5 Mistakes People Make When Trying to Fix Their Biochemistry
These are mistakes that I’ve made in the past as well, so when you see what it is you might be doing could actually be sabotaging progress, know that you’re not alone.
We’re talking about how to fix your biochemistry for relief from pain. The kind of pain that I talk and write about is the “everyday” variety — not from a disease process, cancer, fracture or other primary pathology. Everyday pain is what I see daily in my chiropractic practice. It’s real. It’s serious. It’s disruptive. But too often people don’t pay attention to it when it first shows up because it seems minor compared to those other kinds of pain. It’s true. It’s not as serious, but when we ignore seemingly minor aches and pains, they don’t really go away, we just adapt to the dysfunction that is causing the pain. When we do that, all we’re doing is delaying the inevitable. Our adaptive capabilities, whether structural, biological or psychological, all have limits.
We can easily ignore and push through everyday pain …until suddenly we no longer can. No one knows exactly where that limit is until we’re in the kind of pain that feels like it came out of nowhere but is now disrupting our day to day life. When we don’t pay attention and modify our behavior soon enough, bouts of everyday aches and pains will return and worsen until they do finally get our attention.
So, once pain has your attention, what should you do? If you’ve been following, you know that there are 3 main triggers to everyday pain: biomechanics, biochemistry and emotions or stress. The break that I recently took from coffee, alcohol and news was a break that I needed for many reasons but it was also a good reminder of the role that all three of these things play in my own body’s aches and pains. You can read about my thoughts on all of that in my prior 3 posts starting with the last one: Part 2 — How I Recently Pushed Reset on Some of My Biochemical Pain Triggers.
Sometimes biochemical triggers only cause a feeling of body stiffness in the early stages but that is a symptom worth noticing because it can be a precursor to more significant discomfort down the road. Everyone’s triggers are different and depend a lot on your body’s genetic and epigenetic make-up. When it comes to biochemistry, we’re talking about anything that you absorb from your environment through eating, drinking, breathing, as well as through your skin. I would go so far as to say that the way your brain interprets information from all 5 of your senses (sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste) contributes to your biochemistry.
To learn more about the biochemistry of inflammation and by extension pain, you can pick up Volume One of The Everyday Pain Guide — Put Out the Fire, but for the purpose of this post, I’m going to assume you have a basic understanding of these connections. And maybe you’ve tried exploring one or more of these factors (food, drink, stress) but without much success. If that’s the case, see if any of the following are mistakes that you might have made:
Lofty Goals
Do you let a personal notion of “perfect” be the enemy of your success? There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious in your desire for change and improvement. It is possible however, to be too optimistic when your vision of “ideal” is out of proportion with reality.
This is something I regularly have to check with myself. Perfectionists are far from perfect. But they are often preoccupied with how things should be in order to be a certain version of perfect.
Instead, try to remember that your idea of flawed, imperfect and inconsistent is still better than average. Take the small wins. When looking for perspective, I like to think about the act of brushing my teeth. It’s something most of us do every day — morning and night like clockwork and without thinking about it. Why is that so easy and other self care can be so hard?
The answer is going to be different for everyone but think about what it is for you that makes brushing your teeth easy to do daily? Then see if you can apply that principle to your other selfcare goals in some small way. Maybe tooth brushing is just part of the day because the tools are right there in front of us? Maybe because it only takes a few minutes? Maybe because the feeling of clean teeth is rewarding, or maybe it’s the taste of the toothpaste for some?
Based on these examples, think about how you can apply these principles to make your desired change become similarly: convenient, short/quick, feel good or taste good? And maybe you’ll discover a completely different motivation that makes your goal for a body chemistry reset, attainable in the same way that toothbrushing can be until that too is an automatic built-in part of your day.
Maybe you have a better hack for breaking through the faulty notion of “perfect”? Let me know in the comments!
The Wrong Focus
When we want to change something in our life, it’s common to put all the focus on what needs to be eliminated or stopped. We want to eat less junk, stop being lazy, stop drinking, stop watching too much TV etc. The focus is on what we’re doing wrong.
If you change the focus from eliminating “bad” things to instead, adding good things, you might find that slowly your “good” additions to the day will start to crowd out the undesirable things. The psychology of adding a small good thing, rather than taking something away, is so much more accessible and can better set you up for success.
Remember, everything you do has a reason. The cravings your brain and body have for “bad” things, all come from a real biological need. Until you figure out how to satisfy that need differently, you’ll continue to fall into the rut of old patterns.
Forgetting to Substitute or Support
When you commit to eliminating something in your life that is no longer serving you in a healthy way, finding a substitute is a very important part of the transition.
