that provided the details here on the cover and the color scheme for the cover of this book and sometimes I say lightning, you know, we were married 42 years, I know why you can't blend in with the surroundings . You know, in an unassuming man, in an unassuming way, yes, but Ray has finished his psychological work and he's read my book and he's also seen the studies. You know, there was a study just four or five years ago presented at a major medical conference. in 1700 women over a 10-year period and over a 10-year period, of these women, those who were unhappily married and repressed their feelings, we are four times more likely to die than those who were also unhappily married but expressed their feelings of So the question was not a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage, the question was whether the woman expressed herself or not.

When I get to this point in my talk, this allows me to assure the men in the audience that the next time they think about their wife it's a you should be happy about it now um I'll read you one more of these I'll read you a couple more of these obituaries this is a mother in Calgary who died in the early 50's again cancer just look at this a multi-tasking teacher juggled several hockey practices School Board Orchestra and other extracurricular activities June 2005 brought terrible news for this mother of three children not being president of the parents Consul at the western university of Canada emergency surgery revealed metastatic cancer she rejected the mantle of illness that did not give her in any of her roles, you know she had all these roles and they were more important than who she was, she even continued her 5am bike rides around the nearby reservoir and I imagine that when she was undergoing chemotherapy she signed up for a life coaching course. course and upon graduating from school Adler began to live out loud a group for women with cancer, it is very typical of people suffering from chronic illnesses and, finally, another doctor who dies of cancer and again how the obituary writes something that remains clear when we look it is self destructive but the person didn't realize it and neither did the individual writing the obituary Sydney and her mother had an incredibly special relationship, a bond that was evident in every aspect of their lives until his death as a married man with children Young Sydney made it a point to have dinner with his parents every day while his wife Rosalind and their four children waited for him at home.

Sid arrived welcomed with another dinner to eat and enjoy, he never wanted to disappoint any of the women in his life. Sydney continued to eat two dinners a day for years until her gradual weight gain began to raise suspicions. Well, this poor man suffered under the belief that, firstly, he was responsible for what everyone else felt and, secondly, he would never let anyone down if he really couldn't. tell his mother, you know mom, I have amazing news, I have four something kids and I go to dinner with them most of the time and I couldn't have stayed with his wife, you know, Rosalind, I'm very close to my mother, she. she needs my support.

So once or twice a week I go to dinner with her. He just tried to please everyone all the time and this need to please everyone all the time will kill you and also for reasons that I will tell you and These reasons are not psychological, they are physiological, they have to do with the

body

, the immune system and everything else. You cannot separate the Mind from the

body

and the problem with my profession, the medical profession, is that we make two separations that are actually impossible in life to make one is that we separate the Mind from the body we think that people's emotional life is somehow separated from your physiology completely false unscientific assumption refuted by all research and yet if you go to a doctor I mean I know some of you here have had autoimmune diseases for example so ask yourself: when did you go to the doctor If you have rheumatoid arthritis, your joint is swollen, or some other rheumatic condition, did anyone ever ask you about your childhood?

Has anyone ever asked you about the

stress

in your life? Has anyone ever asked you about your marriage, about how you relate to your work, about how you take care of yourself, or how probably not what they did was they said you got this disease, we don't know why you got it. and here are the pills, so they will give you a medicine to suppress the inflammation or they will give you a medicine because in autoimmune diseases the immune system attacks the body itself, so we will give you a medicine to suppress the immune system itself or it will. give him cortisol or some other type of steroid, well that's all we do, we don't talk about life factors that may have contributed to the onset of the disease and I can guarantee that any of you here If you have had chronic diseases of any type, you will recognize yourself in this talk completely 100 and you will wonder why no one told me this before, because in the West, when I say West, I mean the dominant West. culture unlike aboriginal cultures, unlike traditional medicines from China or India or native traditions around the world, we separate the mind from the body, so we tweet only in the body, unless you have a mental illness, in which case we still separate the mind from the body, we say. and the other thing we separate is the individual from the environment, as I told you last night, those of you who were there, you cannot separate people from their environment, people are shaped by the environment and in interaction with the environment throughout their entire life. life.

I saw live human beings now let me give you three examples of why you can't separate people from the environment. It has now been shown, for example, that children whose parents arestressed or are much more likely to have asthma. No it is not controversial. Several studies have shown that So, in polluted areas where there is more asthma, it is the children of stressed parents who are more likely to have asthma. No, most doctors have never heard of it and if they have, they can't explain it and yet it's so obvious. those of you who have asthma, has anyone had asthma hair before in their life.

