Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Chapter 3: Health Pillar 1—Manage Oxidation
If you’ve ever noticed an apple turning brown shortly after being cut open or an old car with rust spots all over it, you’ve actually seen the results of a natural process called “oxidation.” Within the body, oxidation takes place on the cellular level, and that is the focus of this chapter, because managing oxidative balance is the first key pillar of health for building vigor.

One simple definition of oxidation is that it describes what happens when oxygen combines with another substance. On a somewhat more technical level, oxidation refers to “the loss of at least one electron when two or more substances interact.”
How are these electrons lost? They’re “stolen” by highly reactive oxygen molecules called “free radicals.” Many health-conscious readers are familiar with the term “antioxidant” and understand that it refers to such nutrients as vitamins C and E, among others, that help protect the body from these “free radicals.”

Free radicals are highly reactive and potentially damaging, because they have an “unpaired” electron that wants to “pair” with another electron. Unfortunately, free radicals often try to “take” that needed electron from proteins and lipids in the cells, creating microscopic damage to cellular structures and leading to tissue dysfunction. Perhaps even worse than the direct damage to DNA and cellular structures is that damage in one part of the cell can set off a chain reaction of damage that can be propagated from one part of the cell to another, just as a campfire spark jumps from tree to tree in a forest and leads to a wildfire. Free radicals are not necessarily “bad”—a certain amount of cellular “damage” is actually needed for normal physiological functioning, including normal glucose transport, mitochondrial genesis, and muscle hypertrophy. However, unchecked or excessive free-radical activity is what leads to cellular damage—oxidation—and the cycle of inflammation and tissue dysfunction that follows.

Cells are typically able to protect themselves from free-radical damage through internal antioxidant enzymes produced in the body (superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, catalase) as well as through antioxidant nutrients found in the diet (vitamins C and E, thiols, flavonoids, and carotenoids—each of which can “quench” free radicals by donating their own electrons).

Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Part II: Restoring Vigor—The Four Pillars of Health

As you may recall from the Introduction, the Four Pillars of Health are:
1. manage oxidation
2. control inflammation
3. stabilize glucose
4. balance stress hormones

These Four Pillars offer a multipronged approach to simultaneously addressing multiple causes of biochemical imbalance. These internal processes can, in many ways, be thought of as a “Unified Theory” for promoting vigor.

By contrast, some health programs and products focus on controlling only inflammation, only oxidation, only blood sugar, and so forth. Although these approaches have some value, single-focus programs are automatically limited in their overall effects. Limited programs with limited focuses lead to limited benefits for you. Many of these solitary approaches offer some hope and some help. But the Four-Pillars approach enables you to balance each of the major biochemical aspects of health and vigor at the same time.

For example, scientists and doctors agree that excessive inflammation can lead to accelerated tissue damage and breakdown, so it makes a lot of sense to control inflammation to promote overall health. But, if you look deeper to find the causes of inflammation, you quickly see other factors that you can control. Because oxidation (which is caused by free radicals) leads to inflammation at the cellular level, why not also control oxidation? Great idea—but why not look even farther up the metabolic chain of events to see if you can control or modulate the causes of oxidation? Doing this shows that glycation (cellular damage caused by overexposure to certain sugars) can lead to oxidation (which can, in turn, lead to inflammation). That means you have another factor that you can address (as you do with Health Pillar 3—stabilize glucose). Should you stop there? Of course not, because when you look even higher up the metabolic stream, you see that an imbalance in stress hormones can lead to glycation, which can lead to oxidation, which in turn leads to inflammation. Unfortunately, existing scientific or medical research doesn’t go any farther “upstream” with regard to the biochemistry of cellular aging and health promotion. Balancing stress hormones is about as far “upstream” as you can go at this time—but that’s still pretty good.

Obviously, each of these four aspects of your body’s biochemistry is intimately intertwined and interdependent on the others. Having an imbalance in any of the individual pillars (inflammation, for example) can set off a biochemical cascade leading to imbalances in another pillar (such as oxidation). The pillars act almost like a set of dominoes—when you touch one, you set off movement and changes in all the others. The good news is that when you restore balance in any of the pillars, you can also get the benefit of restored balance in the rest of them, with the end result being optimal levels of health. This section of the book tells you more about these pillars and how you can reach those higher levels of health to develop vigor.

Yesterday, I did a longish interview with an editor at one of the big beauty magazines (I’ll link to the article when it comes out).

She wanted me to recommend my “top 3 beauty tips” for the new year – based on my book Cortisol Control and the Beauty Connection about how stress/cortisol can lead to skin problems.

As we talked, I tried to make the point to her that not only would her readers LOOK better by following my tips, but they would also FEEL better (and athletes would PERFORM better) because the biochemistry of look/feel/perform is all related. That intertwined biochemical balance is really the common theme in all of my books about stress, vigor, weight loss, beauty, and performance.

