Laura Koniver, MD's Blog, page 13

A Super Easy Way To Support Your Brain Health That You Can Do Right Now

 

 

 

Today I’m sharing with you the latest article I’ve written on grounding, that has been accepted for publication by the American Journal Of Neurology Research.

Because you are on my private mailing list, you get to read it (and share it) here first, before it’s available online or in PubMed.  And if someone forwarded this to you, you can also join on my private newsletter list right here!

I hope you enjoy it!  It’s got some good food for thought in there, along with a tip of combining grounding with a few deep breaths to immediately support the nutrition and oxygen going to your brain.  Deep breathing actually helps provide increased nutrition to your brain and boosted removal of toxic metabolic waste because of the increased movement in cerebrospinal fluid that deep breathing creates…  so taking a couple intentional deep breaths actually means you have conscious control over your brain’s environment!  So cool.

I go into the science of that in the article below, and also how grounding might play a factor into increasing those health benefits.

If you’d rather hear me talk about it than read it, here is a video I recorded for you:

 

 

 

 

And if you prefer TikTok, here are two tiktoks I’ve made on this topic.  I would love to have you follow me on TikTok here!

 

@laurakonivermd

Deep breathing combined with groundng = boosted brain health #holistichealth #laurakonivermd #grounding #intuitionphysician #earthing #medicalstudies #brainhealth #deepbreaths

♬ original sound – Laura Koniver, MD

 

@laurakonivermd

♬ original sound – Laura Koniver, MD

 

 

Dr. Koniver’s original article:

Cerebrospinal Fluid & Brain Health: Optimized By Grounding

 

 

 

Cerebrospinal Fluid, The Brain’s Nutritive Bath

The function of the cerebrospinal fluid of our central nervous system has historically been viewed as providing cushioning, buoyancy and a layer of physical protection to our brain and spinal cord.  However, recent research is revealing that the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) has multiple roles in maintaining brain health, including supporting neuronal development, metabolic and nutritional support, hormone signaling, complex pulsatile flow patterns, waste removal, even possibly providing protection from neurodegenerative disease.

Our CSF is capable of signaling to the brain in a non-synaptic way, being in direct and intimate contact with the neurons of the brain and spinal cord while being an electrically bioactive, fully conductive, nutritive fluid.

In fact a continual supply of CSF has constantly supported the health of our neurons from the very earliest proliferation of neuronal stem cells in fetal development [1] throughout the entire lifespan of fully mature neurons in adulthood [2].  

Our CSF bathes the entire brain and spinal column, ventricles, pineal gland, thalamus, hypothalamus, pituitary glands, and other structures with nutrients, oxygen, crucial hormones (such as melatonin, insulin and growth factors) removes metabolic waste products in the brain, and is in direct contact with photoreceptors, chemoreceptors, and mechanoreceptors, all which provide instantaneous messaging that is not dependent on synaptic transmission. 

Because of its pervasive contact with the entire brain and spinal column, the CSF can provide this support in a synchronized, simultaneous way throughout the entire central nervous system [3].

 

 

 

 

The Movement Of Cerebrospinal Fluid

Recent research suggests that not only does the presence of CSF provide a healing, electrolytically stable environment for our brain’s optimized functioning but the actual movement of the fluid itself may impact brain health as well. 

Researchers have found that the CSF moves and pulses in multiple ways — our heartbeat creates a pulsatile movement in the CSF [4], non-REM sleep allows the CSF to move and perfuse through the brain more deeply than it does in wakeful states [5], optical stimulation (such as strobe lights) can instigate measurable CSF movement [6], and even deep breathing can create a significant pulsatile movement of our CSF [7].  In fact, some researchers suggest that respiration may be thought of as the “primary source of pulsatile CSF motion” [8]. 

The stimulation of movement of our CSF via deep abdominal breathing provides a pathway through which we may have conscious control over our internal CSF movement.  Through intentional deep breathing we may have a pathway to boost brain healing via CSF flushing, delivery of nutrients and oxygen, and clearing of metabolic waste.  Therefore it would be incredibly interesting to see studies on the use of deep abdominal breathing to support brain health and healing, to see if it may provide a novel pathway to support brain recovery that is within our conscious control. 

Our glymphatic system (driven by CSF flow) is most active during sleep [9] with CSF perfusing the brain best during non-rem sleep [10, 11] which may be one reason why brain rest, with low stimulation and a focus on obtaining deep restorative sleep, is recommended after brain injury [12].

While improved CSF movement may be one reason sleep is so crucial to brain health and healing, the opposite also may also be true — that decreased CSF movement may contribute to or be a potential cause of brain neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers, and degenerative eye disorders, such as glaucoma [13].  Reduced sleep duration (which likewise reduces the time available for movement of CSF throughout the brain during sleep) has been linked with short term brain issues such as decreased short term memory, cognitive decline, and migraine [14, 15, 16] to long term progression of organic brain disease like Alzheimers Disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis and other neurodegenerative disorders [17, 18, 19, 20].  

Novel research on CSF movement reveals that it may even be used as a battery — harvesting power from CSF fluctuations to power neural implants [21].  Is our CSF a nutritive battery, just waiting for us to learn how to optimize its use through motion?  Is it possible that in addition to optimizing sleep to help protect brain health we can and should begin to optimize CSF movement via deep breathing, in order to further protect our brain even while we are awake? 

One recent study showed that intentional, slow breathing decreased blood biomarkers of Alzheimers disease — decreasing plasma amyloid beta and tau levels in only 4 weeks [22].  Another study found that a breathing program significantly improved cognitive performance in elderly study participants [23]. Could the mechanism of action of these breath work benefits come from boosted CSF flow?

I hope many more future studies include an examination of the potential impact that deep breathing might have in stimulating brain healing to help elucidate if increased CSF movement in the central nervous system improves outcome after brain injury and/or may help decrease onset or delay progression of neurodegenerative diseases.   

 

 

 

 

Electrical Grounding Of Cerebrospinal Fluid

No matter how our CSF supports brain function and health, grounding may be a unique and novel pathway to help exponentially magnify these benefits.  Because our CSF is an electrolytic, fully conductive solution, it provides instantaneous grounding to our entire central nervous system whenever our body is grounded.  

Grounding is simply touching the earth directly to put the body into a healing state.  Decades of research are beginning to show just how healing grounding is [24].  Studies on the neuromodulative role of grounding have shown that grounding immediately shifts brains waves, boosting alpha brain wave patterns on EEG within milliseconds [25], deepens sleep [26] and significantly improves mood [27].  These results suggest that connecting our electrical central nervous system with the earth’s electrical field can have such a supportive impact on our brain it not only supports brain function it can even improve our outlook and how we feel.

Evolutionarily, it seems to be well beyond chance that our planet pulses out with an electrical heartbeat — known as the Schumann Resonance — which creates an electrical field that our conductive bodies function optimally in [28].  The center of our cognition and our entire consciousness as we know it — our brain and the electrical fluid it’s protectively supported in — all operate in the healing electrical fields that our planet produces. 

Researchers have found significant coherence between the electrical activity of our planet and the electrical activity of the human brain in real time EEG/EFL studies [29].  This electrical activity between the planet and our brain is synchronized to such a magnitude, amplitude and frequency that it allows for information processing to occur — a real time “ping” from the planet to our human brains [30].  

Going one step further and making conductive contact with the earth — touching the surface of the planet directly with the body, even just a fingertip or a toe — grounds our electrical system and provides a host of health benefits to our electrical function.  Grounding improves heart rate variability (HRV) [31], increases blood perfusion [32] decreases blood viscosity [33] support muscles contraction during exertion [34, 35, 36] instantaneously shifts brain wave patterns and reduces ambient stress levels [37] along with supporting deeper, more restorative sleep at night [38], improving sleep quality [39] and optimizing our body’s autonomic nervous system function through vagal tone support [40].

Because we know that the CSF is an electrolytic bath that provides the ideal environment for our brain to function in, it would be exceedingly interesting to begin to study the impact that grounded CSF has on the health and function of the human brain verse non-grounded CSF.

Might the electrical activity of the earth even impact the movement of pulsatile activity of our CSF through our brains?  The Schumann frequency is a pulsatile rhythm of DC electrical activity that is often described as the earth’s double heartbeat because of its dual oscillations [41]. 

If our breathing, our heartbeat, and even the brain waves of our sleeping brain allow the CSF to increase the flow of nutrients, oxygen and hormones and the removal of metabolic waste, effectively rinsing out our brains to optimize it’s function, it makes intuitive sense to me that the earth’s pulsating electrical field would also have an active hand in encouraging this flow and be at least in part the mechanism of action behind why grounding puts the human body in such a healing state.  

I highly encourage future research into the healing nature of our CSF to include an examination of it’s groundable electrical, conductive properties as well as an examination of any impact the earth’s pulsatile electrical field may have on the pulsatile movement of CSF within our own brains.  

 

 

 

References:

1.  Lehtinen MK, Zappaterra MW, Chen X, Yang YJ, Hill AD, Lun M, Maynard T, Gonzalez D, Kim S, Ye P, D’Ercole AJ, Wong ET, LaMantia AS, Walsh CA. The cerebrospinal fluid provides a proliferative niche for neural progenitor cells. Neuron. 2011 Mar 10;69(5):893-905. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.01.023. PMID: 21382550; PMCID: PMC3085909.

2.  Zappaterra MW, Lehtinen MK. The cerebrospinal fluid: regulator of neurogenesis, behavior, and beyond. Cell Mol Life Sci. 2012 Sep;69(17):2863-78. doi: 10.1007/s00018-012-0957-x. Epub 2012 Mar 14. PMID: 22415326; PMCID: PMC3856656.

3.  Rasmussen MK, Mestre H, Nedergaard M. Fluid transport in the brain. Physiol Rev. 2022 Apr 1;102(2):1025-1151. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00031.2020. Epub 2021 May 5. PMID: 33949874; PMCID: PMC8897154.

4.  Yildiz S, Thyagaraj S, Jin N, Zhong X, Heidari Pahlavian S, Martin BA, Loth F, Oshinski J, Sabra KG. Quantifying the influence of respiration and cardiac pulsations on cerebrospinal fluid dynamics using real-time phase-contrast MRI. J Magn Reson Imaging. 2017 Aug;46(2):431-439. doi: 10.1002/jmri.25591. Epub 2017 Feb 2. PMID: 28152239.

5.  Fultz NE, Bonmassar G, Setsompop K, Stickgold RA, Rosen BR, Polimeni JR, Lewis LD. Coupled electrophysiological, hemodynamic, and cerebrospinal fluid oscillations in human sleep. Science. 2019 Nov 1;366(6465):628-631. doi: 10.1126/science.aax5440. PMID: 31672896; PMCID: PMC7309589.

6.  Williams SD, Setzer B, Fultz NE, Valdiviezo Z, Tacugue N, Diamandis Z, et al. (2023) Neural activity induced by sensory stimulation can drive large-scale cerebrospinal fluid flow during wakefulness in humans. PLoS Biol 21(3): e3002035.

7.  Laganà MM, Di Tella S, Ferrari F, Pelizzari L, Cazzoli M, Alperin N, Jin N, Zacà D, Baselli G, Baglio F. Blood and cerebrospinal fluid flow oscillations measured with real-time phase-contrast MRI: breathing mode matters. Fluids Barriers CNS. 2022 Dec 14;19(1):100. doi: 10.1186/s12987-022-00394-0. PMID: 36517859; PMCID: PMC9749305.

8.  Yildiz S, Grinstead J, Hildebrand A, Oshinski J, Rooney WD, Lim MM, Oken B. Immediate impact of yogic breathing on pulsatile cerebrospinal fluid dynamics. Sci Rep. 2022 Jun 28;12(1):10894. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-15034-8. PMID: 35764793; PMCID: PMC9240010.

9. Chong PLH, Garic D, Shen MD, Lundgaard I, Schwichtenberg AJ. Sleep, cerebrospinal fluid, and the glymphatic system: A systematic review. Sleep Med Rev. 2022 Feb;61:101572. doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2021.101572. Epub 2021 Nov 18. PMID: 34902819; PMCID: PMC8821419.

10.  15.  Xie L, Kang H, Xu Q, Chen MJ, Liao Y, Thiyagarajan M, O’Donnell J, Christensen DJ, Nicholson C, Iliff JJ, Takano T, Deane R, Nedergaard M. Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain. Science. 2013 Oct 18;342(6156):373-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1241224. PMID: 24136970; PMCID: PMC3880190.

11.  Grubb S, Lauritzen M. Deep sleep drives brain fluid oscillations. Science. 2019 Nov 1;366(6465):572-573. doi: 10.1126/science.aaz5191. PMID: 31672882.

12.  Butler T, Zhou L, Ozsahin I, Wang XH, Garetti J, Zetterberg H, Blennow K, Jamison K, de Leon MJ, Li Y, Kuceyeski A, Shah SA. Glymphatic clearance estimated using diffusion tensor imaging along perivascular spaces is reduced after traumatic brain injury and correlates with plasma neurofilament light, a biomarker of injury severity. Brain Commun. 2023 Apr 25;5(3):fcad134. doi: 10.1093/braincomms/fcad134. PMID: 37188222; PMCID: PMC10176239.

13. Sheng J, Li Q, Liu T, Wang X. Cerebrospinal fluid dynamics along the optic nerve. Front Neurol. 2022 Aug 15;13:931523. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2022.931523. PMID: 36046631; PMCID: PMC9420993.

14.  18. Krause AJ, Simon EB, Mander BA, Greer SM, Saletin JM, Goldstein-Piekarski AN, Walker MP. The sleep-deprived human brain. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2017 Jul;18(7):404-418. doi: 10.1038/nrn.2017.55. Epub 2017 May 18. PMID: 28515433; PMCID: PMC6143346.

15. Ma, Y., Liang, L., Zheng, F., Shi, L., Zhong, B., & Xie, W. (2020). Association Between Sleep Duration and Cognitive Decline. JAMA network open, 3(9), e2013573.

16. Lin, Y. K., Lin, G. Y., Lee, J. T., Lee, M. S., Tsai, C. K., Hsu, Y. W., Lin, Y. Z., Tsai, Y. C., & Yang, F. C. (2016). Associations Between Sleep Quality and Migraine Frequency: A Cross-Sectional Case-Control Study. Medicine, 95(17), e3554.

17. Wang C, Holtzman DM. Bidirectional relationship between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease: role of amyloid, tau, and other factors. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2020 Jan;45(1):104-120. doi: 10.1038/s41386-019-0478-5. Epub 2019 Aug 13. PMID: 31408876; PMCID: PMC6879647.

18.  Peters ME, Lyketsos CG. The glymphatic system’s role in traumatic brain injury-related neurodegeneration. Mol Psychiatry. 2023 Apr 25. doi: 10.1038/s41380-023-02070-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 37185960.

19.  Boespflug EL, Iliff JJ. The Emerging Relationship Between Interstitial Fluid-Cerebrospinal Fluid Exchange, Amyloid-β, and Sleep. Biol Psychiatry. 2018 Feb 15;83(4):328-336. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.11.031. Epub 2017 Dec 7. PMID: 29279202; PMCID: PMC5767516.

20.  Bishir M, Bhat A, Essa MM, Ekpo O, Ihunwo AO, Veeraraghavan VP, Mohan SK, Mahalakshmi AM, Ray B, Tuladhar S, Chang S, Chidambaram SB, Sakharkar MK, Guillemin GJ, Qoronfleh MW, Ojcius DM. Sleep Deprivation and Neurological Disorders. Biomed Res Int. 2020 Nov 23;2020:5764017. doi: 10.1155/2020/5764017. PMID: 33381558; PMCID: PMC7755475.

21.  Beker, Levent & Benet, Arnau & Tayebi Meybodi, Ali & Eovino, Benjamin & Pisano, Albert & Lin, Liwei. (2017). Energy harvesting from cerebrospinal fluid pressure fluctuations for self-powered neural implants. Biomedical Microdevices. 19. 10.1007/s10544-017-0176-1. 

22. Min, J., Rouanet, J., Martini, A.C. et al. Modulating heart rate oscillation affects plasma amyloid beta and tau levels in younger and older adults. Sci Rep 13, 3967 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30167-0

23.  Ferreira L, Tanaka K, Santos-Galduróz RF, Galduróz JC. Respiratory training as strategy to prevent cognitive decline in aging: a randomized controlled trial. Clin Interv Aging. 2015 Mar 20;10:593-603. doi: 10.2147/CIA.S79560. PMID: 25848235; PMCID: PMC4374650.

24.  Koniver L.  Practical applications of grounding to support health. Biomedical Journal, 2023, Volume 46, Issue 1, Pages 41-47, ISSN 2319-4170, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bj.2022.12.001.

