Episode 51: True Wellness with guest Dr. Catherine Kurosu (Part 2)

True Wellness: The Mind

Dr. Catherine Kurosu co-authored another book called “True Wellness: The Mind,” which addresses brain health, as well as problems with sleep, anxiety and depression.

Sleep & Stress

In “True Wellness: The Mind,” Dr. Kurosu and her co-author talk a lot about how the brain functions and why sleep is so important. Specifically, they cover how stress, anxiety and depression affect sleep.

Your brain cannot differentiate between the sort of primitive stress of being eaten by a tiger and modern-day stress, such as trying to get a report in at work. In both cases, the experienced stress produces the same biochemical response and stress can keep you up at night. When sleep is disrupted, it affects about 700 different biochemical processes in your body; so, when you don’t sleep at night, it creates a vicious downward cycle. Specifically, your parasympathetic nervous system (“rest & digest”) can go awry and - without sleep - you never have a chance to recover or recuperate and you end up with this sort of chronic low grade inflammation in your body that then affects other systems.

What happens in the brain at night when you sleep?

There's a system called the lymphatic system within the brain. What researchers have discovered is the brain cleans itself of toxins and metabolites only when you're asleep. The blood vessels in your brain open up and creates these sorts of secret passages within your brain. The fluid that surrounds your brain is called the cerebral spinal fluid and it washes out your brain at night when you're asleep. This “cleaning” only occurs in certain stages of sleep - the deeper stages of sleep.

If you're not getting adequate sleep, then this process is not happening or not happening optimally. The result is that these metabolites will start to build up in your brain and your brain won't function as well.

Stress

Stress management is covered substantially in Dr. Kurosu’s book: “True Wellness: The Mind.” For example, acupuncture and Qi Gong both help to balance neurotransmitters, which plays a part in improving anxiety and depression.

Your brain’s connection to stress

Another way that stress impacts anxiety and depression within the body is that when you experience stressful events, your brain processes this in a way that strengthens the connections between one part of the brain and the other that leads to more anxiety or depression or the physical manifestations of stress, repetitively.

It's like it feeds upon itself and strengthens these connections.

By adopting a lifestyle that minimizing or help you to manage your stress (e.g., with breathing exercises, Qi Gong, meditation, etc.) you help to minimize these connections and normalize them so that the physical manifestations of the stress are lessened.

Brain images or connectivity scans (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging) show the connections between the different parts of your brain. If you’ve had any sort of stressful or traumatic experience, then that information gets stored in deep parts of your brain that you don't really have any voluntary control over or very little voluntary control over (in contrast we have more voluntary control over other parts of the brain – e.g., frontal cortex.) The deeper parts of your brain that store this information about your stressful or traumatic events gets pulled back up any time experience a similar kind of stressful event. This can cause a lack of control of the frontal part of your brain to control your response to that traumatic event.

Minimize your brain’s connections to stress

Exercises to improve your breathing control can help decrease your stress response and can also help to minimize your brain’s connectivity to stressful or traumatic events.

Taking care of your own health

Dr. Catherine Kurosu very much so believes in the importance of Western medicine and medications; so, she is in no way telling people to go off their medications (e.g., anti-depressants). She does note, however, that some people find the idea of totally relying on anti-depressants to be self-defeating in a way. People don't like feeling like they can’t do things for themselves. So, adding in other components can be very useful. For example, in anxiety, cardiovascular exercise is actually very helpful to minimize the body's response to stress. Also, the foods that you're eating play an important role in your health. Some people drink a lot of caffeine and then wonder why they can't sleep at night and why their heart is pounding. In this case, it is important to get people to start to wean themselves off foods and drinks that play into their physical feelings of anxiety.

Integrating Western and Eastern Approaches to Medicine for Optimal Health

The integration of Eastern and Western medicine is important because so many of the Eastern modalities require that the patient is involved in their care. In Western medicine, sometimes patients feel like they're just supposed to take a pill and not be responsible for the remainder of their lifestyle choices. Although a lot of Western practitioners really try and help people to make lifestyle changes that can lead to better health. Unfortunately, a lot of them don't have the time to spend with a patient in order to get that to happen. Eastern practitioners generally have more time to spend with a patient. They spend usually 30 to 60-minutes or sometimes even longer. Dr. Kurosu also believes that when a patient starts to make lifestyle changes for themselves, they feel more empowered that they're taking their health into their own hands and that encourages further change.

Take your health into your own hands

To promote successful healthy lifestyle changes, Dr. Kurosu recommends breaking your desired habits into small manageable steps to start. For example, when Dr. Kurosu starts somebody on a breathing exercise – she starts with just one breathing exercise that is very good for balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.

Sample breathing exercise: Exhale for twice as long as you inhale.

All you have to do is take in a natural inhalation and then exhale for twice that time. It's easy to count in your head – inhale for a count of two and then exhale for a count of four. Catherine teaches this to her patients and then she gives them homework: Do this for five minutes, three times a week.

That's it. That's all she asks them to do.

Start with simple, easy to implement changes.

When the patient comes back in a week or two, they’ll report on how well they've done with the breathing exercise and, from there, Dr. Kurosu will add in more lifestyle changes.

Conclusion

Integrating both Western and Eastern approaches to achieve optimal health is powerful and there’s lots of evidence that shows that small and consistent healthy lifestyle changes can have a huge impact on your overall well-being.

To learn more about Dr. Catherine Kurosu’s work and her “True Wellness” books, you can visit her website by CLICKING HERE. Her books are also available online through every major bookseller (in Canada, the United States and internationally).

Dr. Kurosu’s co-author - Dr. Aihan Kuhn also has an excellent website for Qigong and Tai Chi videos that have been sequenced and developed for specific health concerns. You can visit Dr. Kuhn’s website by CLICKING HERE.

If you have any questions, you can contact Dr. Catherine Kurosu directly - see her website’s contact page by CLICKING HERE.