Everything we do, think and eat has a good reason and serves a purpose. Whether or not that purpose is serving us or hindering us is another topic, but if you can recognize that everything you do comes from a legitimate biological need, then you can try to fulfill it in a different way.
For example, when I take breaks from drinking coffee, I don’t stop caffeine cold turkey because that would be unkind to my system. Instead I switch to a type of caffeine that my body metabolizes more gently like with Yerba Mate. This way, I avoid the withdrawal headaches and brain fog but I get a respite from the adverse impact of coffee caffeine to my nervous system.
Dependence on a strong stimulant like coffee or sugar, usually signals a deeper biological need at the level of our endocrine system — for example thyroid or adrenal dysfunction. When caffeine and sugar (or even carbohydrates of any kind) become a need rather than just an occasional enjoyment, it might be time to ask yourself: “Why is sleep not restoring you to full energy throughout the day?” Or, “Why are you not able to get the sleep you need?” Your body is designed to get through the day without biochemical crutches. What part of your biology needs a little extra support while you find the reset button?
These are questions that you can better navigate with the help of an integrative healthcare team. But it’s this kind of support that can be essential to setting you up for success while withdrawing from behaviors or substances that are not serving your body chemistry anymore.
Taking Time to Know Why
For example, stopping my exposure to news without knowing what my main goal was would have ended in failure. I made sure to take the time to figure out specifically what was disturbing me. Realizing that for myself it was a false sense of urgency that was hijacking my energy and my time, helped me to take a step back mentally and re-prioritize what really matters.
There was a moment when I was not clear on my “why” during this recent reset. Initially I called it a “media fast”. But then I realized that was inaccurate. Was I needing a break from all screen time? That’s what we hear a lot about these days (ironically in the media — ha!). But my answer to this ended up being “no”, because too much screen time wasn’t my “why”. I was able to achieve my goal while still allowing myself to watch streaming shows (which served as my strategic substitute, setting me up for success). I just had to make sure to watch things that were light and fun so that my to-do list urgency wasn’t triggered.
Now that I’ve returned to all forms of media, I find myself less drawn to much of it and can better identify when to re-direct my attention to those more important things again.
Don’t just blindly make changes because of some outside pressure. Even if it’s a physician telling you to make a change for your health, if you don’t tune into a deeper “why” for yourself, any change you try to make won’t last.
Another way to use your “why” as a guiding light is to try and better understand the underlying reason for whatever behavior or craving that you are interested in re-patterning. For example, during my break from social media (in order to avoid seeing the news), I thought to myself that I was missing the connection with friends who don’t live nearby. But when I ended up reaching out intentionally to each person individually by email, phone and text, I was reminded of what real connection feels like. This led me to let go of the false story (the fake “why”) I was telling myself about relying on social media for this supposed connection. And thanks to this reminder, now when I feel a need for connection, my social media feed is not the first place I go.
Are You Breathing Wrong?
This may seem a little random, but breathing is underrated and deserves a nod here. Our biochemistry can be impacted by our breath and our breath can be impacted by our biochemistry. So if you’re trying to “fix” your biochemistry, you cannot not think about breathing.
Breathing isn’t just about taking in oxygen. Imagine for a second that the act of breathing drives all of our biology. It sort of does. We think in crude terms that it’s the heart that powers the body, but without breath, the heart doesn’t get any blood delivered to it. I mean, they’re both important of course but for some reason the heart gets all the credit for keeping us alive when it’s really both (from a mechanistic standpoint).
It’s a much broader topic but I want you to think about this one fascinating feature that isn’t talked about enough: When we’re sleeping or unconscious, our brainstem takes over and makes sure that we keep breathing. The area in the brainstem responsible for this is programmed to provide a very specific ratio of inhalation to exhalation. That ratio is roughly 2:3. This means that when all systems are working at their ideal set point, the amount of time you spend inhaling air should be less than the amount of time you spend exhaling. (For a broader understanding of breathing physiology the citation below provides a good start)[1]
Exhaling is a way to eliminate waste products. It’s cleansing. We need it just as much and apparently more than breathing in oxygen. Is this maybe why expelling air by laughing and singing are so therapeutic?
This means that when you’re awake and trying to pay attention to your breath, you need to stop focusing on filling your lungs and focus more on making room first! Breathing out is largely a passive activity which means when you let yourself exhale, you’re allowing relaxation.
See you for next week’s post as we wind up this series about my biochemistry reset.
[1] Braun SR. Respiratory Rate and Pattern. In: Walker HK, Hall WD, Hurst JW, editors. Clinical Methods: The History, Physical, and Laboratory Examinations. 3rd edition. Boston: Butterworths; 1990. Chapter 43. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK365/