25.  Sokal P, Sokal K. The neuromodulative role of earthing. Med Hypotheses. 2011 Nov;77(5):824-6. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2011.07.046. PMID: 21856083.

26.  M. Ghaly and D. Teplitz, “The biologic effects of grounding the human body during sleep as measured by cortisol levels and subjective reporting of sleep, pain, and stress,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 767–776, 2004.

27. Chevalier G. The effect of grounding the human body on mood. Psychol Rep. 2015 Apr;116(2):534-42. doi: 10.2466/06.PR0.116k21w5. Epub 2015 Mar 6. PMID: 25748085.

28. Koniver L. Neurological Pathways Supported by Grounding. Open J Neurol Neurosci. 2023; 1(1): 1002

29.  Persinger, Michael A., and Kevin S. Saroka. “Human Quantitative Electroencephalographic and Schumann Resonance Exhibit Real-Time Coherence of Spectral Power Densities: Implications for Interactive Information Processing.” Journal of Signal and Information Processing, vol. 06, no. 02, 2015, pp. 153–164., https://doi.org/10.4236/jsip.2015.62015. 

30. Cherry, N.J. “Human Intelligence: The Brain, an Electromagnetic System Synchronised by the Schumann Resonance Signal.” Medical Hypotheses, vol. 60, no. 6, 2003, pp. 843–844., https://doi.org/10.1016/s0306-9877(03....   

31. Chevalier G, Sinatra ST. Emotional stress, heart rate variability, grounding, and improved autonomic tone: clinical applications. Integr Med 2011;10:3.

32. Chevalier G, Melvin G, Barsotti T. One-hour contact with the earth’s surface (grounding) improves inflammation and blood flowda randomized, double-blind, pilot study. Health 2015;7:1022e59.

33. Chevalier G, Sinatra ST, Oschman JL, Delany RM. Earthing (grounding) the human body reduces blood viscosityda major factor in cardiovascular disease. J Altern Complement Med 2013;19:102e10.

34. Brown R, Chevalier G. Grounding the human body during yoga exercise with a grounded yoga mat reduces blood viscosity. Open J Prev Med 2015;5:159e68.

35. Brown D, Chevalier G, Hill M. Pilot study on the effect of grounding on delayed-onset muscle soreness. J Altern Complement Med 2010;16:265e73.

36. Sokal P, Jastrze ̨ bski Z, Jaskulska E, Sokal K, Jastrze ̨ bska M, Radziminski L, et al. Differences in blood urea and creatinine concentrations in earthed and unearthed subjects during cycling exercise and recovery. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med 2013;2013:382643.

37. Sokal P, Sokal K. The neuromodulative role of earthing. Med Hypotheses 2011;77:824e6.

38. Ghaly M, Teplitz D. The biologic effects of grounding the human body during sleep as measured by cortisol levels and subjective reporting of sleep, pain, and stress. J Alternative Compl Med 2004;10:767e76.

39. Lin CH, Tseng ST, Chuang YC, Kuo CE, Chen NC. Grounding the body improves sleep quality in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease: a pilot study. Healthcare 2022;10:581.

40. Passie RA, Doheny KK, Gordin YB, Hinssen HC, Palmer CA. Electrical grounding improves vagal tone in preterm infants. Neonatol 2017;112:187e92.

41.  Benningfield, D. (2020), Studying Earth’s double electrical heartbeat, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO143519. Published on 04 May 2020.

The post A Super Easy Way To Support Your Brain Health That You Can Do Right Now appeared first on Intuition Physician.

How To Deal With Summer Bugs… Including The Dreaded Tick Bite

 

 

Ticks carrying the Lyme disease bacteria (Borrelia Burgdorferi) have been found in all 50 states, so don’t be fooled into thinking its only something that folks in the northeast have to be concerned with.

But as much as I detest ticks, I really don’t want you to limit or stop your healing practice of connecting to Mother Earth outside daily because of a fear of ticks.

To me, this healing practice of grounding is as crucial as eating or hydrating or breathing or wearing a seatbelt to stay healthy for an entire lifetime.

The earth has food, air, water, and conductive support all waiting to restore you back to full health. To read more about how the earth supports the conductive health of your body, you definitely want to read my book The Earth Prescription.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, instead of staying indoors, let’s dive into all of the things you can do proactively each time you go outside to prevent lyme disease.

Quite simply, preventing a tick bite in the first place is the single most important thing you can do to avoid Lyme disease. This is an area where you can really empower yourself to be completely aware and diligent so that you never ever need to fear being outside or let fear of ticks keep you from enjoying Mother Nature.

 

11 Ways To Prevent & Treat A Tick Bite:

 

 

1. Mow:

 

 

The easiest thing you can do is to keep your yard and outdoor living space trimmed, mowed low (don’t let grass grow long, ticks love long grass) and remove piles of leaves and other debris — this will automatically reduce your chances of having ticks in your yard.

 

 

 

Get Chickens:

Add a few free roaming chickens to your yard space and you will have a tick monitoring and disposal system that is practically self running!

Woot!

Chickens eat ticks and constantly scavenge for ticks and other pests that are harmful to humans… and you get to enjoy some delicious organic free range eggs to boost!

 

Add a fence:

Likewise, it’s important to ensure pets don’t bring ticks into your yard and home (which are one of the most common ways that humans get tick bites!) The best thing to do is ensure pets that live in the home with you do not roam in wooded areas.

Installing a fence or keeping pets confined only to yard areas that are mowed short is one of the single most important things you can do to decrease human exposure to Lyme.

 

 

Groom pets:

Daily brushing and inspecting the pet for ticks after time spent outside (before bringing your pets in to the home!) will help prevent ticks from catching a ride into your living space.

Keeping pets out of bedrooms and off of furniture during tick season (late spring, all summer & early fall) will decrease the chance that you or your family members will get a tick bite after a tick has dropped off a pet.

Talk to your veterinarian for more strategies on keeping ticks off of your family pet.

 

Use Cedar Oil as a natural tick deterrent:

Topically it’s so easy to holistically and naturally repel ticks… no toxic chemical required.

Simply spray exposed skin with cedar oil… cedar oil is safe, all natural and no nasty DEET or other toxic chemicals that cause neuronal cell death. Repels ticks as well as flying insects.

Spray directly on skin, pets, around doorways and porches and windows — safe to use directly on the skin.

This is my favorite tick deterrent spray and I love it so much and use it so often my daughter calls this cedar oil spray “the smell of my childhood.”  I love that!

 

 

Tick check:

Even with doing the first 5 tips, you still need to physically double check your body for ticks every time you are outside.

Throughout the day and prior to bathing, double check your body, groin, armpits, scalp, hair and clothing for ticks.

Going directly into a shower after spending time outside is the best way to make sure ticks don’t drop off into your home or stay attached to you long enough to transmit Lyme.

If you can detect a tick before it anchors on, you’ve just prevented transmission entirely. It’s worth it. I recommend you strip off clothing and place directly into the wash after working outside, then hop in a shower to wash up.

 

Tuck in, pony up:

Wear long sleeves and pants whenever possible to help keep ticks from reaching your skin… tucking in your shirt at the waist and if possible tucking pants legs into your socks.

Put long hair into a ponytail, bun, or even better: tucking it all up under a hat is a very easy way to cut your risk of tick bites dramatically because ticks love to grab onto long hair when walking through long grasses and wooded areas.

 

 

Use A Dryer:

Simply running your clothes, bedding, towels, garden gloves, hiking boots, etc… through your dryer will kill any ticks you don’t see. All it takes is one hour tumbling on high heat (or 90 min on low heat) and even fabrics or shoes that you can’t wash or get wet can still have all the ticks removed and killed just by a spin through your dryer.

And if you are on a vacation, especially vacations with hiking or lots of time spent outdoors or to wooded areas, try to stay in hotels or cabins with dryers… simply strip down and run your clothing and shoes through the dryer every time you return from exploring outside and you slash your risk of Lyme disease greatly.

Let your clothes take a tumble while you do a tick check and grab a shower and you have gone a long way to preventing Lyme disease entirely!

If prevention fails and you do have a tick bite from an infected tick, getting treated for Lyme disease immediately is the best thing you can do to prevent long term sequelae from becoming an issue.

 

 

 

But what if you are bitten by a tick?

 

It’s okay! Just follow these 3 steps to decrease your chance of contracting Lyme:

 

9. Remove the tick:

 

Simply gently and firmly remove the tick by the head with tweezers — as close to the skin as possible (not squeezing the body of the tick, which may help enable the bacteria to squirt into your bloodstream!) and most importantly: save the tick!

 

 

10.  Test the tick, so you know if it carried Lyme or not:

 

This can give you instant peace of mind! It is infinitely easier to get a tick tested than wait and see if you become infected with Lyme.

First of all, human Lyme tests can be inaccurate and delay prompt treatment. Second, the myriad of symptoms for Lyme disease is a great mimicker for hundreds of other illnesses and there is no one reliable way to diagnose Lyme through symptoms. And lastly, Lyme treatments become much less effective as time goes on.  So submitting a tick for testing (just place it in a plastic ziplock bag with a moist paper towel) and giving it to your local physician or sending it off to be tested yourself by Ticknology is the best way to know if you need Lyme prevention treatment or not.

This is a service that allows you to send a tick directly to a lab and have results emailed back to you within three days — awesome for getting quick answers without any delay for treatment and doesn’t even need to involve a visit to your family doctor.

Although you may prefer to go directly to your family physician, who can give you an antibiotic to have on hand to take immediately if the results do come back positive for Lyme, having direct access to tick testing services puts you in control of your own healthcare, which I am all for.

It’s important to note that less than half of folks who contract Lyme disease actually have the classic bulls eye rash reaction at the bite site. Of course if you see a bullseye rash, report this immediately to your physician. But other symptoms of Lyme are more insidious and actually more common… symptoms like: fever, joint pain or swelling, muscle pain and weakness, irritability, headache, mood changes, increased susceptibility to other infections (as your immune system compromises over time) and most common: fatigue.

So testing a tick and getting immediate antibiotic treatment for Lyme is the best thing you can do to prevent chasing vague symptoms like fatigue and headache for years to come.

 

 

11. Boost Your Immune System:

 

What can you do while you wait for tick test results?

Starting some immune boosting supplements is always a good idea after a tick bite while you are waiting for tick test results.

My favorite is Vit D, Vit C, Probiotics, and an immune boosting supplement called Quick Defense… all included in my Tick Treatment Protocol, right here.  

Go ahead and boost your immunity with supplements right after any suspected exposure and you will have given yourself a head start in treating Lyme before it’s even had time to express symptoms.  You may want to have these items on hand to take the minute you discover a tick bite:

Tick Treatment Protocol

 

 

 

 

Other biting insects

 

What about annoying mosquitos and other insects that irritate us — and bite us — all summer long? When I head outside I use a two pronged approach:

 

1. Apply All Natural Cedar Oil To Skin:

 

As recommended above, not only is cedar oil a great tick deterrent but it’s fabulous for all flying and biting insects!  Safe to spray directly on skin, pets, around doorways and porches and windows, and anywhere inside or outside of your home that bugs tend to congregate.  Child and pet friendly. I advise my patients to use cedar oil on all exposed skin surfaces whenever going outdoors to get grounded.

Here is the one I use.

 

2.  Burn Sage Or Incense Outside:

 

I like to light a few incense sticks or a sage stick and keep it burning on my outdoor patio area while I eat dinner outside to deter flying insects from buzzing around my food and spoiling the meal!

Or, as I suggest in this incredibly old blog post I wrote almost 15 years ago for you — throw a smudge stick of dried sage into your summer bonfire to help keep the mosquitoes away all night!

 

 

 

 

 

Treating A Bite:

 

What to do if you are bitten by a mosquito or ant or any other bug, and to treat other scrapes and scratches you might get this summer?

You might already know I love honey to ease seasonal allergy symptoms… if you haven’t read my article on that, you can read my blog post on defeating spring allergies holistically right here.

But in addition to treating spring allergies, I love honey for wound healing as well!

Summer is filled with little cuts and scrapes and bites. So it’s the perfect time to recognize the power of honey. Findings published in 2012 in the International Wound Journal show that when raw honey was used on all types of wounds, it:

promoted healingminimized necrosisminimized the amount of skin that sloughed off the woundreduced wound sizedecreased affected area around wound

Not only did it help speed wound healing, but it made a measurable improvement in over 84% of wounds!!!! We are talking:

post operative woundsgeneral skin woundsinfectionsburnsulcerspressure sores and more!

Honey has well-known antimicrobial benefits, doesn’t spoil, is easy to have on hand and is portable (no refrigeration required!) so it really makes perfect sense to use as a secondary wound dressing in children older than 12 months old. To use honey for wound healing:

First be sure to flush out any wound with lots of water… for a long period of time… 2 minutes ideally.Then, depending on wound type you may consider a topical antihistamine, anti-inflammatory, or antibacterial dressing, and then honey.For minor wounds, use this approach of deep cleansing and then raw honey as a dressing, but be sure to have any deeper or larger wounds evaluated by a physician.

Because honey is so safe and so effective for so many different types of wounds… and because it speeds healing and decreases the amount of skin that is affected by the wound, I feel that honey ultimately will be shown to reduce the appearance of scarring as well.

So for post operative wounds or acne infections or stretch marks or injuries that you want to minimize scarring in… bring on the raw honey!  Sweet news, indeed!

 

 

 

 

Now that you are armed with a ton of very effective holistic tips on avoiding tick bites and decreasing your chance of developing Lyme disease (plus a few tips to help speed recovery if you do get a bite!)… it’s time to wish you a very very happy spring and summer full of grounding!!!

Keep going outside and enjoy the beautiful display that Mother Earth brings us each spring without fear!

xoxo,Laura Koniver MD

 

The post How To Deal With Summer Bugs… Including The Dreaded Tick Bite appeared first on Intuition Physician.

My 6 Favorite Ways To Protect Your Skin While You Enjoy The Sun

 

 

As we slide towards summer, I’d love to encourage you to get outside and get grounded to our earth as much as possible. This brings up concerns about skin cancer and photo aging effects from sun exposure — but don’t let that stop you from going outside. Here’s why:

A large medical study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine found that folks who avoided sun exposure actually had a shorter life span… with a decreased life expectancy that was shorter than even heavy smokers who bathed in the sun.

What?!?! Yes.

This was a huge study looked at almost 30,000 participants over a span of 20 years. Researchers tracked health outcomes and life span over two decades and found that even when smoking was factored in, the life span of those who avoided the sun was more than 2 years shorter than heavy smokers who got the highest amount of sun exposure!!!

As hard as it is to believe, even heavy smokers who soaked in the sun their whole life outlived non-smokers who avoided sun exposure… by years!

 

 

 

Participants who avoided the sun had higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and pulmonary disease.

And the results were dose-specific… meaning that the benefits of increased life expectancy with sun exposure went up directly in correlation to the amount of sun exposure.

Though risk of skin cancer did increase with increased sun exposure, the patients that had skin cancer occur in relation to sun exposure actually had a better long-term prognosis. This on top of recent research revealing that melanomas that occur in patients with low Vitamin D actually have more malignantly aggressive melanoma and their prognosis is worse than those with adequate Vit D from sun exposure.

These results show that avoiding the sun is a “risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking” directly quoting the medical report.

So the verdict: under-exposure to the sun is actually dangerous.

Turns out, longer time in the sun correlates with a longer life span. It’s that simple.

 

 

 

 

 

Smoking and inactivity (or prolonged sitting) have long been known to be huge lifestyle indicators of poor long term health… and now we can add a third: avoiding sun exposure.

You know that I never ever ever present negative medical information without giving you tons of positive solutions!!  So you know if I am bringing it up on my blog here, then there are TONS of things you can do to make your time out in the sunshine safer for your skin, while boosting your whole-body disease prevention and prolonging your life span!

Today I want to share with you why sunscreen is not my number one recommendation for prevention of skin cancer. Nor is it my second recommendation either.  I prefer to avoid peak sun hours and use sun protective clothing like rashguards, hats and sunglasses.

Why?

Many chemicals in sunscreen (like the oils, petroleum products, oxybenzone, avobenzone, formaldehyde, retinyl palmitate, etc… found in most chemical sunscreens) have been shown to actually increase cancer rates.On top of that, many of the chemicals in chemical blocking sunscreens are shown to disrupt our natural hormone pathways. In fact, oxybenzone, the most common chemical sunscreen used, has been shown to disrupt hormones and is not even recommended for use in children. That’s right… look at all the “kid’s formula” sunscreens out there… they generally contain oxybenzone. This chemical not only is a hormone-disruptor, but after applying to your skin it becomes internally absorbed within minutes. Which means children, who are still growing, are getting systemic doses of hormone-disrupting oxybenzone circulating through their bodies on a daily basis all summer long. Yuck.More bad news… mineral based sunscreens are increasingly being made in nano-sized particles so that they blend into the skin better… and unfortunately, this means they can potentially be absorbed systemically as well. Even mineral based sunscreens like zinc or titanium dioxide are potentially toxic if they enter your body, so you want to be sure your product does not use nanoparticles.