Well, they were given two types of inhalers. If they had asthma, an inhaler is probably called ventolin and its job is to open the airways because what happens with asthma is they get a spasm of the muscles around the airways, so you get this narrowing of the tube through from which the air has to pass into the lungs, so one breathes heavily, wheezing and labored, and the other inhaler he received would have been a steroid to suppress the inflammation, swelling and inflammatory debris that obstructs the airways , so you get two inhalers, one is called a bronchodilator to dilate and open the airways, the other is to suppress inflammation.

Which are? These inhalers are based on the inhaler that opens the airways is a copy of adrenaline and the inhaler that opens and suppresses inflammation is a copy of cortisol a service What are adrenaline and cortisol? There are stress hormones exactly in other words, we are giving asthmatics stress hormones the same stress hormones that their own adrenal glands produce when they are stressed, all that has happened is that their own stress response mechanisms have been depleted and now we have to give them stress hormones from outside, guess what? If you are rumored to have arthritis or lupus, what will they give you the stress hormone cortisol?

Shouldn't we ask ourselves if we are treating people with stress hormones? Could or not there be a connection between stress and your illness? Of course, why? Children of parents who are stressed because the parent is stressful actually program the physiology of the child because you cannot separate the individual from the environment and this is true throughout our lives a study of women in Australia 500 women 550 women who had lumps in her breasts that were concerning enough to require a biopsy now they had these biopsies but before the results came in they also had a psychological interview or questionnaire, it turns out that after the results came in, if a woman had had a significant stressful incident in her life just before the appearance of that lump which by itself has no effect on whether that lump causes cancer or not, similarly, if a woman was emotionally isolated, that also had zero effect, but if a woman was emotionally isolated and had a major stressor, the risk of a lump being cancerous was nine times higher than average.

Now the doctor is leading the study. He couldn't understand this either because they said: how do zero and zero add up to nine? You see, because we don't understand the connection between individuals. and the environment, here's the deal, if I acted inappropriately towards you right now, if I stressed you out physically or emotionally right now, you would have three healthy options, but hey, let's just say I won't get into that right now. If I were to stress you out right now, what would happen is that stress wouldn't just be in your head, it would be all over your body, you know, your heart rate would increase, your nervous system would be firing off all kinds of impulses. your adrenal glands would be pouring adrenaline and cortisol so you can escape or fight.

These are fight or flight hormones, so your body would be in a different physiological state in a split second to help you fight to escape. That's good. In the short term, stress hormones help you fight or flee, but what do they do in the long term? In the long term, stress hormones exhaust your body, suppress your immune system, give you heart disease, high blood pressure gives you ulcers, thins your bones. Now, what if, if you were stressed, something happened that was stressful for you and you were sitting there, upset about it and your body was in a state of imbalance and upset, but someone you trust comes up to you and says, Hello.

Friend, I see? You don't feel well, I see that you are upset, he puts his hand on your shoulder and says, hey, do you want to talk about this? What would happen to your body immediately? Yes, it would relax. You breathe deeply. Your brain will relax. You get oxygen. You start to think more clearly. your heart rate will lower your blood pressure, your stress hormones will decrease, your system will decrease and you will return to a healthy balance, all because someone said: hey friend, do you want to talk about that? those women who had been stressed but emotionally alone the stress hormone acted on their system for months that's why they were more likely to get cancer it's really simple in other words again the physiology of an individual cannot be separated from their psychological and social environment and finally at the end of life, a study published in a major medical journal a few years ago showed that among elderly couples, when one of them is hospitalized, what is supposed to happen to the other? gets sick;

In other words, the risk of getting sick increases and the other when one is hospitalized why, because their immune systems are not isolated from our psychological, emotional and social relationships, we cannot separate the Mind from the body and we cannot separate the individual of the environment. So how this works, I'll tell you in a few minutes, but I'll illustrate it with a disease that I'm very interested in because, again, medical science says we don't know the cause and I think it's just because we're not looking and I'm talking. about a rare condition called ALS, a myotrophic lateral sclerosis which is a degenerative condition of the nervous system that very quickly leaves you completely paralyzed, your mind is intact but your body is paralyzed and in the end you cannot breathe and you die of respiratory failure.

And right now there is a court case with someone with ALS who wants to have the right to medical suicide and remember Sir Rodríguez and Victoria who went through the same thing and their case was rejected in the Supreme Court, so it is a very serious illness and it entails It has a terrible prognosis and most people who get it die within a few years and it affects people who are otherwise healthy, so a woman came to me for a second opinion about 12 years ago and now I My psychologist friend Gore Neufeld recommended her and her story was that she had been diagnosed with ALS by one of the leading experts on this disease in British Columbia or in the world, but she did not want to accept the diagnosis, she wanted me to tell her that it was just stress, well, it was ALS. but it was also highlighted that her story was that she was a teacher and vice principal of an elementary school in the Lower Mainland of BC in Richmond and at one point she discovered that she could no longer hold the pen in her hands because her fingers simply they could not.

