Nervous System Health

How Your Body Knows to Stay Healthy!

Most people take their health for granted until something goes wrong. When this happens, we wish to be back in time when health problems were not an issue. For anyone who has experienced such unwanted changes, this information offers insight into how we can help your body do what it was designed to do. The body has inborn abilities to control the activities of our glands and organs.

It also has an amazing ability to adapt and respond to stress and challenges. Unfortunately, many of us do not know how to recognize the early signs of problems, so we tend to have chronic problems develop that take longer to resolve.

One of the most important parts of the body's stress response is in the nervous system. The neurotransmitters made throughout the body (not just in the brain) are messengers that signal the body to become responsive and adapt or to relax, rest and rejuvenate.

What happens in many cases is that chronic stress (emotional, nutritional, chemical, etc) leads to a weakened ability to relax and rejuvenate. When that happens we may experience anxiety, depression, insomnia, weight and appetite changes among many other things.

Serotonin is well known for its role in preventing depression though it does many other things such as help us rebuild as we rest at night. Other neurotransmitters have an effect to excite or raise activity in our body while GABA and serotonin are called "inhibitory" because they slow things down. Overcoming chronic illness is a multi-step process. You see, when the body begins to have a problem, it also tries to adapt to or compensate for the problem. The nervous system and the hormones are hugely involved in that process. Most of the time, this ability to adapt gets worn out in addition to the original problem and that is when we really know something is wrong.

If you are in the process of dealing with a chronic condition, it is likely that the nervous system is involved in some way. Dr. Greenspan and our staff are experienced in recognizing the signs and guiding you through the process of discovering how your body is affected and how to correct the problem, one step at a time. Balancing neurotransmitters that have been unbalanced for a long time is a fundamental part of maintaining a stable body chemistry.