 

And in fact, a study (presented at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting on Nov 19, 2016) shows that sunscreen did not reduce melanoma risk.

466 children (enrolled in the study at age 6) were followed for almost a decade (through age 15) with a detailed report of annual sun exposure and sunscreen use as well as annual skin exams, which identified and documented skin lesions.This is the longest term study on new mole development ever conducted.Unfortunately, the results reveal that there was no association between sunscreen use and subsequent development of new pigmented lesions.The study conclusion: sunscreen use did not protect from or decrease the likelihood of developing pigmented moles (a marker of melanoma risk) at all.

 

 

 

To understand why the most common sunscreens (which are chemical based) are not preventing new pigmented lesions from arising, you have to understand how chemical sunscreens work:

Chemical sunscreens (such as oxybenzone, octinoxate, octisalate and avobenzone) are absorbed into your skin and attempt to neutralize the UV rays once they penetrate your cells, by chemically reacting to the UV radiation.This means that the UV exposure is already reaching into your living tissues, and as a physician I don’t see how this can be cancer preventive.Your cells are already exposed to the UV radiation (including your cell’s DNA) by the time it is being neutralized.Physically blocking sunscreens, such as titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, are different. These physically sit on top of the skin and literally block UV radiation from even reaching your skin.Physically blocking sunscreens is the type of sun protection you want, and this is the only type of sunscreen I will carry in my pharmacy for you — you can find those here.

The Environmental Working Group agrees — sunscreen should be a last resort to protect against UV exposures outside. Read their full sunscreen guide here.

Because you don’t want to avoid sun exposure (which decreases your life span) and you don’t want to rely solely on sunscreen to reduce your cancer risk (since it doesn’t anyway…) today I’ve compiled a list of 6 awesome ways to stay protected in the sun in ways that will truly protect you:

 

Top 6 Things You Can Do To Decrease Your Skin Cancer Risk:

 

 

 

 

1. Avoid Peak Sun Hours:

 

The most important #1 way to protect from ultraviolet exposure is to avoid the sun during the peak UV hours in mid-day. There was a huge medical study that backs this up… Sunscreen was third in order of most effective ways to protect yourself from sun damage and skin cancers.

The ultimate solution, when possible, is sun avoidance during peak sun hours (10AM — 4PM) — this is infinitely better than any sun protection. You want to get some incidental sun exposure on some exposed skin daily, but to decrease the UV intensity you want that exposure to be in the earlier AM or later PM hours!

I love to recommend that folks get out in the early morning light — grounded of course — to start their day with light exposure (which helps boost sleep that night, boosts immune function, decreases pain, even boost libdo!) and to get a Vit D boost from indirect sun exposures, as well as to get a grounding boost (which helps every organ system in their body function better, & even gives them a mood boost to start their day on the right foot!) If all you can do is head outside with a cup of coffee and touch a leaf on a tree, stand on a patch of sidewalk, or sit on their front door step while they drink their morning brew… that’s perfect.

Then again, after dinner, shoot for another 10 minute or longer grounding session, an after dinner walk, or even eat dinner directly outside (grounded of course!) for another boost of indirect sunlight.

Try 10 minutes in the AM and 10 minutes in the PM for a week and see how noticeably your wellness blooms.

 

 

2. Wear UV Protective Clothing, Hats and Sunglasses:

 

The second best way to protect from the sun, if you are going out in the peak hours, is UV protective clothing. Rash guards, hats, sunglasses.

Be certain to protect your eyes by wearing UV protective sunglasses, dear reader! UV exposure is one of the leading causes of lens opacity (cataracts) as you age. You can prevent this by diligently protecting your eyes.

A hat will shade most of your face and your ears, and a rash guard can protect shoulders while you are outside getting grounded on the beach, working in your garden, doing yard work, or spending a little time with your kids or your pet outside in the fresh air.

 

 

 

 

3. Use Only Physically Blocking, Non-Nano Sized Sunscreens:

 

As talked about above, a non-nanosized, non-chemical based sunscreen is the only thing I will put on my own face every single day.

Here is my Skin Repair Protocol in my online pharmacy — in it I have listed my favorite stick, lotion and spray sunscreens that I personally use and recommend to my patients.

I also list the liquid tinted moisturizer that I use (instead of foundation) that contains 20% zinc oxide to protect my face and neck every single day of the year (even in winter):

 

Skin Repair Protocol

 

 

4. Take Curcumin To Protect Against Melanoma:

 

Did you know that Curcumin actually kills cancer cells in laboratory studies and has been specifically shown to target and kill melanoma cancer cells?

Read this study published in the International Journal of Cancer in October 2016 for a good overview on what we know about curcumin and melanoma so far.

If you want to add the anti-cancer benefits of curcumin to your health regime (which I highly recommend if you have any personal or family history of melanoma or even if you just have a history of intense sun exposure) I recommend taking a pharmacy grade supplement that couples a 500 mg dose of curcumin with bioperine to help increase the bioavailablility and absorption of the curcumin.

The one I listed in my Skin Repair Protocol here is my favorite:

Skin Repair Protocol

 

 

 

 

5. Use Vitamin B3 to decrease all other forms of skin cancer:

 

Clear evidence that a simple vitamin can be cancer preventive: Vitamin B3 dramatically reduces skin cancer rates.

Presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2015 Annual Meeting in May 2014, Vitamin B3 has been shown to be a safe, effective way to reduce your risk of recurrent skin cancer.

Researchers looked at over 380 patients with a prior history of non-melanoma skin cancers, giving half nicotinamide supplements and half a placebo, and followed them for a year. They found the patients in the Vitamin B3 group had a quarter less skin cancers total (a 23% decrease) than control patients:

Basal cell occurrence decreased by 20%Squamous Cell Carcinoma decreased by 30%Actinic Keratosis decreased by 13%

Niacinamide (Vit B3, also known as Nicotinamide) enhances DNA repair in skin cells damaged by UV light, as well as boosts the immune system and prevents the suppression of immunity by ultraviolet radiation. (Nicotinamide has other benefits as well, including preliminary studies showing a boost in cognition… helping to restore cognition in Alzheimers!)

So… if you have a history of serious sun exposure?

Or a history of previous skin cancers?

Or you just want less unsightly actinic keretosis popping up in the future?

Vitamin B 3 offers 100% all natural holistic chemo-prevention! Vitamin B is safe, inexpensive, proven. Find my favorite Vitamin B3 and Curcumin supplements together in my Skin Repair Protocol, here.

 

Skin Repair Protocol

 

 

 

 

6. Eat fruits and veggies daily, especially during the summer:

 

Medical studies have shown that eating foods rich in carotenoids (like ) and lycopene (like tomatoes) have a photo protective effect in human skin, and have even been shown to cut the number of tumors from UV light exposure on mice significantly… actually slashing the tumor count in half!

Foods to eat daily that not only provide this photoprotection to decrease skin cancer risk, but also to protect against premature aging as well, include:

squashcarrotsgrapefruitorangesapricotsasparaguscantaloupemangoesnectarinespeachessweet potatoestomatoeswatermelonand sweet red peppers

 

 

 

 

Enjoy that life giving, mood boosting, beautifully warm radiant sunshine this spring & summer, but do it in a way that protects your skin from too much exposure:

Try to avoid peak hours of sun exposure, going out in morning and evening hours when possibleWear a hat, sunglasses and/or rash guards whenever possibleAvoid toxic chemical sunscreens and use physical sunscreens insteadTake curcumin and vit B3 supplements to decrease skin cancer riskEat fruits and veggies high in antioxidants routinely to nourish your skin from the inside out& while you are at it, stay well hydrated too, drinking water before, during and after sun exposure (more on this soon!)

 

In an upcoming blog I’ll be telling you how to naturally protect against other spring and summer health concerns, like what to do if you get a tick bite!

So if you have had this article forwarded to you, be sure to sign up here by entering your email to receive my uplifting weekly newsletter so you don’t miss next week’s article.

And if you know someone who loves the sunshine and could use some uplifting holistic tips that will protect them, forward this email to them too!

 

Here’s to happy, healthy spring & summer days ahead…xoxox, Laura

 

The post My 6 Favorite Ways To Protect Your Skin While You Enjoy The Sun appeared first on Intuition Physician.

My Latest Painting On Letting Go Of Your Trauma Coping Mechanisms

 

 

I painted this because I, like all humans, have gone through heavy, life altering traumas.

And I, like all humans, have built up some impressive coping mechanisms to get me through.

But sometimes those coping mechanisms are no longer needed. Sometimes we forget that the storm might have actually passed.  We forget to check to see if it is still even raining.

So we walk in the dark heavy shadow of our walls and barriers, and we can’t even see the sun has started peeking out.

I had an image of myself, walking with my umbrella over my head to protect myself from life’s horrible storms.  I was so attached to my umbrella that I was walking with it casting a shadow about me, one so dark that I didn’t even know the sky was filled with beautiful colors, rainbows and sunrises and sunsets that I was missing through my trauma scars.

 

 

Trauma has such an impact over our health. Health is an expression of who we are and what we have gone through over our entire lifetime.  Our cells, organs, tissues, physical body are affected by traumatic experience that quite literally change how our body is able to function.

I’ve written previous blog posts highlighting this, how our body’s health is an expression of our emotional well being, in articles such as:

The Good News About Trauma RecoveryTrauma Changes The Health Of Your Body, But It’s ReversibleTrauma Increases Headache Risk 4-FoldOCD May Stem From Birth TraumaHeart Disease In Women As A Response To TraumaHow Grounding Quickly Reverses The Effect Trauma Has On Our HealthChildhood Trauma Is Scary, Here Are 3 Things That Can Help Your Child Be ResilientWhat Is Stress Sensitization? It’s The Reason This Pandemic Is Traumatizing Us All

 

What happens to us emotionally when we have trauma, what happens to us when we are under prolonged stress, what happens to us when we are betrayed, neglected, abandoned, sexually abused, or mistreated shows up in painful ways that you can’t ignore.

So we develop impressive coping mechanisms to survive trauma.  These coping mechanisms can save our life, but they can also become a burden.  Situations change, time goes on, nothing stays the same.

Even your physical body changes from head to toe.  In fact it not only changes, it renews every few years… all of your organs (except for one) regenerates, repairs, and optimizes on a continuous basis.

Some parts of your body are so fresh and new that they are only one day old… the cornea of your eye, for example. Your cornea can completely regenerate every 24 hours.Some parts are a little older… the lining of your intestines, for example, are about 3 days old.Your skin is about 1 month old.Your fingernails have completely grown out and replaced themselves in about 6 months.Your taste buds are only 10 days old when they get replaced.Your liver regenerates every 5 months.Your lungs are renewed every two years.Even your bones, the support system of your body, is on a 10 year replacement program.

 

When we meet a friend we have not seen for six months, there is not one molecule in his face which was there when we last saw him.”

— Harold Saxton Burr

 

There is only one organ system that sticks with you for your entire lifetime: your brain.  Nervous tissue is the slowest to repair, does not increase in cell quantity and unfortunately actually declines in cell quantity over time.

And because of this, what we learned from trauma, what we develop as a response to trauma, is still being run on autopilot in the control center of our brains.

So over time, years and decades later, the only thing that is still locked into place are the coping mechanisms that you must consciously release or they stay with you for the rest of your life.

This painting is a reminder to you to double check if you still need all of those coping skills.  Maybe you do.  But maybe you don’t.  It’s worth taking a look around to see.

 

 

I started by painting a dark background — the canvas that is laid for us when we experience a terrible, unwanted, life altering event that we have no control over.

 

 

On top of this, I over laid the colors of a beautiful storm ending, colors lighting up the sky after a storm starts to ease.

Of course the dark heavy colors of the storm are underneath, always underneath.  Not erased, never erased.  Still part of the new landscape, but even with that layer there, forever a part of us, the sky can still come up with some very impressive and very beautiful new colors.

 

 

Yet here we are, still holding tightly to that umbrella for protections.

The problem with holding tightly to that umbrella is that you miss everything around you right now — you miss the reality of the current moment lost in a dark shadow from the past, no longer connected to the present.

Well enough is enough.

Peek out from under the umbrella.

Test to see if you still need it.  There might just be a sky full of color over head.

 

 

This original canvas is the perfect reminder to remind yourself (or your loved ones, or your clients, or your patients) that sometimes we no longer need the umbrella.   It is a large, 30″ x 30″ original canvas painting, one of a kind (no prints will be made of this artwork.) framed in a custom hand built solid wood frame and signed by me.

For more details on this original artwork that I call After The Storm, hop over here.

oxoxoxo, Laura Koniver MD

 

The post My Latest Painting On Letting Go Of Your Trauma Coping Mechanisms appeared first on Intuition Physician.

A Mother’s Love Capable of Helping to Protect Your Health As An Adult

 

 

 

In honor of Mother’s Day this weekend, I want to share with you one of my all time favorite medical studies. It shows how a little TLC from your mom may actually help protect your health, well into adulthood.

Published in 2005 in Dialoges in Clinical Neuroscience, researchers found that the how much affection a mommy rat showed to her babies in their first week of life protected them from future stress later on in life — decreasing their stress response and even lowering stress hormone production.

Researchers compared two different types of mom rats, separating them into two groups by how much they licked and groomed their babies. Mom rats in the high affection group groomed and licked their offspring twice as much as the moms in the low affection group.

Following the rats behavior for the first week of life, and then examining what effect this had on the rat babies once they became adults, researchers found that the rats who had affectionate mothers for the first week of life actually decreased there reaction to stress as an adult — producing half as much stress hormones in response to stressful stimuli and buffering their reactivity to stressful conditions. Just one week of licking and grooming their babies had a profound impact on the health of the rat pup which lasted well into adulthood.

Not only that, but this behavior impacted the next generation of rats, because pups who were licked and groomed more during that first week of life grew up to lick and groom their own babies more as parents.

How does a few days of affection translate into future health resiliency?

Researchers found that the pups who were groomed twice as much as the pups who had less affectionate moms actually had epigenetic changes to their DNA, which modified how the DNA was expressed and as a result, lowered hormone production.

Obviously this is just a study in rats, but it’s fascinating that the ability of the mother to be affectionate subsequently affected the child’s DNA expression, reducing the amount of stress hormones that are released in the face of stress as adults.

 

 

 

 

We likely will never fully know how much parents can influence their child’s future health, but if you have a mom that was attentive and affectionate with you, send her this article and thank her on Mother’s Day.

And if you didn’t have a affectionate mom?

Epigenetic changes are completely reversible. So even if you have a high stress response, or even if you have a history of trauma, or even if you are so stressed out you have adrenal fatigue, these epigenetic changes can be reversed and healed. Which protects your health and the health of future generations.

If you had a stressful childhood or lack of consistently loving parenting, you may want to hop into my next Trauma Recovery Class to learn more about how to release trauma from your body (even if your own mom put it there!) to protect your future health by clicking here. 

Meanwhile, if you are a parent yourself, today I wanted to give you some quick tips on protecting the health of your own children and promoting well being for the rest of their lives.

And to my own mom, who was extremely attentive — thank you, I love you.

Because of her love I was able to navigate several highly traumatic experiences with resiliency… as well as shower my own two children with tons of love and affection, which in turn will impact their children’s health and their children’s children’s health, and on and on.

 

I cannot believe these two cuties are all grown up and my daughter just graduated college last weekend! Congrats Clarabelle!

 

Let’s give our children lots and lots of resources to find inner strength during health challenges… because setting an example of resilience during a crisis for your children now will benefit them for the rest of their lives, even during times when you may not be there to help.

Modeling resilience now will support them forever.  Here are other ways to protect their health…

 

10 Ways to Support Your Child’s Long Term Health:

 

 

 

 

1. Emphasize PLAY.

 

Play is a child’s therapy. Play is not only a relief and a respite from the seriousness that stress, illness, or trauma can bring abruptly into a child’s world, but it is a way to restore innocence. It’s a way to off-gas and release inner workings and thoughts and fears that the child doesn’t even consciously know they have yet!

Play is an avenue for healing.

Encourage play. Allow *inappropriate* play like laughter even on the saddest days, violent actions towards dolls and stuffed animals that might otherwise be macabre… during a crisis, children need to see that their favorite toys can get beaten down by life and still be there for them the next day.

Allow anger too — anger expressed can turn your child into a centered warrior, giving them inner strength when the anger is witnessed and allowed to flow — transforming a passive child desperately struggling to release fear into an empowered warrior ready for the next round.