What were my “3 tips” for her article?

1. Get Your Sleep. Too little sleep (6 hours or less per night) increases cortisol and leads you to higher levels of belly fat and deteriorating skin quality (not to mention fatigue and brain fog). It’s called “beauty rest” for a reason! You can’t “push through” inadequate sleep – so if you’re sleep-deprived, you are going to suffer in terms of appearance (more wrinkles and redness), appetite (greater sugar cravings), and mental/physical performance (sub-par).

2. Balance Your Diet. Every meal and snack should be a balance of lean protein, slow carbs, and healthy fats. I use the Helping Hand approach to eating to guide people in choosing the right balance. This approach ensures not only calorie control, but also biochemical balance of cortisol, glucose, inflammation, and other aspects of biochemistry that can help them feel and look better.

3. Up Your Exercise Intensity. Often referred to as HIIT (high-intensity interval training), this method of exercising takes only about 20 minutes and is more effective than a full hour of lower-intensity “fat-burning” exercise for how you feel and how you look. HIIT alternates hard efforts with easy efforts and is the most effective way to get your cortisol and glucose levels back in balance. HIIT is also effective as a general de-stressor and blood flow promoter – so it’s fantastic for your waistline and your skin tone.

I hope those tips can help you to Look and Feel your best in 2014!

Thanks for reading,

Shawn

Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Train Your Brain to Build Vigor
You’ve just gotten a great deal of technical information about the brain, stress, and biochemistry. In this closing section of the chapter, I want to give you practical ways to apply this information to your life to change your behavior and build vigor.
Let me start by telling you about the work I’ve done over the years with elite-level athletes in a variety of sports—including many professional athletes and participants in the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.

A common theme among these athletes and “peak-performance” enthusiasts is that the athletes standing on the podium not only are the athletes with the highest states of physical performance but also are the athletes with the highest states of mental performance and the highest states of biochemical balance and vigor (timed perfectly to coincide with their most important competitions). The athletes who miss the podium (or even miss qualifying for big events, such as the Olympic Games) are often those whose biochemistry is “unbalanced” and whose vigor slipped at the wrong time—leaving them fatigued, unfocused, injured, or sick and allowing a high-vigor athlete to surpass them.

Sometimes, athletes and coaches refer to this state of high vigor as “the zone” to indicate an athlete who has momentum and who is simply “floating” out of reach of his or her competition. This “zone” is hard to describe in words (just like vigor), but when you feel it, you want to maintain it (just like vigor)—and when you lose it, you want to get it back as quickly as possible (just like vigor).

In the same way that an elite athlete must properly train body and mind to reach the highest levels of performance, you, too, must “train” yourself on a daily basis to achieve your optimal state of vigor. Over the years, I have found that two “practice sessions” are particularly effective in helping people harness and direct the power of the brain to improve personal vigor—and they are well worth a few minutes of daily practice. These two approaches are quite simple and involve practicing gratitude and mindfulness.

Let me close this chapter by offering you the following tools for incorporating gratitude and mindfulness into your life to improve the quality of your health and to build vigor.

Gratitude and Mindfulness

Gratitude is the practice of focusing on what you have instead of what you lack. You may have heard the old proverb (one my grandmother used to remind me of as a child), “If you’re not thankful for what you have, you’re not likely to be thankful for what you’ll get.”

One of the easiest and most effective ways to practice gratitude is to keep a “gratitude journal” in which you write down a few thoughts every week about the things for which you are grateful. You can express your gratitude in innumerable ways from past memories, present experiences, and even future hopes. These will often be “little” things, like a sunny day or a phone call from a friend—and you should write them down (or at least think about them for a few moments, like a nightly prayer) and reflect on the details of the event and the sensations that you experienced. It might sound overly simplistic, but dozens of research studies show that those who write about gratitude feel better about their lives, are significantly more optimistic, and have higher vigor.

Mindfulness is the practice of purposely focusing your attention on the present moment so you are aware and accepting, but not judgmental, of your present circumstances.

When you are being mindful, you are able to savor your pleasurable experiences as they occur. You’re able to derive the highest level of pleasure from each and every experience through every moment of every day. You might realize that “multitasking” is the opposite of being mindful—and you’re correct. You simply cannot be mindful of anything if you’re trying to pay attention to several things at the same time—for example, eating lunch while scanning e-mail and also talking on the phone means that you’re not capable of deriving the pleasure you could from any one of these actions alone.

People who multitask on a regular basis typically report feeling “disconnected,” with lower vigor than they “should” have. But mindfulness practice can quickly restore their connection with the present and help restore their vigor. Mindfulness helps you become fully engaged in daily activities and also increases your capacity to deal with adverse events. By refocusing on the “here and now” in your daily life, mindfulness helps you worry less about the future or regret the past. You can approach mindfulness as formal meditation or less formally (as I do) when you have a moment of “downtime” (such as commuting to/from work or waiting in line).