She didn't obey her brain's orders, she also started to experience difficulty walking, now you think that if that happened to you you would seek a medical opinion very urgently, not her, but she did it, she got up for months, she got up at 5: 30 each In the morning, he dressed slowly, of course, because his fingers would have trouble buttoning or pulling zippers. She drove herself to school and walked to school at 7:30 with her door in trouble, clutching her chalk in her clenched fist and poring through the day's lesson. on the blackboard for students to teach all day, go home, stay up late at night to prepare the next day's lesson, everything was slow for her, you see, and the next morning she got up at 5 :30.

And she did it until she could no longer walk. or just not, is she alone in this? In no way, every person I have seen with ALS has the exact same personality and behavior pattern, without exception, without exception, no matter who I interviewed or who I read about when writing this book. I also looked at the medical literature and in 1970 there was a study at Yale University School of Medicine on ALS patients by two psychiatrists who wrote the following: These patients invariably evoked the admiration and respect of all staff who came into their care. contact with them. to avoid asking for help study working without Rico's help to help others was widespread the suppression of denial or the isolation of fear anxiety and sadness seemed to have been common so there was no expression of the so-called negative emotions some gradually talked about their deterioration or they regretted casually they like It didn't matter or I did it with attractive smiles.

Then I looked up the biography of Lou Gehrig, after whom the disease is named in North America. Now those of you who are old enough may know that Lou Gehrig was a great baseball player. He played for the New York Yankees and in the 1930s and set a record for number of hits for the New York Yankees that was only broken two years ago by Derek Jeter, so that record stood for 80 years now Gary He said another record that stood for almost 60 years and it was back to back games so he never missed the game now they never missed a game and it was called The Iron Horse.

I didn't know about this one before reading his biography. He only knew that he died because of his Let's also see what happened to him, well, he was also known as The Iron Horse because he never missed a game and he never missed a game because he was never sick, he was a human being, he had the flu and colds like everyone. Also, being an athlete, he was injured at one point, they had an x-ray of his hands and it turned out that his fingers had been broken 17 different times and each time he played despite the injury and his teammates described him making faces like a maniac. . monkey in agony while feeling the ball but never missed the game And yet, when a teammate's young rookie gets sick with the flu and can't play and the coach is really mad at the guy, Gary says what the hell Are you talking about what is sick?

He can't play. He tests the rookie boom in his own house where he lived with his mother. His mother puts this newbie in Gary's bed. Lou sleeps on the living room couch while his mother nurses his son back to health. and he himself never missed the game until he could no longer walk. This is typical of all people with ALS. Are we blaming patients for causing their own illness? Well, no, we don't because it's not deliberate. It is not deliberate. These are unconscious patterns. Let me. I give you an example for my personal life. So when I was 54 and my mother was 78, she was in a nursing home because she had a genetic disease called muscular dystrophy and could no longer walk, move her arms much mentally, of course, she was completely with this she died at 82 years. and by then she was already a widow and had to be in a nursing home.

Now one afternoon I am visiting her in a nursing home and as I walk through the nursing room at home I have a bit of a lamp, just a slight limp, the reason I limp is because that morning I had arthroscopic surgery in a of my knees, which was minimally invasive and simply cut out a piece of torn cartilage that I incurred. Because I used to jog on cement and didn't pay attention to the fact that it hurt to jog on cement, I missed the lecture in medical school on the relationship between pain and tissue damage, so I didn't know that this is a bad thing.

I continued jogging on cement Tor cartilage surgery that morning that afternoon I limp a little when I get to my mother's room I open the door and my limp disappears and I enter her room with a perfectly normal door I greet her again I come out again in a balanced manner and then I close the door behind me and start limping again now she assumed I was taking pictures of someone taking care of her not wanting her to worry yes but this is what happens with my mother she was 78 years old. He survived the Second World War, he had survived the Nazi genocide, the death of his parents in Auschwitz, he simply survived the communist dictatorship, the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the emigration to Canada with two teenagers and my father, uh, the birth of a child in Canada when she was 39 in a new country, the whole immigration experience, do you think she could have handled it and was she a huge and emotionally very strong person?

Do you think she could handle the fact that her middle-aged son had some light on the afternoon of the arthroscopic surgery? If she had thought about it, she wouldn't have suppressed my land, but the point is that I didn't think about it. . It goes back to my first year of life, when I was two months old, when the German army entered Budapest and my mother called the pediatrician to say: could you come see God? Or, of course, he's crying all the time the day after the invasion and the pediatrician says, of course, I'll go, but I have to tell you that all my Jewish babies are crying.