As adults, we might find our way through illness by taking long showers or baths, working out until we reach pure physical exhaustion, crying until there are no tears left, praying and therapy and acupuncture and massage and millions of other ways…

For a child, the direct route to this is through play.

One of the best ways to keep your child healing through play is to play with them.  For help discovering your own play style and how it impacts your health too, read this article I wrote for you:

How To Discover Your Play Style, And Use It To Improve Your Health

 

 

 

 

2. Focus on POSSIBILITY for your child.

 

Illness, trauma, death, divorce… these outer circumstances may take certain choices away from your child and leave them with a feeling of not having any control over the situation. This results in DISEMPOWERMENT.

Disempowerment and lack of control is what makes trauma and illness so hard.

Sometimes it is not possible to give a promise or control outcomes in order to empower a child. Even if you can offer a choice or secure a certain outcome, this is only temporary relief anyway, because there will always be another crisis.

The healing doesn’t come from getting control back — control is (at best) an illusion. The healing comes from re-establishing POSSIBILITY!!!

Finding meaning, and even joy, by living in possibility and open ended wonderment is the healing mind-frame. Not the answer… the question.The questions are the healing.

 

What is possible?

What can I imagine?

What do I wonder?

What can I transform?

 

Re-establishing possibility and open ended thinking re-establishes health because it brings back HOPE.

Asking more then answering the questions in your life. Asking “I wonder?”  Can you think of the last day you spent asking more questions than answering questions?

For many of us, that day was way back in our childhood.

Keep this realm of possibility open for your child.

Keep the potential of any and every healing outcome within reach to your child by staying open to possibility.

 

 

 

 

 

3. Remind your child that they are a miracle.

 

 

“The child must know that they are a miracle… that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been… and until the end of the world there will not be, another like them.”

-Pablo Casals

 

I believe that with my whole heart, and I believe that is true for my children and that it is true for your children and that it is true for YOU.

And with that truth comes the knowing that each moment of your existence is precious and rare and valuable.

Remind your child of this by treating them in such a way that you witness their value in every moment… in sickness and in health… in joy and in pain… in tears and in laughter… in rest and at play.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Spend healing time in nature

 

The earth is perfectly suited for reminding your child that he or she is part of a bigger plan and that they are well supported for life here on this planet, that in fact the planet itself has a healing energy to give to them.

Touching the earth (grounding) supports the body’s ability to heal. I have a huge list of medical studies that reveal the healing power of grounding for you right here.

 

Grounding so important for children that I wrote and illustrated a children’s book about it, called From The Ground Up, available on my website and on Amazon.

This book can be an important healing tool that can set your child up for a lifetime of enhanced health by teaching them the value of spending time grounding.

Work even just a few minutes of outdoor grounding into their day, model for them touching the earth as a way to reset when you are not feeling your best, and you will have instilled in them a healing practice that will protect their health over the course of their entire lifetime.

 

Grounding isn’t just crucial for children, it’s crucial for their mama’s too.  For more on specific ways that grounding supports female health, hop over here to read this article I wrote for you:

Women Need Time In Nature To Reboot, Here’s Why

 

 

 

 

 

5. Spend healing time with animals

 

The comfort of an unconditionally loving pet can not be underestimated.  Let your child’s favorite pet sleep with them at night, lay on their sickbed with them, even take a bath with them!  And if they don’t have a pet, ask them if they’d like one. Watch their face light up.

Read more about how pets help protect our health in an article I wrote for you here:

Pets Boost Your Health For A Lifetime

 

 

 

 

6. Fill their world with music

 

Healing music has a way of opening us up to possibility. When the energy in a room gets heavy or dark or stagnant, bring new energy in with the beauty of sound.

Ask what your child would like to listen to or just begin by some gentle nature tunes like the kind used in massage therapist’s office… there is a reason this music is played, it helps the client relax and get into a healing, positive mind-frame!

 

 

 

 

 

7. Heal through art

 

Art has a way of letting you get out of your own worry and into your hands.

Many times, something you have no way of expressing or even formulating and idea about can be released through active use of your hands.

Especially for children who are facing a health crisis and are too sick to actively play or adventure or get out of the hospital or home, bringing art in (just like with music) is a way to give them a bit of play, a bit of fun, a bit of possibility back.

Modelling clay, paper and crayons, finger-paints in the bathtub… all are doing more than just giving your child something to do, it is giving your child a way to heal.

 

 

 

 

 

8. Be certain they are getting enough sleep.

 

Sleep time is healing time. Deep sleep gives the body time to repair on a different level than we can repair during activity.

Restorative sleep is crucial to the healing process.

Be sure your child is getting 10 or more hours of sleep, especially when they are facing an illness or a stressful life change.

Solid sleep allows the body to decrease inflammation, improve memory function, improve daytime stamina and decrease fatigue, increase attention span, regulate a health weight, lower stress, boost mood, and boost immune function… all key when you are fighting off illness.

 

And by the way, I am such a big fan of co-sleeping with babies and toddlers, especially those that are sick, that I wrote and illustrated a book about it for you.

You can find that here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. Know that your very presence in your child’s life transforms their future health.

 

YOU are a healing presence in your child’s life. Enjoy being that presence and that light for them.

During a crisis, simply your presence is enough.

It is more than enough.

Your consistency in their life is the rock upon which they draw strength, comfort, hope and yes… healing.

Continue to show your unwavering presence to your child through every health crisis they could possibly face and you show your child the power of unconditional love… the best medicine there is.

 

 

 

10. Read my free Parenting eBook

 

As a thank you to parent’s everywhere, I’ve made my parenting idea book completely free to download.

So for more ideas on how to nurture your child through stress and illness and raise them in vibrant Well Being, you can find this absolutely free Parenting Idea Book right here — I’ve written 160 pages full of ideas, information, and fun tools to nurture the fullest health potential of your child for a lifetime!

I hope you love it!

xoxox, Laura Koniver MD

 

 

Here I am pregnant with my son & watching my adorable one year old daughter as she naps… over 20 years ago!

 

The post A Mother’s Love Capable of Helping to Protect Your Health As An Adult appeared first on Intuition Physician.

Are Your Weight Struggles From Subclinical Hypothyroidism? Probably, Here’s Help

 

 

 

What to do if counting calories, exercising, and making the environmental changes I suggested last week are not making any difference to your metabolism?

What if you still feel sluggish, tired, and your weight just won’t budge?  It could be subclinical hypothryoidism and adrenal fatigue.  This super common condition is poorly understood and can literally simply be caused by prolonged stress.

Ask yourself: have you been through a stressful period recently?  Or have you been living under stress for a long period of time — months, years, even decades?  If so, focusing on boosting thyroid and adrenal function is going to be more helpful than trying diets and struggling over weight loss.  Stop thinking weight loss and start thinking adrenal repair.

It’s no secrete that stress affects your body from head to toe, and can have a tremendous impact on your weight.  Studies show that sress can cause changes in eating patterns and they also suggest that cortisol reactivity is one of the reasons why.  So instead of monitoring your eating, maybe what we should be monitoring is your cortisol and stress levels.

Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands and by supporting your adrenal health, you can normalize your cortisol levels. Stop the focus on weight and instead focus on reducing your body’s stress hormone output. In fact, releasing your weight struggle and embracing your adrenal repair instead may be the best way to stop unhealthy food consumption that is due to stress, which is what is triggering this change in the first place.

As I wrote about in this article here, feeling stress and shame over your weight is actually harmful… and unnecessary, when what we could be doing instead of stressing is nurturing. Nurturing your body, nurturing your adrenals, and relieving stress to naturally reset your eating patterns.

If you have been focusing on trying to control your food intake, maybe it’s time to stop beating yourself up over something that is actually being triggered by high levels of stress and high cortisol. I’d like to suggest that weight issues might be actually adrenal issues.

 

5 Tips for Healing Adrenal Fatigue & Boosting Thyroid:

 

 

 

1. Instead of reducing calories, reduce gut inflammation:

 

Eating foods that are inflammatory to your gut lining can cause leaky gut syndrome, and you might find new food sensitivities develop to foods that you had no problem eating before, and ultimately this can even result in hypothyroidism.

The main culprits?  Gluten, dairy, sugar.

All three are highly inflammatory to the body… gluten being the most inflammatory directly to the lining of the gut.  When you consume gluten, dairy and sugar while you are repairing adrenal fatigue… even if these foods would not normally bother you in any way… the small amount of sub-clinical inflammation that it triggers is enough for your body to increase the amount of antibodies it makes in response to the increased inflammation.

Blood markers for inflammation goes up, the body is on high alert for irritants, and you might find yourself getting heartburn when you normally wouldn’t, sensitive stomach to foods that normally don’t bother you, constipation or irritable bowel worse than ever, skin rashes and eczema and hives that you don’t normally have, even seasonal allergies getting worse by the year instead of better as your body is on higher alert than ever before!

All of this inflammatory response sets you up for easily triggering an autoimmune reaction — the antibodies circulating begin to attack your normal tissues, and in this case, where your energy levels are crashing, your body feels stuck in fight-or-flight mode, your food intake might be causing more cortisol to be required and your nutritional building blocks are absent, then the body wants to decrease it’s own metabolism in order to preserve energy for the long haul.

This results in the body using it’s own immunity to attack the thyroid.  Autoimmune hypothyroid is the number one form of thyroid disease.  Even if your thyroid labs appear within normal limits, if you have symptoms of hypothroidism with normal lab values, this is called subclinical hypothyroidism and is a real thing.  And because it’s real, you can actually heal from it.

Did you know that just the act of removing gluten from triggering gut inflammation can be enough to turn an early hypothyroid situation around? It’s true. Because it stops the cascade of inflaming the gut which produces antibodies which attack the thyroid.

And we can go even further than that… we can decrease all triggers (gluten, sugar, dairy) at least temporarily, while we are healing the adrenal glands, and we can restore balance to the gut lining by supplementing with probiotics, digestive enzymes and drinking aloe vera juice (shown to significantly help heal the gut lining!) and we can eat adrenal and thyroid supportive foods to help facilitate repair.

Now is also a good time, if you feel concerned about hypothyroid or if you are already being treated for it, to remember to get your TSH, thyroid antibodies, and reverse T3 checked and have any Rx thyroid medications optimized.

Symptoms of hypothyroid go right along with symptoms for adrenal fatigue because they are so interrelated.

Do these sound like you? Fatigue, weight gain, thinning hair, dry skin, constipation, depressed mood, and feeling cold all the time?

If so, double check your thyroid function by getting your thyroid labs taken with your local physician.

And whether you are requiring thyroid Rx medications or not, there are plenty of wonderful things you can do right now to turn your entire health around by addressing adrenal fatigue, healing your gut and decreasing gut inflammation and whole body inflammation, supporting your adrenal gland and your thyroid gland nutritionally, AND by introducing adrenal supportive supplements into your diet as well.

Let’s talk about those below, and also print out this hand shopping guide (by clicking the button below) to make implementing these changes easy:

 

Free Printable Shopping List

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2.  Take Supportive Supplements:

 

We can exponentially support the speed of our body’s recover from Adrenal Fatigue with high quality supplements. Most important during the repair process are herbs that directly support the adrenal glands, like ashwagandha and holy basil.

Although it’s absolutely possible to repair your adrenals without taking supplements, it’s super helpful to support your healing process nutritionally.  Contraindications to starting Adrenal Supportive Supplements like the ones I link to below are anyone currently taking prescription sedatives, drugs that treat Bipolar Disorder, participants who are or may become pregnant, and participants on immunosuppressants.

But for the vast majority of us, adding on supplements that boost our adrenal gland function, boost our thyroid function, and help calm and repair our digestion and gut lining are all very good ideas because they will exponentially speed repair and restore us to our innate health and energy levels more quickly!

My favorite adrenal supportive ingredients:

1. Ashwagandha: used for thousands of years in India, this ancient herb has a calming, anti-inflammatory, and immune boosting effect. Many medical studies prove the safety and statistical efficacy of this herb, which is why it is my top choice for adrenal repair.

2. Rhodiola: this herb is anxiolytic (decreases anxiety) increases mental clarity and boosts immunity

3. Holy Basil: this herb has been in use for over 5,000 years and is renowned for increasing energy, stabilizing mood, decreasing blood glucose levels and stabilizing blood sugar.

4.  Probiotics: shown in medical studies to decrease cortisol levels (read more about that here) and support mood (as I wrote about here) probiotics are a big help in restoring balance to the gut and decreasing whole body inflammation

5. Digestive enzymes: taken along with meals this helps the digestive process become easier and less inflammatory, less bloating, gas, pain and other symptoms of irritable bowel

6. Aloe vera juice: medically shown to help speed repair of the gut lining, I recommend drinking a beverage with aloe vera juice in it daily (at least 4 oz a day… add to any fruit juice or smoothie if you don’t want to drink it solo!)

7. L-glutamine: this one is a game changer. Not only does glutamine help repair the gut lining, but it also has the wonderful side effect of decreasing sugar cravings, carb cravings, even alcohol cravings! Right at a time when we are wanting to decrease our sugar consumption and switch from simple carbs like wheat and sugar over to more nutrient dense foods like healthy fats and proteins, taking an L-glutamine supplement can be a life saver. Here is a good article that guides you through the use of L- glutamine to decrease sugar cravings.

I’ve put all of these supplements, in the brands I trust and have found work the best, into one protocol that combines all of these awesome healing plan, waiting for you in my online dispensary here:

 

Adrenal Recovery Protocol

 

 

 

 

 

3.  Realize how much this affects how you feel:

 

The least understood thing about adrenal fatigue is that it has not just caused you to burn out of your cortisol, but it has also actually robbed you of the sex hormones that help you stay balanced and young and vibrant too.

In fact, did you know that repairing your adrenals is absolutely going to improve your mood, your metabolism and muscle tone, your hair and skin, even your boost your sex drive?  That’s because cortisol is made out of the same precursors that the sex hormones (like estrogen and testosterone) are made from.

So as your body uses more and more of the precursors trying to keep up with outputting more and more cortisol into your body, it literally steals these precursors away from your estrogen and testosterone production.  As a result, when your adrenals are strained and your cortisol has been over-produced for any length of time, your sex hormones decrease, your sex drive disappears, your skin and hair lose luster, your mood plummets, your muscle mass decreases and more — this goes for men and women alike.

Basically, adrenal fatigue makes you feel aged.

It accelerates the lowering of sex hormones, plummets mood, worsens PMS, hastens menopause and andropause, robs you of restorative sleep, and dampens your mood.

So being very very diligent about implementing the repair work outlined in this article can truly make such a difference that you feel ten years younger again. Or maybe even… better than you’ve ever felt before!  If you want to take a fun quiz to determine if you are in adrenal fatigue (and what stage of adrenal fatigue you would fit into) click the button below to take a free adrenal fatigue quiz I created for you:

 

Free Adrenal Fatigue Quiz

 

 

 

4. Keep track of your progress:

 

To help track your progress, print out this monthly mood and energy tracker to keep track of your improvement over the next few months. It is really crucial to track your sleep and daily rhythms so that you can see concrete evidence of change.  It’s too hard to contrast how you will feel in a few weeks with how you feel right now if you don’t have evidence in front of you of the changes. Tracking your progress will encourage you to keep on going!

On top of that, using a tracker helps remind you to stay in the new patterns that are so essential to this work, and keeps your targeted activity changes and sleep goals on your radar.  Just click the link below and print out as many copies as you need — one copy per month — and let’s begin tracking your healing progress today!

 

Free Printable Energy Tracker

 

 

 

 

 

5.  Join My Online Class That Just Started Today

 

The next thing I recommend you do — for tons more support on uplifting, natural ways to lose weight — is to join my Weight Release & Reset online class, which starts today!

Hop over here for more information and to reserve your spot.

 

“I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Weight Reset emails and videos! I looked forward to each and every day. Your class gave me so much hope!” – C.C.

“This was AWESOME!! I loved all the information — the medical studies to back it up and the daily reminders. Plus — I love that you can do this at your own pace. Thank you!” C.W.

“I was surprised at how many different things can affect your weight and when you talked about them in the class… it was like a bell went off.  I would definitely recommend the class to others” – S.G.

Together, we go over the 5 pillars of sustainable, feel-good weight loss.  One pillar a day for 5 days.  Simple and sweet.  I’ve based this course directly off of the medical literature and my 20 years of experience helping to support my patients with their weight loss goals, holistically and easily and with no stress.

You’d be surprised that your body naturally knows what weight is the perfect one for you, and it can sustain it at this perfect weight effortlessly once you naturally align your metabolism. I’ll show you how in a very non-threatening, supportive, uplifting way.  It’s not about being rigid or militant or hard on yourself, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. The harder you are on yourself, the harder it is to align with your healthiest version of you.

