Successful
Take Care of Your Mind EVERY DAY | Dr. Bruce Lipton
If I take the chemicals of a brain that is stimulated by stress and put those chemicals in a plastic petri dish with my cells, you know what? The cells stop growing and they begin to die. You know what? There's an old saying called "Fear Kills" and I go, "Yep, there's a biology for that." The reason why is the chemicals released by the brain in fear shut down the growth of the body and shut down the immune system and you go, "Why would it do that?" And it's sort of simple. Let's say you're being chased by a saber tooth tiger and I say, "Here's the amount of energy in your body. 100 percent." I say, "How much of that 100 percent do you want to allocate to run away from that saber tooth tiger?" "100 percent." I go, "Yeah, so what does that mean?" Well, I say, "Well, the body was using energy for things like growth." And you say, "Well, I'm an adult. This is very important." I go, "Yeah, but guess what? Your body's made out of about 50 trillion cells and every day, every day, your body loses hundreds of billions with a B. Hundreds of billions of cells, normal attrition, die. Red cells are dying by billions, but by the second, you're losing billions of cells." I say important point, "How can I stay alive if I don't replace the cells?" I say, "Ah!" Then it says, "You have stem cells and they're equivalent of embryonic cells. So every day, while you're losing hundreds of billions of cells, your stem cells are dividing and creating hundreds of billions of replacements. Every day, you're growing." So, but what happens is you're being chased by a saber tooth tiger. You have energy to replace those hundreds of billions of cells and you give a lot of energy. You say, "How much you want from run away from the tiger?" And Lewis, you said, "All of it." I go, "Yeah!" So I say, "What about growth?" I say, "Stress hormones shut down the growth of the body to conserve energy to run away from the threat." So the moment you're in stress, you stop replacing the body cells. Well, that sounds like a very negative thing. If I need these body cells to live and I'm under stress, I go, "Wait, go back to when the system was developed." You know, 100,000 years ago, 200,000 a million years ago, I say, "Well, what stresses do you have?" I say, "Run away from the saber tooth tiger." That's a big stress. But when the system was designed of that long time period ago, I say, "Well, what are the stresses you have?" I say, "Well, okay, running away from the tiger." It says, "That happened every day all day." And I go, "No." That's a, you know, on a van when it happens, it's rare, but you run away from the tiger and I say, "Well, okay, you escaped the tiger now what?" I say, "Well, no more stress." And then I go back into growth again. So, stress originally was only used for short intervals, just a short interval, run away from that tiger, get away, I'm free, I don't have to have any stress anymore and I'm back to growth. Today's world is quite obvious, it's 24/7, 365 stress. Every day, the world is creating a stressful but infirmative force, are you going to keep your job, you're going to have enough money for the food and pay the rent, are you going to have friends around, are you going to lose your friends or where? Every day you're in these stress issues, it's like, guess what? Every day you're releasing stress hormones, every day you're inhibiting the health of your cells that are being replaced, they're not being replaced very quickly, in fact that's what, one of the causes of illness and second cause of illness is also from stress and that is this, the immune system, which uses a lot of energy and I say, "Well, you know that because if you ever been sick, you didn't have enough energy to get out of bed." That's how much the immune system is using, it uses a lot. So we go back to the situation, I say, "Okay, you happen to have a bacterial infection, a bad case of diarrhea, it happens to be brewing right now, but you're also being chased by a saber tooth tiger." How much of your energy do you want to fight the diarrhea of bacterial infection and how much do you want to run away from the tiger? So the issue is this, stress hormones can serve energy from the immune system by, guess what, inhibiting the immune system function, when you're stressed, you don't want to use all that energy to be in bed and recover, you want to run away from that tiger. So I say, "Well, you got this bacterial infection, you got a tiger chasing you, who cares about the infection?" Simple reason as Luis said, if the tiger catches you, the bacterial infection is not your problem anymore and so the significance is stress has now done two things, one, it shuts down the growth of the body to conserve energy so that you could run away from that tiger, and two, it shuts down or inhibits the immune system which is protecting you from threat but internal threat and the result is what, stress, and this is the fact, this is it, ready, 90% of illness on this planet is directly tied to stress, for what reason? Because you've interfered with keeping the body alive by replacing the cells and you've shut down the immune system is protecting you from the infection and sure as hell you're going to get sick when you're stressed, that's what the consequence of stress is sickness and the