Here are a few pointers to help you focus your attention on the present:
* Focus your attention on the sensations in your body.
* Breathe in slowly and deeply through your nose, letting your chest and abdomen expand fully.
* Breathe out slowly through your mouth, letting your chest and abdomen fall as you notice the sensations of inhaling/exhaling.
* Deliberately sense and pay attention to the task at hand—move slowly and notice the sights/smells/touch/sounds of the moment.
* If your mind wanders away from the task at hand, acknowledge it and then slowly/gently refocus your attention on the present moment.

Getting back to athletes and their ability to “train” their brains to build vigor—remember that vigor is characterized by physical energy and mental energy as well as by motivation, resilience, optimism, and engagement. These are all factors that are high in a top-level athlete and are low in a poor-performing athlete.

Numerous researchers in “sports psychology” have suggested that exercise training and mind training can increase positive emotions that can change brain levels of neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and the natural endorphins and endocannabinoids responsible for a “runner’s high”). This is yet another two-way street where the neurochemicals influence mood—and mood influences neurochemicals in either a positive or negative direction.

As stated earlier in this chapter, biochemistry affects the brain, which in turn affects behavior, and it all happens in an ongoing loop. By engaging in mindfulness and gratitude practices, you can turn this cycle away from behaviors that promote burnout and direct it toward building vigor.

Want to feel better than you’ve ever felt?

Here’s another excerpt from my 10th book, The Secret of Vigor – How to Overcome Burnout, Restore Biochemical Balance and Reclaim Your Natural Energy

Some of the most popular New Year’s resolutions every year are:
*Lose Weight
*Get in Shape
*Reduce Stress
*Get Healthier
*Win the Lottery

The Secret of Vigor can help you with 4 out of 5 of the most popular resolution goals, so I’ll be posting excerpts from the book for the next several weeks – so please stay tuned for each installment.

If you simply can’t wait, then you can certainly get a copy at http://amzn.to/1eju3wu or at your favorite library or bookstore.

Switches and Thermostats—Adjusting Your Brain Chemistry
The previous chapter examines the idea that chronic stress interferes with internal biochemical balance and, further, that interference leads to imbalances that directly reduce vigor and promote burnout. However, it is possible to restore biochemical balance and, in doing so, it becomes possible to beat burnout and to reestablish a desired state of high vigor. In addition, your thoughts and experiences can alter your neural circuits and change the structure and function of your brain. This concept of neuroplasticity is also a two-way street, in that negative thoughts and actions can establish circuitry that is detrimental to your health and well-being (thus reducing vigor). On the other hand, positive thoughts and actions establish patterns of neuronal firing that promote feelings of well-being, abundant energy, and high vigor.

Because the concepts of biochemical balance and neuroplasticity can become extremely complex (and are actually not even fully understood by researchers), I often use the analogy of “switches and thermostats” to help people understand exactly what is going on at the cellular level when they are exposed to chronic stress. Think of stress as a “switch.” When you’re under a lot of stress, your switch is flipped “on,” and when things are calm, your stress switch is in the “off” position. The switch (on or off) represents the degree of “signal” that is being transmitted to your body and to every individual cell in every tissue and organ. A constant signal from a switch that is in the “on” position for too long can overload the cell, leading to cellular dysfunction, tissue breakdown, stress-related disease, and low vigor.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the “thermostat,” which represents the “receptors” on the surface of cells. These receptors are the parts of the cell that transmit and interpret the signals from the switches—basically letting the cells “hear” what is going on around them. The more thermostats you have in a room of your house (or receptors on a cell), the more specifically you can detect the signal from the stress switch. Chronic stress is like having your switch in the “always on” position. When you look at the thermostats, however, you’ll see that by having more thermostats (receptors) or having really sensitive thermostats that can detect very slight changes in temperature, your cells can respond quickly and very specifically to changes in the level of your stress signal.

This is how your body should work when you’re in good health: When you encounter stress, your switch sends the stress signal throughout the body (via nerves, hormones, neurotransmitters, cytokines, and so forth). These signals are “read” by your cellular thermostats (receptors), thus triggering actions within the cells, such as the fight-or-flight response or an increase/decrease in inflammation levels and blood sugar.

Unfortunately, with chronic stress, these signals become too strong or come too frequently, so your “thermostats” begin to malfunction or shut off, and your cells no longer respond appropriately. This “insensitivity” of your “thermostats” (receptors) to the stress signals from your “switch” underlies many of the problems with biochemical balance that result in low vigor and detrimental neuroplastic changes in brain structure. Those changes cause further biochemical imbalances and reduce vigor even more in a vicious downward cycle.