Release that struggle by understanding the things that sabotage weight loss and once you do, the weight releases, naturally.

Class starts today so of course today is the last day for you to sign up.  Snag your spot here and let me support you:

 

 

To your resilient, natural health!xoxox, Laura

 

 

 

PS:  If you’d like the information in this blog post in a PDF format, I turned it into a free ebook that you can download and save.  

Click the button below to order your free copy of my Adrenal Fatigue eBook… it will be instantly emailed directly to you, to keep forever, and please share it freely:

 

 

The post Are Your Weight Struggles From Subclinical Hypothyroidism? Probably, Here’s Help appeared first on Intuition Physician.

How Our Environment Can Cause Weight Gain & What You Can Do About It

 

Although the traditional approach to weight loss focuses on calories in vs. calories burned, we are starting to become more and more aware about how our environment actually impacts our weight.  There are many contributing factors, well beyond diet and exercise, that cause significant issues in our metabolism.

In fact, the environment has such an impact on our weight that there is an entire category of environmental chemicals that are now considered obesogens — chemicals directly responsible for contributing to obesity.  Obesogens increase fat has, modify our basal metabolic rate, alter our gut microbiota, promote chronic inflammation, interfere with glucose metabolism, and cause epigenetic changes that impact our health, including our weight.

The good news about this is that means there are other things you can do, well beyond focusing on what food you eat and what exercises you do, that can make a measurable impact on your health and on your weight, and I’m here to help outline them for you today.  If you are sick of focusing on calorie restriction to lose weight, if you are sick of focusing on exercising to lose weight, this article is for you.

Here is a round up of 7 things you can do to make losing weight, or maintaining your healthiest metabolic set point, that have nothing to do with calories in vs. calories out.

Here we go:

 

10 Ways To Make Weight Loss Easier:

 

 

 

 

 

1. Stop eating or drinking from plastic.

 

Phthalates are found in plastics, found in your water bottles, even found in the coating on pills we ingest (what???  These are medications we are taking to try to improve our health, and they are putting phthalates into our bodies — yuck) and they disrupt our hormones and contribute to weight gain.  12 different medical studies found that the concentrations of phthalates in our bodies was linked to weight gain and central abdominal obesity.   Other obesogens include BPA, PCBs, DDT, PAHs and more — a good review of these studies can be found in this medical article, published in Feb 2022.

What to do about it?

Skip plastics food containers as much as possible.  And definitely do not microwave your food in a plastic container or plastic wrap — transfer to a glass container first.  In addition, filter your own water instead of drinking plastic bottled water (here is the one I use myself and recommend most to patients.) 

 

 

 

2. Get More Sleep

 

Shift work disrupts our circadian rhythms and has been found to contribute to weight gain.  Shorter sleep duration as well as inconsistent sleep patterns are associated with obesity.  We have know this for over a decade now, and you can review studies like this one, published in 2011, and this one, published in 2014.

I always ask patients who are having trouble loosing weight about their sleep. That’s because a medical study (that I shared with you back in August of 2013) showed that poor sleep caused study participants to gain weight 9 times faster than participants who slept well.  Nine times faster weight gain!  Many of us live and function daily in a state of catching only a few hours of sleep a night…  for weeks, months, even years at a time. This has a huge impact on your weight.

What to do about it?

If you are watching your weight or struggling to understand why your best efforts are not good enough to prevent you from gaining weight, examine your sleep.  Give yourself the next month to focus on getting high quality sleep instead of focusing on dieting for the next month.  Hop over here for some tips on deepening your sleep at night, naturally.  An easy place to start?  Don’t leave any lights on when you sleep, not even the glow from the TV, which is enough light to interfere with deep restorative sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

3.  Eat outside

 

Grounding has a profound impact on your digestion, boosting your vagal tone (which supports the function of your entire digestive tract, from your esophagus to your colon and everything in between!) while meanwhile directly impacting your ability to feel full and satiated, even enhancing absorption by decreasing inflammation, which also helps with recovery after a meal.

Because of the scientific evidence that grounding supports our digestion, I ran a study of my own patients because I wondered if, by boosting our digestion and metabolism through touching the earth, we would see a change in weight over time. So I personally enrolled a dozen overweight patients into an informal private study on grounding and weight loss. I followed them for 10 weeks, measuring weight, energy, mood, sleep, and pain, with weekly weigh-ins and assessments.  Their instructions were to touch the earth outside directly for 15 minutes a day, and that was it. I told them not to change their diet at all. I wanted them to eat everything they had eaten before in the same quantities and in the same fashion. I told them not to start new activities or to change their exercise or activity level at all.

What happened? Most of the patients lost a clinically significant amount of weight: 60% of them losing between 4 and 15 pounds in the 10 week study period, doing nothing more then adding in daily grounding for just 15 minutes a day.

What to do about it?  Start grounding for 15 minutes a day — ideally eat one meal a day grounded outside.  Hop over here to watch a video I created for you to explain why adding grounding to your daily routine is the quickest way to heal your digestion. At the end of this free article I wrote for you, I share tons of ideas on how to eat grounded outside pick one each day and watch your weight self correct effortlessly.

And for more tips on how grounding profoundly supports your health from head to toe, and how to easily incorporate grounding into your daily life to see profound results, grab my book The Earth Prescription, available as a paperback, a digital book, and an audiobook, right here.

 

 

 

 

 

4.  Allow Yourself To Fidget

 

This very interesting medical study was sent to me by an awesome reader (thank you Lansing!) which found that study participants who fidgeted while sitting attenuated the risk of death associated with long periods of time spent sedentary.   Published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2016, researchers followed over 12,000 participants for over three years and found that moderate to high fidgeting levels completely removed the risk of death from prolonged sitting.  This is incredible because even exercise is not enough to reverse the mortality risk of prolonged sitting, and this is because exercising once or twice in the day does nothing to break up the long periods of sitting spent in between exercise sessions.  But fidgetting allows you to keep moving, even during the time spent seated, completely ameliorating the mortality risk usually associated with a sedentary lifestyle.

So can fidgeting also help not only prolong lifespan but actually help burn calories too?  Yep.  Fidgetting falls under the “non-exercise activity thermogenesis” type of calorie burn (NEAT) and can burn as much calories as someone who exercise strenuously two or three times a week — about 350 calories a day, or well over 2,000 calories a week, according to this study published in Science in 2005.

What to do about it?

Foot tapping, seat shifting, finger drumming, etc… all count.  Keep in mind this tip is just for folks who naturally fidget, as they generally fidget up to 10 hours a day without effort.  Those that do not naturally fidget can not train themselves to do it consistently enough to make a difference, and instead must be conscious about breaking up sedentary time with a more intentional activity, like walking or going up and down a flight of steps.

 

 

 

 

5.  Quiet background noise.

 

Chronic levels of noise found frequently in modern society have been shown to significantly increase your risk of heart attack, heart disease, heart failure, stroke, even atrial fibrillation.  It also increases your risk of metabolic diseases and type two diabetes.

Think about your day:

Do you hear traffic constantly (especially consider if you hear traffic where you sleep at night?)Do you work in an area where there is chronic talking (such as a hospital, a hotel, a store or a restaurant?)Do you work in an area where there are phones constantly ringing (such as at an office?)Do you work in an area that has music playing constantly?Do you sleep with music or a television on?If so, your risk for diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart attack, stroke, cognitive impairment, BMI and more is much greater than it has to be.What to do about it?Wear simple, effective ear protection that allows you to hear (and even improve your hearing) of intentional noises while filtering out irritating background noise.  These simple, soft, effective silicone ear inserts decrease irritating background noise while at the same time, helping to clarify important noises that you actually want to hear.Calmer sits barely visible in the ear and uses revolutionary, non-electric technology to reduce mid and high frequency distortion without having a detrimental effect on our hearing. You can hear more clearly what you need to hear clearly, while minimizing the constant barrage of environmental noise stressors which have a negative impact on our mental and physical well-being.

 

 

 

While this will decrease stress for anyone, whether you are sensitive to noises or not, it can be a game changer for those with Hyperacusis, for example those with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, tinnitus, or other hypersensitivity issues. You can wear these during waking and sleeping hours. They help to relieve stress while at home, at work, at school, on commutes, while traveling, at restaurants, concerts, or all night long when you want to deeply relax.  They are very discrete and you can still hear normal conversation, music, co-workers, etc… but at much safer volumes that protect your long term health and decrease your immediate stress.

Learn more about how these ingenious, simple ear protective devices work right here.

 

 

 

 

6. Recognize your emotional eating style

 

What I’ve noticed as a physician examining health outcomes for the past 20 years, is that most people eat emotionally instead of nutritionally.  Because of this, I have developed a list of the top 7 emotional eating patterns I see over and over again.

What to do about it?

If you can develop insight into why you eat the way you do, you can reframe your mind away from eating emotionally and get some tips on working with your eating patterns in a healthier way.

Scan this list and see which emotional eating pattern describes you best:

 

FOOD IS SECURITY:  For some folks, food represents safety and security. So when they are not eating, deep fears of safety and panic may arise. There may be worries about food scarcity and needing to know when and what your next meal will be. If you notice you overeat, it may be an attempt to feel secure and reassured that all is well. You may crave comfort foods such as casseroles and home cooking and baked goods, or foods that remind you of childhood.  One way to provide comfort and a deep contentment to security-type eaters is to include lots and lots and lots of fiber, so that you feel full, satiated, safe and grounded for longer.FOOD IS PLEASURE:  For some folks, food isn’t about the nutrition, food is about the entire experience… the smell, the feel, the texture, the flavor, the delight in chewing it. Food is pleasurable and even sensual. If this is your style of eating, you may find you are eating because you want the feel of food in your mouth, not because you are hungry. One great idea for pleasure eaters is to enjoy drinking (coffees, teas, water, fresh squeezed juices…) or chewing gum throughout the day to experience that sensual pleasure of having sensations in the mouth without necessarily reaching for food.FOOD IS POWER: For some folks, eating food is an issue of control or power.  For people who see food as power, diets are particularly offensive because restricting food intake feels like a loss of power or a loss of control… two things these types of eaters hate! One great idea for control-based eaters is to drop the diets and instead focus on choosing easily digestible foods like soups and pureed foods that are easier on your digestive organs (liver, pancreas, stomach) and eating frequent, smaller meals, grazing all throughout the day instead of a few large meals. Focusing on high quality foods and eating them more often, instead of restricting quantity, tends to be kinder than dieting and allows your body to feel healthier.FOOD IS LOVE: Some folks enjoy food that releases endorphins and provides a rush, similar to falling in love. Any of my blog readers who know how often I blog about eating chocolate will recognize… yep, I’m this type of eater. Romantic foods like oysters, red wine, chocolate… it’s not so much that these eaters care about food, they care about the way the food makes them feel. Dieting feels atrocious for love-seeking eaters and restricting food is equivalent to being dumped by a lover. One great idea for love-seeking eaters is to focus on enjoying the people you are eating with more than the food.  If possible, avoid eating alone (which may lead to over-eating) and instead really focus on making eye contact with the people you are enjoying a meal with, the conversation. Or, focus just as much on creating a lovely place to eat as you do what foods you are eating. Add a fresh flower to your kitchen table, bring your lunch outside to eat in sunshine the middle of a work day, or browse thrift stores for beautiful, vintage glasses and plates to mix and match, or use beautiful cloth napkins as a treat.FOOD IS JOY: Some people just love to enjoy a wide variety of foods and this is one of their wonderful strengths with eating. Because joyful eaters are so open to food, dieting or any type of food restriction at all feels like a huge loss and may even bring deep sorrow. My favorite recommendation for joy-based eaters is to focus on trying new, unusual or exotic foods to satisfy their cravings, instead of over-eating a large quantity of boring foods. Keep a stash of different spices, hot sauces and healthy seasonings to make each bite taste exciting and invigorating instead of needing larger portions to bring joy. Joy eaters also tend to actually enjoy preparing food, so if you are a joy eater build time into your day to focus on trying new recipes, browsing new cookbooks, and preparing healthy meals from scratch.FOOD IS ENERGY: High energy people have so much energy output that each bite needs to be calorie dense and their body knows this. Although they get the message to feel bad about eating fats and eating dense protein (after all, eating a light salad seems so much more social acceptable) this leaves them feeling depleted and desperate for a pick-me-up later.  People who are energy eaters need to feel good about their intuitive food choices that make them crave protein. Energy eaters need to honor their bodies by feeding their brain lots of healthy fats (organic whole fat dairy/butter/yogurt or coconut, avocado, fish oil…) and protein (organic, ethically produced meats, organic eggs, organic nuts and nut butters.)FOOD IS OPTIONAL: Does this sounds familiar: forgetting to eat, not making the time to eat, feeling dizzy because you skipped lunch, reaching for a quick snack and then getting right back to work, forgetting to hydrate? Some folks find it easy to ignore their bodies needs or lose track of time. While sporadic eaters are usually not so bothered by going on a diet, the danger here is that they often don’t take the time to eat healthily so that when they do eat, they are ravenous and don’t make smart food choices, or they don’t even get the needed nutritional building blocks at all. The best thing these eaters can do is to schedule in their eating so that they eat at regular intervals, stay hydrated, and make nutrient dense food choices… instead of not eating all day long and then binging in a drive through on the way home. Another great tip is to carry water with you at all times, so that even if you are not taking the time to properly eat, you stay well hydrated.

 

 

 

7. Stop negative self talk:

 

This is something no one talks about in medicine but it is crucial: absolutely eliminate any negative self talk you might be having with your food choices.  Medical studies suggest that fat shaming alone — not the weight itself — can directly increase a person’s risk for metabolic syndrome and subsequent health issues.  Letting go of the internalized stress associated with weight will decrease diabetes risk, heart disease risk and the rate of metabolic disease in general, as shown in this study published Jan 26, 2017 in Obesity.

In that study, researchers found that participants who internalized stress from weight-related stigma were over 40% more likely to have metabolic syndrome than participants who did not internalize stigma.  These results were independent of the actual degree of obesity and other confounding issues such as depression. Weight stigma was found to cause a direct physiological stress response in the body, elevating blood pressure and increasing the body’s inflammation.  The researchers conclude that weight stigma alone is a form of chronic stress that creates physical disease when internalized.

These results suggest it is not necessarily the weight, but rather the stress that our society places on larger sized individuals and their internalization of that stress, that increases the risk of metabolic syndrome and puts folks at higher cardiovascular risk than they would otherwise have.  This is totally unnecessary. If the stress of being overweight was reduced, so would the disease burden. So stop beating yourself up — this is about supporting your body, not tearing it down.

What to do about it?

First of all, never hesitate to seek counseling if you find yourself unable to stop the negative self talk.

Second, understand that weight is not the end-all be-all marker of health.  This is according to the results of a huge longitudial study published in the January 2, 2013, issue of JAMA.  This study was a meta-analysis of 97 different published studies that included more than 2.88 million participants.  In this study, grade 1 obesity was not associated with any higher mortality and overweight was actually associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.

 

 

 

 

Compared to ideal weight individuals, overweight individuals actually had lower mortality rates than ideal weight participants, and those with Grade 1 obesity had no increased risk (having roughly identical death rates as the ideal weight participants.). Only participants who had a BMI of 35 kg/m2 or higher had significantly higher mortality rates.

So you need to IMMEDIATELY drop the guilt if you feel like you should be losing those last 5 or 10 pounds.

Be thankful and grateful to your magnificent body right this very minute.

Feel good about every inch of your precious soul-containing skin.

The take home message here is that the real focus should ALWAYS BE on feeling as healthy and vibrant as possible.

This means focusing on muscle tone.

On heart strength.

On endurance.

On lung capacity.

On bone mass.

On energy levels.

On restorative sleep at night.

On happiness.

On quality time with loved ones.

On meaningful relationships.

On spiritual strength.

Not on weight.

And certainly not on beating yourself up over weight.

 

 

Third, you can find supportive, awesome information regarding the fact that you can be healthy at any size, click right here to read and download the Association for Size Diversity and Health’s Fact Sheet.  This is a wonderful organization that is sure to help you expand your definition of what a healthy weight means!!!!

 

Feel better?  Good!

 

That’s the entire reason I do what I do.

I want every single person who crosses my path to feel better after finding me then they did before they met me.  That’s the whole point of seeking health solutions from a medical provider in the first place — after all, healing should feel better and better and better, and fill you with a sense of relief!

 

 

 

 

Want more support?

 

I’ve got you.  The next thing I recommend you do — for more support on uplifting, natural ways to lose weight — is to join my Weight Release & Reset online class, which starts next week.

Hop over here for more information and to reserve your spot.

 

“I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Weight Reset emails and videos! I looked forward to each and every day. Your class gave me so much hope!” – C.C.