reason is why, you're not maintaining yourself, I mean the immune system is shut down, you know an interesting point, there's a therapeutic use for stress hormones, when a doctor wants to transplant an organ into a person, let's say I want to transplant a kidney or a lung or a heart into a patient, remember it's foreign tissue, if I transplant somebody else's kidney in your body, your immune system by definition should say hey, not self and eliminate the kidney, okay, so I say well how do doctors make sure that the transplant of kidney isn't rejected, the answer is they give the patient stress hormones before doing the operation, so that when the kidney is transplanted, the immune system is being inhibited and will not attack the kidney, so that's how powerful stress hormones are in shutting off your immune system, I go yeah, but 90% of the health issues on this problem are from the perception of stress, whether it's real or not, that's not relevant, it's your perception of it, your world could be totally safe but if you have a fear, your cells can't see that the world is safe, all they're talking to is the nervous system, the nervous system says there's fear and we have a reason for it, then the cells are going to gird themselves stuff and prepare for the stress and yet in the real environment there may be no reason for having stress but it's just your perception, so all of a sudden we start to realize that the cells are getting information from the nervous system which is interpreting the environment and then sending chemistry to the body cells via the blood to adjust the body cells to what's going on in the world, I said hot out, cool the body down, cold out, warm the body up and so I'm adjusting and the point about that is since the cells don't actually see the outside they only engage their activity by what the nervous system sends and this is where the biggest problems in life come from because we generate beliefs and perceptions that may not be accurate and totally false and yet once we generate them they control our chemistry, they control our immune system, they control our biology and so a false assumption could kill you and this is really critical because again the cells are supposed to be adjusting to the environment but because they're contained inside the skin they can only adjust to your perception of the environment which is releasing chemistry which is controlling their genetics and so the issue that we come down to now is the, let's go to the first conclusion, A you're not controlled by your genes, the genes are simply blueprints that are controlled by the environment and in this case of humans very much influenced by your perception of the environment separating environment for perception because our perceptions could be right but our perceptions could be wrong to the cells they just see the perceptions right or wrong that they're going to read whatever the perception is so wrong perceptions will mislead your biology and take you away from health. Now we have two problems with stress it shuts off growth and it shuts off the immune system there's a third problem which I call adding more stress when you are in fight or flight do you think you use conscious reasoning or reflex behavior, you use reflex behavior the stress hormones squeeze the blood vessels in the gut causing the blood to go to the periphery when the stress hormones come into the body they also go to the brain and they squeeze the blood vessels in the front of the brain where consciousness is to push more blood to the back for reflex behavior that means when you're under stress you are less intelligent and for my example I give you the people of the United States and the reason is the government knows this and ever since 9-1-1 they keep in the media the newspaper the television more stress more stress and the result is since 9-1-1 every year the pharmaceutical companies have made 20% more profit every year in selling drugs so it's important to realize that stress affects you in many different levels but all of them result in shutting down your life it has now been demonstrated that love is the greatest growth signal in the world for example Yugoslavia where they have orphanages the people could not afford to take care of their children and they sent them to orphanages they got food clothing the protection of living inside they got everything they needed to live except love and about 40% of those children became autistic what is autism is the child is shutting itself off from the world it's in protection closing itself down and all of the parameters of health and intelligence in these children were greatly suppressed they got everything but love the issue is when we're in this direction in protection we shut off growth and that's when illness starts so when we're on this side of the scale protection leads to disease and growth leads to wellness and I said well what causes this disease and the answer is stress now here's the problem that people do not realize if I just remove the stress from my life where am I on the scale it's zero if you want wellness it's not just the absence of stress you need the joy and the love to go to growth so if you're in the middle place you're not in real growth and real health so stress alone is not the problem it is what we need is more love and life and happiness.