What are you doing? I think it was about what I knew when I was two years old or two months old about the Nazis, Hitler or the genocide.it happens, yes, but they say why bother, yes, suggestions on how we can work with them and yes, yes, well, first of all, let us. I ask all of you a question. How many of you just ask to raise your hand? How many of you made New Year's resolutions this year? How many of you made news resolutions? Can you see how many are stuck captain? How many of you?

You know what it takes to live and have a really good life. I mean that in terms of nutrition and exercise and emotional balance and all that. How many of you know what it takes? How many of you are living it well? First of all, thank you. After all, the person you are talking about is not that unique, he is just like the rest of us, so what I would say to that person is: you know what, listen to him, what is he saying to you? who are discouraged so just here this instead of convincing them not to do it listen to them oh you sound really discouraged I wonder what that's about for you you must feel really desperate sometimes even I know how to live a good life but I don't, It's very difficult, really listen to them, make sure they feel validated and understood by you, then they can get over it, you try to talk them out of it, you can't, and again a little louder, please, yes.

It's time to change how I feel, but I mean, I used to be a person that was like yeah, yeah, you know, when I had a drama about five years ago, who is that and then last year and when I started having this expressive problem and personal care, how important. It is and I've been doing it myself learning to say, you know, I have to create these boundaries because I wanted to help people set them and that made me feel better, but then I realized that I wasn't taking care of myself. Is there any suggestion? I was really about how to get some of that back.

Let me tell you about a friend of mine who lives in Calgary. Her name is Shannon Duke and Shannon she is now 48 years old and when she was 37 she was diagnosed. with stage four breast cancer, stage four meant the cancer was already in Her Bones when it was diagnosed at the time she had two young children aged one and three and was married to a well-to-do businessman she herself was a woman very high-functioning executive for Microsoft in Calgary and then she's diagnosed as the perfect life, the perfect marriage, the perfect home, of course, and then she was diagnosed and she was physically healthy, you know, she always ate well and then she was diagnosed with cancer. stage 4 breast cancer and has a transformation, now he receives the best medical advice he can get anywhere in North America and he traveled to New York and other places he got the best medical treatment and with that he was given a year to live because that is the fourth stage of the prognosis despite medical treatment, you will most likely be dead in a year a year ago in February just a year ago now Shannon traveled to California's Napa Valley with some of her friends and they celebrated her 10th year of survival on her 47th birthday and the transformation she experienced was that when she was diagnosed and began to pay attention she realized that her life had not been her life because she had been sexually abused as a child and her response to the abuse was, Of course, as many children will experience, it can't be about adults, it's about me, so if something so terrible happened to me, I must be a very bad person, so I have to be very good to compensate then it's a good daughter. who does not talk about it does not disturb the waters the good employee the good student The good wife who does not talk about her husband's addiction problems because that would disturb the waters again and when she is diagnosed and decides that she wants to live, she says to hell with all her might. this perfection and goodness and confronts her family, her virgin, about the abuse she had suffered and confronts her husband and begins to leave authentic and by the way she leaves the job. that it wasn't her, she wasn't really expressing who she was 11 years later the cancer is still in her bones but it's completely dormant but she knows that if she wants to stay alive she needs to stay authentic so I think a lot of these issues are reversible, like I'm not promising a cure to anyone, but Shannon really went on an important personal journey and continues to work on it every day and practices her spiritual methods that she ignored all those years and pays attention to herself. and she keeps cleaning things and she is the image of Health.

She and I do workshops together at some point so there are ways to get there, but it's a commitment and of course it could threaten attachment relationships, so that's always your decision. I was curious. about any correlation with the endocrine system with a person living with alcohol-related birth defects and um and Trauma, so when we look at what you're presenting here about um Mind-body connection and the immune system, then we're talking a lot. of hormones, so my questions about whether the endocrine system is not fully developed due to alcohol-related birth defects. I do not know the answer.

I don't know the effect. I'm not enough of an expert to tell you if there is any correlation between the effects of alcohol and the hormonal system, the endocrine system. I do know that there is a correlation between trauma and they are consistent, that's what I mean, but I don't know the specific answer. about alcohol is a good question. Maybe I need to look it up. Are you telling me it's over? or yes, you have a question. We have five minutes. Okay, but look, instead of answering another question right now, let me ask you to answer a couple. of minutes and answer for yourself the following question in which area of ​​your life you are not saying no.

I'm talking about where there is a no that wants to be said but is not saying it, those areas are usually work or personal relationships. and I suggest you talk to each other, say it at your table or to a partner, if you don't want to talk, write it down, but have a conversation with yourself or someone else at the table about where you're not saying no. your life that would be a personal relationship or in your work, it's okay, just