“This was AWESOME!! I loved all the information — the medical studies to back it up and the daily reminders. Plus — I love that you can do this at your own pace. Thank you!” C.W.

“I was surprised at how many different things can affect your weight and when you talked about them in the class… it was like a bell went off.  I would definitely recommend the class to others” – S.G.

 

Together, we go over the 5 pillars of sustainable, feel-good weight loss. One pillar a day for 5 days. Simple and sweet.

I’ve based this course directly off of the medical literature and my 20 years of experience helping to support my patients with their weight loss goals. You’d be surprised that your body naturally knows what weight is the perfect one for you, and it can sustain it at this perfect weight effortlessly once you naturally align your metabolism. I’ll show you how in a very non-threatening, supportive, uplifting way.

It’s not about being rigid or militant or hard on yourself, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. The harder you are on yourself, the harder it is to align with your healthiest version of you. It’s not even about your diet and exercise plan — there are actually several other things that are even more important than what you eat and how you move… and without knowing what those things are, you just can’t lose weight.

Understand the things that sabotage weight loss and the weight releases, naturally.

Class starts May 8th and I’m excited to get started with you. Hop over here to sign up and reserve your spot today:

 

 

To your resilient, natural health!xoxox, Laura

 

 

 

The post How Our Environment Can Cause Weight Gain & What You Can Do About It appeared first on Intuition Physician.

It’s Planting Season! 10 Reasons To Grow At Least One Plant

 

 

I love watching the earth wake up more and more each day, because even though there are plenty of ways to get grounded in the winter — even outside — it’s undeniably easier when the weather is warm and bright green leaves and fresh green grass wait for you outside.  I’ve already written you a bunch of blog posts to help you get excited for the spring season.

Posts like:

Why You Think More Clearly When You Spend Time Outside

Sick Of Winter? Here’s Why Hearing Birds Will Instantly Help You Feel Better

10 Activities You’ll Probably Do Today That You Should Definitely Take Outside

 

But the real reason I get most excited for spring is to plant a garden.

Today, as you read this blog post, I want you to consider planting something this spring.  Yep, even just throwing down some grass seed counts!  No matter how big or small your space is — whether you have a windowsill garden, a potted houseplant or two, a few medicinal herbs grown on your porch, access to a community vegetable garden or pick-your-own orchard or berry farm, or are even blessed enough to have your own land — tending to plants and growing flowers or food is one of the most rewarding, most pleasurable activities that I can recommend.

One fabulous study shows that adding even a very small greenspace to an urban setting boosts immune function in a measurable and meaningful way. Published in Science Advances in October 2020, researchers found that by adding a small green play area to urban playgrounds, they boosted the immunity of the children using the play area.  Researchers in Finland added a very small, low cost green area in the corner of existing playgrounds in several different urban daycare centers. They added a little grass patch, some small plants and a planter box with garden crops the kids could tend to.

This is what one of the modifications looked like:

 

University of Helsinki

After only one month — just 28 days — not only did the children who played in this urban greenspace (an average of 90 minutes a day) have boosted immune markers in their blood (like boosted T cells) they also had an improved microbiota (both on the skin and in their gut biome) similar to children that lived and played in rural areas with large greenspaces and forests. These changes were statistically significant compared both to controls and to their own baseline measurements.

This study is just one example of how you don’t need to live in the country to experience improved health from nature. In fact, in my book The Earth Prescription, I go into great detail about how you can get grounded in urban settings through sidewalks, through touching a metal signpost, through simply touching a leaf on a bush or a tree — even one growing in a downtown city street — that’s all it takes to get grounded from head to toe and experience all of these health benefits.

For more ideas, you can watch my TikTok on how to get grounded in a city right here:

 

@laurakonivermd

There is something that can ground you on every city block #grounding #earthing #groundingtechique #holistichealth #laurakonivermd #intuitionphysician #conductivehealth #urbanlandscape #citylife

♬ original sound – Laura Koniver, MD

 

There are tons of benefits of interacting with plants (from tending to a single blade of grass, to a few herbs in pots, to a few veggies planted in planter boxes, to a huge urban garden) beyond all the benefits of grounding.

It’s actually healing just to be around plants of any kind, even while ungrounded (for example, just seeing a plant through a window or adding a potted plant to a workspace) can provide measurable health benefits.

Read through this list of the top 10 perks of gardening and see if it doesn’t inspire even those of us who are non-gardeners to dive into this wonderful activity. From a windowsill garden to a flower bed to a large plot of farmland, gardening is more than a way to grow flowers and food… it’s a lifestyle that can help ensure longevity and health.

Read on to discover some surprising ways that gardening is doing more for your health than you ever thought possible:

10 Ways Gardening Boosts Your Health:

 

 

 

1. Protects Your Brain Function

 

Every minute you spend out in your garden is brain protective… so much so, that having gardening as a hobby actually lowers your risk of dementia! A study published in 2006 in the Medical Journal of Australia found that daily gardening decreased dementia risk by in incredible 36%. A follow up study, published in 2019 in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that gardening actually increased levels of brain nerve growth factors.

Another incredibly interesting study, recently published in January 2020 in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that a gardening intervention program significantly boosted levels of the brain neurotransmitters tryptophan and serotonin, which are necessary for healthy sleep patterns and mood stabilization.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Gives You Boosted Mental Health

 

Multiple studies have found that having access to a garden or other green space decreases depression rates, anxiety rates, and dramatically reduces stress. One study, called the MIND study (conducted in 2007) found that simply walking through a garden or greenway significantly improved mental health, while walking through areas without greenery (such as a shopping mall) significantly decreased mental health.

If simply walking through a green space impacts mental health so much, you can probably guess that hand’s on gardening would boost mental health even more. And you would be right. After an extensive systemic review of 22 studies looking at the health impact of gardening, the results of this meta-anylsis (published in Preventive Medicine Reports in 2016) found that gardening significantly reduced anxiety levels, anger levels and depression rates, decreased tension, stress levels and boosted mood… all while simultaneously improving life satisfaction and boosting over all quality of life. It’s absolutely incredible that simply tending to a garden can offer such a transformative life make-over, but it’s true!

 

 

 

3. Lowers Your Blood Pressure

 

Even indoor gardens can positively impact on your well being, so don’t discount the power of a windowsill garden or a simple house plant to support your health. An exciting study published in 2015 in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology, showed that simply adding plants to an indoor computer room not only boosted the worker’s productivity, it also significantly decreased their blood pressure.

Another study, published in 2007 in the American Society for Horticultural Science found that workers with potted plants in close proximity to them while working took less sick leave off from work and enjoyed increase productivity.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Boosts Your Resiliency

 

Being physically near plants is so impactful to our mental and physical health that it turns out, even just seeing a plant can significantly impact our recovery from stressful health events. 

We have such an innate need to be submersed in a world with foliage and plants around us that a study (published in 1984 in Science) found that patients who simply had a view of plants through a window while recovering from surgery had better moods, used less pain medications, had less surgical post-op complications, and even decreased their length of stay in the hospital.

Less pain during recovery and getting to go home sooner after surgery just by looking at plants? That’s an awesome health strategy that I wish more hospital and clinics would take into account when designing their architecture.

 

 

 

 

 

5. Decreases Your Body’s Inflammation

 

One of my biggest passions as a holistic physician is encouraging people to touch the earth to decrease inflammation in their body, a healing practice known as grounding. A study on grounding, published in the Journal Of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine in 2010, found that subjects who were grounded while exercising had 40% lower levels of creatinine kinase (a marker of muscle inflammation) and less soreness after exertion than non-grounded subjects. They also had lower pain levels, significantly lower blood cortisol levels, and even lower white blood cell counts.

Even newer studies are showing that grounding, even for just a few minutes, boosts your body’s health.  The Biomedical Journal just published a special feature on Grounding in Feb 2023, here are some of the fabulous new articles in it that you might want to read over:

Is Return To Nature A Piece Of The Health Puzzle?  (2023)Illness In Technologically Advanced Societies Due To Lack Of Grounding (2023)Grounding As Related To Electromagnetic Hygiene (2023)Practical Applications Of Grounding To Support Health — this is the article I contributed (2023)Influence of Electromagnetic Fields On The Circadian Rhythm (2023)Prevention And Treatment Of Covid-19 Infection By Earthing (2023)Grounding, The Universal Anti-Inflammatory (2023)

When you are grounded to the earth, as you are during gardening while touching the ground in any way, including touching any plants, soil, dirt, rocks and water that is on the earth, you are supporting your health in so many ways. 

For more information on the whole body benefits of grounding, see all of the medical studies I’ve got waiting for you on my Grounding Medical Studies page here or read my book The Earth Prescription right here.

 

 

 

 

6. Reduces Your Toxic Burden

 

One of the very best things about gardening is that you can have a direct impact in reducing your body’s total toxic burden. By growing your own garden, you can reduce your environmental exposures to pesticides and insecticides by choosing non-toxic, organic gardening practices and choosing not to apply toxic chemicals to your garden space, as well as reducing the amount of pesticides that you directly consume when you eat edibles from your garden that haven’t been treated with chemicals.

With over 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides used globally each year, it’s estimated that the average person eating store bought foods, including store bought produce, eats over a pound of chemicals every year. The good news is that it only takes a few days of eating your own garden fresh produce to dramatically reduce the concentration of measurable pesticides in your body. One study, published in Environmental Research in 2019, found that eating organic produce for just one week significantly reduced urine pesticide concentrations in study participants by 70%.One week!

 

 

 

 

7. Increases Your Nutritional Intake

 

Not only will eating your home grown produce reduce your toxic burden from things you don’t want — like exposures to unwanted chemicals — it can also dramatically boost the things you do want to go into your body… like active antioxidants and powerful vitamins. Even organic produce sold in a grocery store can lose half of it’s vitamins and phytonutrients by the time you get it home and eat it, especially water soluble vitamins like Vitamin C, Vitamin B6 & B12, thiamin, riboflavin and niacin.

Just by eating your food fresh picked, garden-to-table, you reduce the loss of nutrients that inevitably happens when shipped, stored and displayed at super markets. Fruits and vegetables are extremely sensitive to and heat and light exposures, rapidly degrading over time. A studypublished in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture in 2007 found that most produce loses about 30% of their nutritional content three days after picking. Some dramatically more, for example, spinach can lose up to 90% of it’s vitamin C activity within 24 hours of harvest.While freezing produce might help slow nutrient degradation, the ultimate solution to having vibrantly nutritious, fresh foods to eat is to grow them yourself and consume them that day, if not the very minute you pick it!

 

 

 

8. Gives You Better Sleep

 

There is a beautiful relationship between our sleep cycle and mother earth. Most people believe that our circadian (day/night) rhythm is dependent on sunlight to set that pattern for us, but scientists feel that the earth’s energy field has as much, if not more, to do with our sleep/wake pattern than even the sun, and they have known this since a pioneering study conducted back in 1970. Published in Life Sciences in Space Research, researchers discovered just how influential the earth is to our sleep patterns.

Looking at several hundred test subjects that lived for a two month period of time in a bunker that was blocked from sunlight but still had the earth’s electromagnetic field surrounding them, scientist discovered that they kept sleep/wake patterns that were close to a 24 hour rhythm.Meanwhile, test subject that lived in a bunker that was completely shielded from the earth’s energies became completely desynchronized and experienced significantly longer, and much more irregular, sleep/wake rhythms. Researchers then experimented with introducing different electrical and magnetic fields into the shielded bunker, and only one frequency was able to restore normal sleep/wake patterns… the frequency of Mother Earth’s natural energy, the Schumann frequency.

From this the researchers postulated that it is actually the frequency of the earth that regulates our natural biorhythms. Based off of this understanding, it’s easy to understand how directly connecting to the earth through gardening daily can help enhance restorative sleep at night and boost daytime wakefulness.

 

 

 

 

9. Boosts Your Vit D Levels

 

By now we’ve all heard of the importance of getting adequate Vitamin D… vitamin D protects so many different aspects of our health, from decreasing diabetes risk to boosting weight loss benefits to decreasing depression risk to preventing depression to predicting better cancer recovery to boosting fertility!

But does gardening actually increase Vitamin D levels? Yes, says a study published in PLOS One in 2014. Researchers studied thousands of blood samples from patients who engaged in a variety of activities, and found that gardening and cycling were the only two activities that significantly decreased the risk of vitamin D deficiency… superior all other outdoor activities, including fishing and walking. Gardening boosted Vitamin D levels across all age groups, so it’s a fantastic pastime that you never need to outgrow, a hobby to get into for life!

 

 

 

 

 

10. Increases Your Life Span

 

A study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in 2016 found that people who stayed indoors and avoided sun exposure actually had a shorter life span than those who spent time outside. Participants who avoided the sun had higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and pulmonary disease than those who had daily sun exposure.

And the results were dose-specific… meaning that the benefits of increased life expectancy went up directly in correlation to the amount of sun exposure. 

Longer time in the sun = longer life span. That simple!  Gardening is a fantastic way to routinely be inspired to go outside and get that sunshine and fresh air, two of natures best holistic health treatments.

Another reason that being a gardener might lengthen lifespan, besides getting more sunlight, is the increase in activity level. A fabulous study (published in 2019 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine) found that replacing just 30 minutes of sitting each day with light physical activity was enough to significantly decrease mortality rates. And again, here’s the clincher: the health benefit of replacing sedentary time with light physical activity was actually even stronger if you were older than 75 years old. So light activity decreased mortality rates in adults older than 75 years old even more than it decreased mortality rates in younger age groups. In other words, the older you are, the more that activity of any kind increases your lifespan.

 

 

 

It’s never too late to lengthen your lifespan and boost your health through daily activity — and that includes gardening. When you combine the fact that gardening has been proven to have huge mental health benefits, longevity benefits, grounding benefits, nutritional benefits and more, you would be hard pressed to find another activity that supports your health from so many different angles and in so many ways.

So what are you planting this year?

No matter how big or small your space is, whether you have a windowsill garden, a potted houseplant or two, a few medicinal herbs grown on your porch, access to a community vegetable garden or pick-your-own orchard or berry farm, or are even blessed enough to have your own land, tending to plants and growing flowers or food is one of the most rewarding, most pleasurable activities that I can recommend.

 

 

Want me to give you tons of other ways to get outside and get grounded this spring?
Want to see if grounding for just a few minutes a day for two weeks can really impact your health?

I will personally walk you through two weeks of grounding together and you will see for yourself.  Let’s take my Earth Relief Class together and I’ll give you an easy, fun, uplifting grounding exercise to do each day, plus class culminates in a private Q&A Recording with me personally answering every single question you’ve ever had about grounding.

Every single one.

Join me in class and get materials, tips, and ideas for grounding that you can use again and again and again, for the rest of your life.

Class starts today!  Click the button below and let’s get you feeling your best!

 

 

xoxo, Laura Koniver, MD

 

The post It’s Planting Season! 10 Reasons To Grow At Least One Plant appeared first on Intuition Physician.

Slow Down Aging By Staying Hydrated… Especially Important This Spring & Summer

 

 

 

Known as the Elixir of Life for good reason, water is absolutely critical to our well being in every way.

In fact, a new study just published in Jan 2023 in eBioMedicine found that dehydration, measured by how concentrated the salt is in your bloodstream, is actually a risk factor for premature death.  Almost just as bad?  It also accelerated biological aging.  Mean if you run chronically dehydrated, your body is aging faster than your actual chronological age.  And the worst part is that this is with your serum sodium still being in within normal limits — they found increased risk of death and accelerated aging with serum concentrations in the high normal range.

Yuck.  That’s so stressful.  Not only are we primarily made up of water (over 70% of our body is pure water!) but water has a healing property that goes way beyond simple hydration. So today, I want to share with you all the different ways that we can use the power of water to support our Well Being from the inside out.

One of the most important ways is that it supports our grounding practice — allowing your body to literally be more conductive the more hydrated it is!  But first, I want to run through some of the surprising symptoms of dehydration, and I’d like you to tally up how many of these symptoms you are feeling right now.

If you feel even one, you are already volume depleted and you need to immediately go drink a big glass of water!

 

 

 

What Does Dehydration Feel Like?

 

Dehydration is life threatening. Severe dehydration means our organs absolutely can not function normally and leads to seizure, organ failure, and death.

But did you know even very mild levels of dehydration might be affecting you on a daily basis?

Dehydration can lead to or exacerbate common conditions such as constipation, dry skin, bad breath, headache, and high blood pressure. How many of these symptoms do you have right now?

