Listening To Your Body
Taking the time to properly listen to your own body is one of the most important natural health self-help tools available. Yet, many of us do not take the time to listen to what our own bodies are trying to tell us. Macho people wrongly think that the objective is to inflect as much self-abuse upon their own body, as possible, without complaining.
Highlights of Listening To Your Body:
- Listening to your body is an important self-help tool that is worth developing.
- Do you know what is normal for your own body?
- Macho people excel at ignoring important warning signs when they continue to abuse their own bodies rather than listening when their body starts complaining.
- Sudden radical changes in your body could be important enough to be worth discussing with a qualified health care professional.
- When you are sick, listening to your body means finding out why you got sick.
The Natural Health Perspective is not a medical Web site. It is a site on health that offers evidenced-based commonsense solutions that will improve your health, wellness, and longevity. Therefore, no attempt will be made to list specific warning signs of medical emergencies since there are scores of medical sites offering that approach.
Sure we all listen, when our bodies tell us it is time to go to the bathroom and snack when we are hungry. And, we all know when we are having a bad day. But, many people are ignoring important messages being sent to them by their bodies. Are you sensitive to what your body is saying, when your body starts to complain, or are you totally numb to these bodily sensations?
The basic premise of this Web site is that if you provide your body with what it needs, it will naturally heal itself. Likewise, when you are doing something wrong that your body does not like; your body will complain about it. Are you listening?
| "Unless you learn to notice and be bothered by
the early, subtle stages of illness, you will lose your chances of
managing your body through its changing cycles by simple means and
will find yourself more and more dependent on outside practitioners
and the costly interventions of modern hospital medicine." -- Spontaneous Healing by Andrew
Weil, MD |
It is vital that everyone becomes aware of what is normal for their own body, so that you can hear your body complaining when something goes wrong. Are you listening to your body? We all have aches and pains, but what is unusual, what is different should motivate every one of us to find out what a strange new feeling, sensation, or whatever, might be all about. Anything that you may be experiencing which feels different to you could be important enough to be worth discussing with a qualified health care provider of your choice.
You listen to your body by focusing on what you are doing, throughout the day. Many people call this being centered. The practices of meditation helps people to become more centered and live for the moment rather than always for the future.
When you come down with a headache, for example, you should be able to make a connection between your behavior and your headache. How many times have you just automatically reached for a OTC drug pain reliever when you got a headache? But, have you ever asked yourself what might have caused that headache in the first place? Have you ever observed, how often you get headaches? Could it be related to what you ate or drunk? Have you ever observed on what days of the week you usually get headaches?
In other words, healthy people are usually healthy rather than sick. But, when a healthy person does gets sick something triggered it in their environment. When you get a headache something in your immediate environment triggered it. It is your job to figure out what that something might have been. Become aware of what is triggering your headaches and you should be less likely to get another one in the future.
There are many opportunities to increase your sensitivity to, and awareness of, the true needs of your body. These include when to be active and when to rest, when to sleep and when to get out of bed, when to work and when to relax and enjoy yourself. There is more than one way to listen to your body. Periodically, measuring your body weight, waist size, body temperature, blood pressure and pulse rate are objective ways of listening to your body. Taking an appropriate blood test will quantitatively answer questions about your health status. Did you know for example, that moderately high cholesterol levels often means that your body that is trying to make more vitamin D with sunshine synthesis in your skin? The list of opportunities for listening to your body is quite long. Listening with greater interest should be part of any program of natural healing and health.
When you have symptoms, treat them with OTC medicine, if you must, but also be sure to ask yourself what those symptoms might mean. Do they indicate that there is something more serious that should be investigated? In natural health this is called a constitutional imbalance, while conventional medicine refers to them as underlying disease processes which if left untreated could lead to a serious lifestyle disease. Are your symptoms telling you that you are an experiencing a medical emergency? Or, do they mean that you should simply slow down or alter your lifestyle in some way?
Learning to answer these challenging questions is a part of dealing with the problems of living a good life.
In conclusion: everybody must decide for themselves, including physicians, when something is wrong, and whether or not it is a medical emergency. The natural health way of doing this is called listening to your own body. Find out what is normal for you. And, learn to recognize when your body starts to complain.
External Links
- Red Light Warning Signals - What might your body be trying to tell you?
