Beware inflammatory content. It can make your cells toxic

Usually inflammatory means something has triggered us and we respond by getting angry. I ask you to pause and reflect for a moment on how your body feels when you are angry? Mine tenses up and contracts so my muscles feel constricted. My posture usually goes into a prepare to fight mode. My facial expression changes to match my body’s changes. I tend to lose my ability to think clearly and just prepare for defence.

My next question is: How long do you stay feeling angry? If it is a legitimate boundary crossing that needs to be addressed, usually it is temporary. As is any need to get ourselves out of immediate danger that is REAL. But what if the anger is not for something that needs our immediate attention to get us out of real danger. Often we can be triggered from our thoughts, from people who annoy us, work issues, or a number of other reasons that may end up having us feeling angry/fearful etc or if that attention stays with the anger/fear for a prolonged time? What then? How would the body feel to stay in this angry/fearful state for a prolonged time? It probably would feel unpleasant; it does for me. What would it feel like if you were in this state all the time even if at a lower level? Still unpleasant I imagine?

This is just a quick example of what occurs on a macro level when we hold onto an emotion like anger/fear. We think it is not affecting us on the inside, but that is where most people make the mistake. These changes occur FIRST inside the body before we express and can stay inside the body if we keep thinking about them even if we do not express. But what is this doing inside our body to our cells?

Anger is not wrong, we need it if our boundaries are crossed. It is meant to be used like any of the fight/flight reactions in the short term to keep us safe. Once the danger has passed we can go back to feeling ok and calm. This is demonstrated best by animals and birds. Ever see birds have a quick disagreement, then they separate and they shake it off (how they release trauma) and off they go as if nothing happened. We should be like this too, but often we have developed the ability to mull it over, keep thinking about it, replaying it in our minds etc…..

Humans, like you and me, usually stay in the fight or flight or anger mode and often don’t switch off. Humans have so many life stressors these days that our nervous systems are perceiving stressors everywhere nearly all the time. The more unresolved trauma, faulty beliefs or unprocessed emotions we are holding in our bodies the more we can stay holding on. If you don’t believe me just lookout the chronic health statistics, including chronic pain. They are increasing even though modern medicine has advanced a long way.

Chronic conditions are a sign our nervous system is dysregulated and when our nervous system’s are dysregulated and in chronic stress for too long it decreases the ability of our immune and digestive systems to function properly. Our immune system produces the pain relieving and healing chemicals we need to restore our body’s inner balance and optimal health. But often our bodies stay in protection mode which decreases the immune system function, it causes an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. This can influence our blood sugar levels, and other hormonal balances.

Nearly every chronic condition has as part of its description - increased inflammation.

If you go back to my first paragraph about how your body reacts to anger, the response is usually an inflamed response. So now imagine if you stay chronically or habitually angry (or other protective emotions eg fear, sadness) and all the biochemicals in your body influence every cell and they being fed mostly stress chemicals and not receiving adequate nutrition and repair as the digestive and immune systems are down? How do you think you cells may be feeling and what conditions are they operating under?

Increased inflammation in our bodies can be caused by doing too much exercise with not enough rest and recovery, poor diet that includes lots of sugar and preservatives or other toxic ingredients, or thinking patterns that are prone to more protective and stressed thoughts and also from unconscious unresolved emotions/ traumas and faulty beliefs that get stored in our body during our lifetime.

So how do we change this? First acknowledge that you feel this way and may have increased inflammation. Tune into your body to feel what it needs most to address this?

Try this quick test and technique, place your hand over your heart and breathe slowly and deeply to fill down to your belly. Try to let the belly fill before the shoulder area. Let it go slowly and repeat three times. Now check in with your body again? Do you feel a little less tense? Hopefully, you can feel some difference. The more stressed you are the more breaths are needed to notice an effect. This is a quick and easy way to reset the nervous system into a more healthy resting state.

What else can be done?

Sometimes changing diet or exercise can be a solution. Often they only partially help as the unprocessed emotions, unresolved traumas or faulty belief systems keep running in the background. These need to be addressed by increasing our self awareness, becoming more present and mindful, learning to safely release the unprocessed emotions and consciously cultivating the regenerative emotions like compassion, gratitude, peace and appreciation.

Changing our habitual responses takes time, patience and practice at developing new skills. So go easy on yourself and have self compassion. You are human and we humans all have some challenges that we have stored in our body. Our bodies store unprocessed emotions and patterns and programs and we all have them.

I work with these practices myself every day. I meditate, process my unprocessed emotions, do heart based techniques including breath work and Heartmath tools, exercise, eat nutritious food and more.

Are you aware of how stressed or angry or tense you are right now?

If you wish to do a mindfulness technique for calming the nervous system listen to my podcast as the last part always includes a presensing process to access greater self connection and balance the nervous system.