 

Dry Mouth: One of the first symptoms of dehydration is dry mouth, which leads to bacteria overgrowth and bad breath. If you notice bad breath, you might consider: are you chronically dehydrated?Dry Skin: Your skin turgor is another indicator of dehydration. If you’ve been concerned about your skin feeling dry or more wrinkled, double check that you are drinking enough fluid each day.Pain: Pain is actually a symptom of dehydration as well, often starting with a headache. And low fluid status can lead to headaches and brain fog as well, as the fluid volume of the brain gets depleted from dehydration. I’ve literally had patients with a raging headache drink a glass of water and have the headache clear completely. The next time you have a headache or any type of pain, make sure you drink a glass of water and then re-evaluate your pain levels before reaching for a pain reliever or medication. Dehydration makes all pain worse, as the volume of the organs and joints deplete, dehydrated ligaments and cartilage get injured more easily and dehydrated discs in the spine allow increased pinching of nerves and muscle cramps increase as electrolytes deplete.Constipation: Having sluggish bowels is another classic symptom of chronic dehydration. Recent studies have shown that water status is the NUMBER ONE factor impacting regularity. More important than walking and more important that even fiber intake, water intake can turn constipation issues around completely. Drinking water has more of an impact on encouraging healthy bowel movements than fiber supplement or exercise… in fact, I’d go as far as to say fiber supplements clog people up more often than they help. In general, a constipated person is a dehydrated person. You can fix that right now — go grab a glass of water.High Blood Pressure: Another classic sign of chronic dehydration? High blood pressure. When we decrease our water intake, our blood gets thicker, harder to pump, our blood volume decreases and our heart rate increases and our blood vessels constrict. All together, this means your blood pressure raises and stays raised. If you are having blood pressure issues, it is more important than EVER to be extremely vigilant about your hydration status!Digestive Issues: Dehydration also impacts your entire gut lining, and chronic dehydration can give rise to stomach ulcers and absorption issues as the mucosal layer stops secreting it’s protective film.Dry Cough: Not only does the gut lining need to be well hydrated to function, but also our entire respiratory lining does too. Our lungs absolutely require a moist mucous membrane to function. In chronic dehydration, the mucus membranes in our respiratory system dry out and become more vulnerable to dust, pollen and other irritants, leaving you susceptible to an irritating, non-productive, dry cough.Urinary Tract Infections: Getting more UTI’s than usual? Our entire urinary system (and therefore the health of our kidneys) depends on having enough volume to use liquids to flush toxins from our body. When we can’t do that, we set ourselves up for issues with kidney function and a higher rate of infections.Weight Gain: Another little known side effect of chronic dehydration is weight gain. As we become volume depleted, we begin to feel thirst, which is often confused with hunger because the body is craving intake of any kind (knowing that most foods will provide some form of hydration, your body sends out the message that it is hungry when it is volume depleted in any way.). As a result, we eat when what we really need to be doing for our true health is rehydrating.Bad Mood & Brain Fog: Did you know that even mild dehydration affects our mood? A study published in The Journal of Nutrition showed that study participants reported decreased motivation and increased feelings of anxiety when mildly dehydrated. On top of that, headache, fatigue, difficulty concentrating and decreased physical activity all were increased during dehydration. And the effect of dehydration on mood was even more pronounced in women than in men! And this medical review published in the Journal Of the American College of Nutrition showed that our attention spans and even our short term memory fizzles when we are dehydrated.

 

 

 

So the next time you have a headache, or feel anxious, or notice your blood pressure or weight creeping up… drink a glass of water and re-evaluate.

It could be that chronic dehydration has been a key factor contributing to your symptoms all along.

And don’t rely on thirst to remind you to drink!

Prevent dehydration before you even get thirsty. Dehydration begins when we are just 1% volume depleted, but thirst doesn’t set in until our body is about 2% volume depleted. By then we have already had effects on our mood, energy level, ability to think clearly, and pain levels.

Instead of waiting for thirst or darkened urine to remind us to drink, let’s utilize these preventative strategies for staying well hydrated, instead of treating dehydration!

The goal of this article isn’t to teach you how to address dehydration but to have you protecting your hydration levels by preventing dehydration in the first place. Read on:

 

12 ways to use water to boost your health:

 

 

 

 

1. Begin and end every single day drinking a big glass of water.

 

Drink a full glass of water each AM before you even think about reaching for orange juice or coffee. In fact, don’t allow yourself to drink anything at all before you’ve had a glass of water.

Replenishing the fluids you lost overnight every as well as the fluids you may have overlooked drinking all day long is a great lifelong habit to get into.

Do it daily so it becomes an automatic routine!

 

 

 

 

2. Drink a glass of water whenever you feel hungry.

 

Use hunger as a reminder to hydrate!

We feel hunger on and off all day long, and so we can remember to drink water on and off all day long too.

Thirst is often confused with hunger, because your body is craving INTAKE of any kind!

Drink a glass of water before each meal and whenever you feel thirst *or* hunger, and you will stay well hydrated all day long.

 

 

 

 

3. Include fruits and vegetables at every single meal.

 

Fruits and veggies are full of water (many being more than 90% water!) and minerals that help you maintain essential fluid volume.

Processed foods like packaged snacks actually dehydrate you.

Fruits and veggies are a great way to hydrate *while* you eat!

The most hydrating ones include:

melonsberriescucumberceleryleafy greenstomatoes andbell peppers

 

 

 

4. Use an unrefined sea salt when you cook, instead of table salt.

 

It’s truly important to make sure you have enough minerals in your diet so that you can absorb and retain the right hydration balance.

Trace minerals, found in sea salts, are essential to the body’s function.

In fact, trace minerals actually help enhance another healing practice that I feel is crucial for our well being… grounding! I talk more about why minerals are so essential for grounding in this video I made for you here.

 

 

 

 

Even if you don’t think hydration is an issue for you, most of us are mineral depleted whether we hydrate well or not. This can affect many different organ systems in our body, and even decrease our grounding potential.

You might want to consider a daily mineral supplement that you drop into a glass of water, which will further encourage you to drink drink drink throughout the day.

My favorite is Concentrace Mineral Drops, in a glass bottle, which I have waiting for you right here.

 

 

 

5. Moisturize your skin to decrease transcutaneous water loss.

 

By removing any dead skin, making sure your skin is moist and hydrated, making sure you are not mineral depleted, and making sure you drink a big glass of water so you are well hydrated internally before grounding, you can maximize how quickly and how easily your body gets grounded through contact with the earth outdoors.

My favorite moisturizer combines two of these principals in one: it moisturizes to repair the lipid bilayer of your skin, and it also adds crucial trace minerals to your body as well. It is a trace mineral lotion and you can find it right here.  I use it every night and my skin thanks me for it. So do my muscles, as it contains magnesium, a natural muscle relaxant that most of us are deficient in.  It’s the equivalent to taking a nice long warm epsom salt bath right before hopping into bed.

 

 

 

6. Switch from soda to sparkling water.

 

If you love carbonation and find it difficult not to crave soda, make the switch to sparkling water instead.

The sugar and chemicals found in soda (even diet soda!) mess with your metabolism and absolutely do not *count* towards your 8+ cups of water a day. But sparkling water does… and even better if you drink sparkling mineral water, which also replenishes your mineral balance. Here is one study showing mineral water has health benefits.

Get your carbonation fix from sparkling water or sparkling mineral water instead of soda and reap the hydration rewards!

 

 

 

7.  Allow tears… always.

 

The healing power of water can work magic for helping to support our entire well being, from clearing our mind frame to easing pain.

Because water is such a transformative medium, it’s no coincidence that the basis for our blood, sweat and tears is water. So the first way to use the power of water to transform your well being is to allow the tears… always. Never hold them back.

Let the water of your tears release your emotions and lift them from your body.

Water is the ultimate medium of flow and healing… in fact, water is the body’s natural choice of release as well, as you can see in the fact that the body uses tears to facilitate an emotional release.

Tears help encourage the flow of emotions through the body (both tears of joy and tears of sorrow!) and allows us to release tension more easily.

 

 

 

8. Sweat it out!

 

The other way that the body uses water as a form of energetic and physical release is through sweat. Working up a sweat uses the energy and flow of water (the blood in your circulatory system) by increasing flushing: fluid in, sweat out.

Exercise is an essential, wonderful, medically proven treatment plan for so many different health conditions, shown to be effective in treating everything from insomnia, to depression and anxiety to fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions… even preventing dementia and extending our lifespan!

Make sure you find some physical activity that you can routinely do that allows you to sweat… whether you like hiking, yoga, kickboxing, jogging, or even, in a pinch a more passive form of sweating like a sauna (which has been shown to decrease dementia rates and lengethn lifespan!) find a way to embrace sweating and be sure to replace that fluid flow with tons of fresh filtered water both before, during, and after sweating!!!

 

 

 

 

9. Use the grounding properties of water to detox and release, even inside your home.

 

Take a long hot epsom salt bath soak (you can even add some baking soda and apple cider vinegar to turn it into a detoxing experience) to soothe muscles, calm and relax you before bedtime. As I mentioned with my magnesium lotion in tip #5, magnesium will help relax your muscles, and did you know the bath water is actually grounding you the entire time you are soaking?  That further allows your muscles to deeply release tension and your stress levels to lower as your vagal tone gets a natural boost.

 

 

 

Here is a video I made for you showing you how the water inside of your home is likely grounding you! No wonder showers, baths, and even washing the dishes can feel so stress relieving and centering.

 

 

 

10. Use water to increase the strength of grounding outside as well.

 

Another great way to use water to heal is to ground in areas that are naturally moist: by the ocean or river or lake… even simply the morning dew on a blade of grass!

There is a reason that doctor’s routinely gave out prescriptions for spending time by the sea when they had no idea what else to do to help an ailment. That’s because the earth has healing energy to give you, and if you add moisture to that you increase your own conductivity and healing accelerates.

 

moisture + you + earth = expedited healing

 

This spring and summer, if you can get outside grounded while there is still dew on the grass, you will expedite your grounding experience.

If you can take a spray bottle out with you and spritz the ground before touching it, or spritz your skin before touching the earth, you will boost your conductivity.

If you can run through the sprinkler as you water your garden or yard, you will boost your conductivity (take your kids… they love this!). If you have a hose you can play with, to get wet during grounding, by all means do it!

If you have the option to get grounded in an in-ground swimming pool that is made from cement (not plastic) you will be grounded and the water will boost your grounding experience.

If you have the option to wade through a river or creek, or swim or walk along the edge of a lake, river or beach, you will feel the boost that water gives to your time spent grounding.

Bottom line: if water is ever an option for outdoor grounding — take it!

Here is a video I made a few summers ago with my friend Stacey, experimenting with grounding in water. It was one of the last really warm days we recently had at the very tale end of summer (which, where we live, is in September!)

 

 

I hope you enjoy it. You can really see and feel the difference of how relaxed and centered we become after spending an hour grounding through water.

 

 

11. Make sure your air contains moisture!

 

You lose over two cups (or a half liter) of water just from breathing each day. And another cup or more just through your skin. If the air is dry (which all of our indoor air is…) then that water loss is dramatically higher.

Use steam/humidifiers to help hydrate your air and support the hydration of your mucosal membranes, decrease respiratory water loss and even decrease transcutaneous water loss.

If you can’t humidify your whole house, humidify the area that you spend the most time — usually, the bedroom. If you breathe mositurized air for the 7 or 8 hours you spend in bed each night, you will notice a difference, waking up with more hydrated skin & mucosal membranes.

 

 

 

12. Drink water in an intentional way, to energetically reset the body from the inside out.

 

As I mentioned above, you lose about 2 liters (8 cups) of water each day… through skin and lungs, urination, bowel movements, tears, and sweating. You can utilize this high turn over of fluids to your advantage and hydrate hydrate hydrate during times of worry or sorrow or stress more than any other time of your life.

Look at every glass of water you drink as a way to add a healing intention into your body, infusing every single cell of every single tissue of every single organ system you have with healing support. You can simply say a prayer, say an intention, even just *think* an intention as you hold your cup of water and silently bless it before you drink it.

Let your body be flushed out inside and out and with every urination or bowel movement or tear or droplet of sweat you shed, recognize you are flushing the old energy down the drain and making way for new healing.

The beautiful, life affirming, healing properties of water can not be matched with anything else we put into our bodies.

 

 

 

And on that note, one last note bit of really good news: the water filter that I use in my own home, and that I routinely recommend to patients, is back in stock! Woot!!!

Why do I recommend you filter your water before drinking it, especially if it’s from the tap?

Hundreds of medical studies have shown that fluoride affects everything from cognitive function and cardiac function in humans, to diabetes, fertility and more in animals… so I recommend avoiding fluoride in water and never use fluoridated toothpastes.

Fluoride is an enzyme inhibitor, point-blank.

Even the minuscule amounts of fluoride added to the public water supply accumulates in bone. It is estimated about 50% of the fluoride we consume is eliminated, and 50% is stored in our body, mostly in our bones. So miniscule amounts of fluoride adding to our bodies sip after sip after sip equals a not-so-minimal exposure. Over a lifetime, these levels can reach high proportions… decreasing bone density and causing brittleness.

For a nation whose women have epidemic proportions of osteopenia and osteoporosis, it would be counter productive to continue to drink fluoride on a daily basis… and then use prescriptions to try to combat the osteoporosis that develops later in life. Studies have shown that the rate of hip fracture in elderly is directly increased in areas that fluoridate their water.

And the truth is, you get plenty of fluoride through your foods. Plants store fluoride found naturally in the earth AND from the water used to irrigate crops. Yep, even organic crops have fluoride in them from the irrigation water.

Statements from reps of the National Institutes of Health recommend that people who drink large quantities of water should not drink tap water, but instead switch to bottled water. We are just getting so much exposure to fluoride, that to intentionally consume extra fluoride, whether through drinking water or toothpaste, is way too much.

Your skin absorbs fluoride as well, so even when you are showering or taking a bath, you are absorbing fluoride.

We also know fluoride is being taken up by our cardiovascular system as well.  A study published in the journal Nuclear Medicine Communications definitively proved that fluoride is absorbed into your vascular system. Researchers followed 61 patients after administering fluoride and found that 96% of them had fluoride uptake in their cardiovascular walls.

In a nation with heart disease steeply rising, this doesn’t sit well with me. Direct absorption to of fluoride into our cardiovascular walls (and a significant correlation between cardiovascular events and fluoride uptake) makes it all the more urgent for us to avoid fluoride all together.

And studies have even found that fluoride lowers IQ.  I am routinely asked at the dentist’s office if I would like to give my children a concentrated fluoride treatment. And affect their still-developing brain? Uh… NO. I feel that a fluoride filter to remove fluoride from your drinking water (as well as not using fluoridated toothpaste) is a mandatory investment to protect the long term health of your heart, your bones, your brain, and all the organs in between!

Not only will the right filtration unit filter out fluoride (double check that yours does, most do not) but it will also filter out chlorine and other nasty chemicals added to the public water supply, as well as nasty chemicals that are unintentionally in our water supply like lead, arsenic, pesticides, perchlorate, and even pharmaceutical drugs.

 

I keep a water filtration system out on my kitchen counter space so that not only am I drinking pure, clean, fluoride free water, but the beautiful filtration unit serves as a visual reminder to DRINK every single time I walk by it, or am standing in the kitchen preparing a meal.

My agreement with myself — and hopefully one you will make with yourself too now that you’ve read all about how serious dehydration is and how crucial staying hydrated is — is that every time I see the water filter, I have to go take a quick drink of water from it.

So every time I walk by my kitchen, every time I go in for a snack, every time I am doing the dishes, and every time I am prepping a meal or cleaning up from a meal… I drink a glass of water.

It’s win-win, because drinking a glass of water before every meal helps me decrease cravings and control portion sizes naturally, which is one of the best tips for losing weight there is. But as a bonus, this habit has really helped me to remember to maintain my hydration status.

Using a water filter not only ensures my water is pure and healthy, instead of harming me (and my children and my pets — did you know that drinking tap water is harmful to your fur babies as well? This report goes over why hard water may be harming your pet. In addition, fluoride, chlorine, lead, microplasltics, pesticides and fertilizers in tap water harm your pet’s organ systems just like it harms yours!) but it serves as a visual reminder to stay hydrated.

And here is the best one, finally back in stock.

 

 

Today, try to use at least one of the dozen ways listed above to allow water to naturally support your Well Being… knowing you are doing more than just avoiding dehydration, you are boosting your immediate and long term health!

Bookmark this article and send it to your loved ones as we head into the warmer months of spring and summer and dehydration becomes even more common.  They will thank you!!!

xoxo,Laura Koniver MD

 

 

The post Slow Down Aging By Staying Hydrated… Especially Important This Spring & Summer appeared first on Intuition Physician.

How To Hear Your Body’s Intuition Speaking To You & How I Discovered Mine

 

 

 

One thing I know about intuition is this:everybody has it and everyone can use it.

 

 

If I can access my intuition, absolutely without a doubt, so can you.

