What You Can Do to Take Control

The medical care bandwagon is losing its very wheels.  Health insurance is becoming prohibitively expensive – and only if you can get it. More and more people in their forties, fifties and sixties believe that given the changes in our economy and politics,  Social Security and Medicare will fail them.  They expect to work till the day they die.

More and more of the patients I see are going back to work, if they can find work.  Finding a job when you’re 75 or 80 is not easy, but people tell me they have no choice.   Their 401K is gone, the health insurance they had from the job they retired from has been terminated, and they’re sitting on a cliff above the ocean high and dry.  Sometimes their children or grandchildren are coming to live with them, as they’ve lost their livelihoods and their homes.

When the health system falls apart, what do you do?

You have to rely on yourself.  That means you have to stay as healthy and be as healthy as you possibly can.

Which means you have to know how your body is built, and use it the way it’s built.  Fortunately, your body is built for near endless regeneration.

When you wake up in the morning you literally are a different person.  Many of the proteins that make up the life of your cells have died and been remade, some within a few minutes.  The proteins pumping your blood have been built, died, and replaced through the night.  Your gut lining is mostly new in the last 24 hours.  If you gave your body the right kind of information, new brain cells will grow each and every night, new cells and new connections that foster learning, memory, and different, more effective ways for your body to survive the always changing environment.

If you realize how quickly your body regenerates you recognize what an enormous opportunity that creates.  So much of your health is under your control.  So much of what happens truly depends on what you do.

You want to take that control.  Because controlling your regeneration is the health insurance you own that no one can take from you.

The key way to regenerate  is to provide the right information that renews your body effectively.  Much as your body furiously rebuilds, making much of you anew in days, nothing is ever the same.  Your brain has built new connections and new memories to aid your physiology, remembering the different allergens and bacteria, twists and turns of your muscles and viscera you’ve experienced in the previous day. Use it or lose it works as a biological principle because so much of you is rebuilt, and must be rebuilt, to deal with all the changes that take place around you.

In the next weeks and months I hope to lay out more of what you can do to create this private health insurance, where you have control over your body and mind, your physiology, psychology  and consciousness.  Five of the most prominent causes of increased health and longevity are:

Physical activity – especially at the right times

Rest – both active and passive (sleep).  Active rest techniques can physiologically revive you in a matter of seconds, and revive your mind anytime and anywhere

Food – what you eat represents the materials and fuel of what you become – the right food also provides the right information to help renew your rapidly rebuilding tissues

Body Clocks and Regularity of Pattern – Time rules life, and your genes and gene expression are deeply influenced by your inner clocks

Social Connection and social rest – critical factors to survival, meaning, and pleasure in life.

You want to take control.  It’s time to act in ways that regenerate yourself in the ways you want.  In times where a sense of control seems fleeting, it’s important to know how much you can control your body and mind.

Rest, sleep, Sarasota Sleep Doctor, well-being, regeneration, longevity, body clocks, insomnia, sleep disorders, the rest doctor, matthew edlund, the power of rest, the body clock, psychology today, huffington post, redbook, longboat key news