I absolutely was THE most conventional person on the planet… since 5 years old my goal was to become a physician and I worked hard to become an M.D. by the age of 26 years old — I was square and type A and totally boxed into the world of conventional thinking.

After I became pregnant with my first child, I fully intended to continue on with my conventional medical career when something stopped me right in my tracks :

It was seeing my first soul, eye to eye… looking directly at my daughter after she was born.

BOOM. Done.

I could no longer pretend we weren’t all souls wearing earth suits and having divine experiences on this planet.

 

Jumping waves with Clara when she was just a few months old.

 

I remember the next physical exam I did on a patient in the office — rushing my patient through in 15 minutes as is protocol and writing her a Rx as she headed out the door… something I would have felt happy to do before having children made me stay awake all night feeling nauseous and repulsed now.

I actually rushed in the the bathroom and vomited in the toilet.

Because now I knew — the body was just a thing I was treating and the soul was something I was missing out on entirely.

So I quit.

Quitting conventional medicine is the best thing I had ever done because it forced me to fully trust in the unseen — trust in the outcome when it was not at all apparent what my next step would be.

I had absolutely no idea what I would do next when I walked away from everything I had ever known and walked away from the 23 years of straight schooling I had just invested in (and still had scary big med school loans to prove it…)

I just knew I couldn’t do what I had done before.

 

 

 

And as it always does, the next step kept appearing.

The intuitions started coming like a feeling of deja vu… a feeling of waking up from amnesia to what was there all along… all these intuitions that were always there that I had blocked from coming in.

I started working with patients in a whole new way — seeing their energy and working with their soul energy and finally HEALING things instead of prescribing a cover up.

Now I don’t want to work any way other than intuitively.  The 5 sensory way to heal patients is so incredibly limited.  And just as 5 sensory physicians limit themselves when healing the body, healing any situation with only 5 sensory information traps us into a limited finite outcome that keeps ticking away towards a dead-end.

We need to move beyond 5 sensory living on this planet in order to transform our experience and reality and existence… in order to create sustainability.  Right now we live focused on a limited, finite experience of reality… we are 5 sensory organisms on a 5 sensory planet trying to figure out 5 sensory solutions in a limited capacity environment.

We have limited resources and are looking dismally at a finite outcome with an end point that means time is up.

 

This original artwork I painted sold but here are prints of a similar piece, Dynamic Universe

 

In a 6 sensory existence, one that welcomes intuitive information as direct and valid information equal to the other 5 senses, we can move beyond boxed in finite outcomes to infinite possibility and infinite solutions.

Now is the time to open to POSSIBILITY.

I can testify that opening to possibility with the human body leads to health and healing beyond what one could predict with only 5 sensory calculations and trials and data and outcome computations.

Healing strategies that see the entire dynamic of energy flow throughout the body instead of just a linear cellular process of A = B = C (which is NOT ever how health flows through the body and not how a single disease process happens or resolves!)

The information is ALWAYS there, you just learn to lean into your favorite way of picking up on it:

You can feel intuitions in your abdomen — intuitive gut knowings.You can feel intuitions in your chest — heart centered intuitive connections.You can feel intuitions in your head — through visualizationsYou can feel intuitions all over your entire body in the form of physical sensations on your skin or deep in your musclesYou can receive intuitions through your dreams when you are deeply relaxed and in receptive sleep modes.

Your intuitive information is the best ally you have in making decisions that are unlimited in potential and open to many alternative possibilities.

 

 

Every single one of us can get intuitive information, but I meet so many people who don’t feel that they are intuitive.

Nothing could be further from the truth!  Our bodies are always speaking to us about what is going on inside of us, all we need to do is listen.

To me, intuition just means feeling connected to our inner guidance system. We each have at least one intuitive center that we can lean on to get deeper knowings about our health, about how to navigate relationships, or how to develop a soul career… in fact, there is no area of life where intuitive understanding can’t support us!

Today, let me walk you through how to figure out which way that intuitive information reaches you most easily.

Let’s figure out where your awareness lives!

 

How To Find Where Your Intuition Speaks To You:

 

 

 

Sit or lay down. Take a big deep breath in, and release it slowly.

Enter a place where you are neutral and not forcing any particular outcome at all.

You are relaxing into the feeling of being a receptor, just receiving. So this means:

you do not have to create any feelingsyou don’t have to force any responseyou do not have to come up with any answersyou don’t have to picture anything in your mind

Your job is only to be an active listener and feel in your body if you get a positive response at any time while connecting to these intuitive centers.

 

 

 

1. Drop your awareness all the way down your spine.

 

Feel the connection you have with the floor underneath of you — how it is holding you up… supporting you.

Bring your awareness down to the base of your spine. If you are sitting down, then feel down your back right into the area that you are sitting on. If you are laying down, feel the lower most portion of your spine, right at the base of your glut muscles.

As you bring awareness to this portion of your body, ask yourself this:

Do you tend to get a knowing deep down in your bones?Do you make decisions based on something indescribable all the way down to your core?Do you ever use the phrase “I knew it in my bones.”Do you ever get a feeling of deep comfort when making a decision?Do you ever feel like sometimes your body moves itself when making decisions — like you are able to just watch it play out, knowing your body automatically makes the decision for you and moves when the time is right.

If this is how you tend to know when to say *YES* to a decision, then you are likely to be a grounded, rooted kinesthetic intuitive.

To access your natural intuitive abilities, you can focus on doing a body scan when making decisions or asking intuitive questions.

How your body responds — if you feel an itch, if you feel pain, if you feel your body tense up, if you feel your body relax, if you feel comfort or if you feel anxious after you ask yourself a question — a body scan is your go to tool for easily accessible intuitive information.

 

If you are a kinesthetic intuitive, making a decision based on which choice provides you with a deep seated level of COMFORT is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

2. Next, move your awareness up to your lower abdomen, just below your belly button.

 

As you bring awareness to this portion of your body, ask yourself this:

Do you tend to get intuitive information flowing to you while you are creating?Do you find that doodling, or painting, or drawing, or sewing or cooking or gardening or doing any creative hobby is when your best answers and solutions arise?Do you find that sex or focusing on physical pleasure allows creative solutions to flow more easily?Do you find that after a massage or love making that you are able to open up to creative solutions?Do you find that when you are creating music or art or working on another hobby, time stands still?Do you tend to follow your pleasure to know when to say yes to an opportunity?

 

If creativity or pleasure is the strongest intuitive guidepost for you, then you are also likely a kinesthetic intuitive, like the grounded kinesthetic we met in the last section, but this is a more action oriented intuitive, one that needs to be doing something physical in order to allow the intuitions free range to flow.

For these types of creative or sensual kinesthetic intuitives, it is imperative that they get body work and allow for open ended, non-goal oriented expression.

Expressing themselves without an end point (so painting freely, not because you are hired to create a painting for a customer) is how these kinesthetic intuitives allow the answers to rise up from within.

So, knowing this, when trying to access intuitive information these types of intuitives often get great success when asking a question and then getting active — taking a hot sensual bath, receiving a massage, doodling on a sketch pad.

This type of physical intuition can also be assessed by responding to temperature — does the decision make you feel warmer or cooler? — can be a great intuitive tool for physical kinesthetic intuitives.

Visualizing a thermometer and how it goes up or down depending on your different choices and options, or simply feeling if your own body gets warmer or cooler in response to asking intuitive questions, can tell you everything you need to know about your best path!

Making a decision based on the choice that provides you with a deep seated feeling of PLEASURE (or delight!) is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

3. Next, let’s move the awareness up to your solar plexus. This awareness center is in your upper abdomen, between your belly button and rib cage.

 

As you bring your awareness to this portion of your body, ask yourself this:

Do you ever get a strong gut knowing?Do you know when to make a decision based on how it feels to you in your stomach?Do you feel a sense of freedom or empowerment when you know you have made the *right* choice?Do you get spontaneous answers and solutions best if you are exercising or totally enveloped in a task?Do you prefer to take action — any action — instead of doing nothing when facing a choice?Do you feel relief after making a decision, and would you rather make any decision than no decision at all?

 

If you know that you hit a home run when making a decision because you immediately feel in your gut that it’s the right call, then your type of intuition is through getting direct information into your solar plexus core.

It’s great to know if this is your intuitive type because those that receive gut knowings can work with this type of incoming information to go with their first, initial impression.

The gut response — quick, quiet, sure, immediate, direct knowledge — this is direct intuitive information. Gut intuitives should not deliberate or wait or weigh the pros and cons or over think decisions.

Gut intuitives get a distinct first impression that aligns them with the best possible outcome.

Waiting for more hits, second guessing the first gut response, letting the mind come in and overthink things, or dismissing the initial reaction and waiting for something bigger to come in can obscure intuitive information for these types.

Gut intuitives can work with their unique intuition flow by recognizing that the initial response is the most accurate, and they can carry a journal around to immediately jot down first impressions or desires, so that this direct intuitive information is not lost later on when second guessing or deliberating the decision.

They can also bring their awareness down to their solar plexus whenever faced with a decision, feeling whether there is an expansion (a yes) or a constriction (a no) in the solar plexus when asking for intuitive guidance.

 

Making a decision based on the choice that provides you with a deep seated feeling of POWER or FREEDOM is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

4. Next, let’s move our awareness up to the heart. This intuitive center is right in the middle of your chest.

 

As you bring your awareness to this portion of your body, as yourself this:

Do you make most of your decisions based on emotion?Do you feel like you’ve made all of the best decisions of your life based on it’s pull on your heart?Do you feel that you can sense other peoples emotions, even when they are not physically present in front of you?Do you feel so connected to others that you feel markedly drained or highly invigorated by spending time with them?Can you have tears spring to your eyes simply by witnessing other people’s emotions?Do you feel in your heart when you know exactly what you need to do?

 

If so, you are an emotional intuitive.

If intuitions come to you most easily through your heart energy center, then you can use your emotional guidance scale to make intuitive decisions.

You can feel in your heart when you align, or do not align, with a particular decision.

You can often sense a feeling of fullness in your chest or a lifted vibration when an option is intuitively right, and you can sense a heaviness or a subdued vibration when an option is not in your highest alignment.

Emotional intuitives can often feel the emotions of others, which sometimes helps in intuitive decision making because you can be privy to information that other people are trying to conceal.

Often emotional intuitives just *know* when other people are lying.

To help them use their heart to help them make big life decisions, emotional intuitives can imagine a cord leading from their heart to each particular decision, and follow the one that makes the strongest and most positive connection.

Visualizing a heart centered connection is a fabulous tool for emotional intuitives to use when trying to obtain the clearest intuitive picture.

 

Making a decision based on the choice that provides you with a deep seated feeling of LOVE and CONNECTION is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

5. Next, let’s move our awareness up to the throat. This intuitive center is in the center of your neck, in your throat.

 

As you bring your awareness to this portion of your body, ask yourself this:

Do you ever use talking or journalling to make big decisions?Do you ever use singing to de-stress or to amp up your energy before tackling a big task?Do you hum or whistle a lot?Do you like to make a list of pros and cons, do you like to talk big decisions through, do you prefer to bounce your ideas off of others?Do you feel like you get your best and most clear *YES* by talking out loud about your options and as you speak about each option, the decision becomes clear?

If journalling and using the written word or speaking out loud to hear your inner voice helps you to get that intuitive hit of clarity, then you are likely adept at connecting to your inner voice to get intuitive information.

For people who connect most easily with their inner truth through the use of vocal or written expression, it helps to simply get your mind out of the way and let the words arise in a free flow format — whether by talking out loud or stream-of-conscious writing.

If you have this as your most easily accessible form of intuition, it might help you to begin each day writing a page or two uncensored in a journal, or ending the day this way.

It might also help for you to talk out loud to yourself when making big decisions, instead of quietly thinking.

Go outside for a walk or get into your car and go on a drive — talking out loud the entire way.

Other techniques that can help are to use chanting, humming, singing and even simply whistling to help intuitive information flow through the throat chakra to be picked up faster.

Making a decision based on the choice that provides you with a deep seated feeling of TRUTH is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

6. Next, let’s move our awareness up to your mind’s eye. This intuitive center is in the center of your forehead.

 

As you bring your awareness to your mind’s eye, ask yourself this:

Do you ever get sudden pictures or images that seemingly come out of nowhere?Do you have a little voice in your head that allows you to make quick decisions (like which street to take when you are driving or to wake up at a certain time in the morning)?Do you ever see energy around others?Do you ever get distinct impressions or visions in your mind’s eye?Have you always been thought of as having an *active imagination* as a child?Do you get mental images that are seemingly co-incidental to reality — for example, you think of someone and then they call you later that day?

This is the most traditional way that intuitive information comes in… yet most of us filter out this information automatically, without even realizing we are filtering it out.

If you are a visual or auditory intuitive, you are still open to getting this information without filtering it out! Go you! This is awesome. Keep a journal and record all messages and visualizations as they come.

Make sure to express gratitude for these intuitions and to not discount them.

Receive them and acknowledge them… acknowledging and recording the intuitive information you get is the best way to keep strengthening your gift.

Making a decision based the choice that provides you with a deep seated feeling of WISDOM is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

7. Lastly, let’s move our awareness up to the very top of your head.

 

As you bring your awareness to this area, ask yourself:

Do you get your best intuitive information through dreams?Do you have vivid dreams, instructive dreams, dreams where you receive information or dreams where you get to speak to loved ones who have passed?Do you wake up knowing what to do better than when you went to sleep the night before?Do you feel like one of the best things you can do when facing an important decision is to sleep on it?Do you find more clarity after taking a quick cat nap?Do you enjoy mediation?Do you feel comfortable in silence?Do you often prefer to take a break and leave a stressful environment than stay in the struggle of it?

If so, your skill is silencing your brain to receive intuitive information that is intuitively guided.

These intuitive types can be the opposite of the gut intuitives — instead of acting on that very first gut feeling they have, often they need to take the time to let a day or two pass before making a big decision.

Sleep allows for information to integrate and process, and for intuitives that allow divine information to come in when the brain is most receptive and relaxed can be their smartest intuitive move.

These types of intuitives should absolutely have a dream journal by their bedside and should get into the habit of recording feelings, thoughts, words, images and sensations that they have while they are still in that open hypnagogic state, before becoming fully alert.

While in the hypnagogic state, your intuition can access information that is closed to it when the mind returns to it’s daytime state.

Another great tool for these types of intuitives is to work with meditation, as deep meditative states induce the same type of brain frequencies that deep sleep induces.

Even deeply relaxing yoga states can create this type of open brain function, and grounding (touching the earth directly) can help enhance this as well, particularly when you sleep, it will prolong the amount of time you are in that deep open restorative sleep state.

The core of the earth, the mind in restorative sleep, and the mind in a deep meditative state all resonate at the same frequency (the Schumann frequency) and you can use your ability to receive intuitive information while in that open frequency by utilizing all three modalities to make decisions: sleep, meditation, and grounding.

Making a decision based on the choice that provides you with a deep seated feeling of UNITY is your most accurate *YES*.

 

 

 

No matter which way you resonated with receiving intuitive info as you read through this list, you absolutely can use your body to feel your way to your best decision making.

Whether that’s for your health or any other decisions in your life (big or small….) get used to dropping your awareness into your body and feeling your way towards an answer.

If you’d like more help unlocking your intuition, discovering where in your body you feel intuitive guidance most easily and what your unique intuitive strengths actually are, save a spot in my upcoming class right here.

 

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I’d love to help you find and use your own intuitive strengths.

Yes, you do have them.

I’m here for you and I’ll show you. And I can’t wait to work with you.

Everything I offer comes from a very strong desire to support you in ways that I wish I had been supported.

Damn, if I had had just ONE SINGLE CLASS in med school on how to include intuition when helping patients through their healing journey, I could have been so much of a better physician from the jump.If I had had just ONE PERSON in my life encouraging me to drop into my heart space when making big life decisions, I could have felt so much less anxious than I have for the past (almost!) 5 decades of living.If I could have had just ONE CLASS to join into the help me quiet my overactive, overthinking mind and center instead into my gut knowings, I could have avoided so much of the trauma I have been through in my life… and I could have stopped my energy from getting drained over and over and over again by the world around me.

So I want that for you — I want to offer a group where you feel seen, supported and lovingly guided, and that’s why I created my Intuition Online Class, where I can guide you step by step through the process of you opening to your own unique intuitive gifts.

Yes, you absolutely do have them. I’ll show you how to find your intuition, hear your intuition, and feel empowered — instead of drained — by being empathetically intune to the world around you.

Join me right here, we start today:

 

To your totally unique soul energy…

 

xoxoxo,Laura Koniver MD

 

The post How To Hear Your Body’s Intuition Speaking To You & How I Discovered Mine appeared first on Intuition Physician.