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February 27 - April 7, 2021
Movement is big medicine; it’s the signal to every cell in our bodies that no matter what kind of damage we’ve suffered, we’re ready to rebuild and move away from death and back toward life. Rest too long after an injury and your system powers down, preparing you for a peaceful exit. Fight your way back to your feet, however, and you trigger that magical ON switch that speeds healing hormones to everything you need to get stronger: your bones, brain, organs, ligaments, immune system, even the digestive bacteria in your belly, all get a molecular upgrade from exercise.
Today, movement-as-medicine is a biological truth for survivors of cancer, surgery, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, brain injuries, depression, you name
Normally, up to 75 percent of all prisoners who are released will be arrested again within five years. But among prisoners who’ve worked with animals, the recidivism rate tends to be as low as 10 percent.
“Contact with companion animals resulted in greater improvement of ADHD symptoms, better learning, and superior school performance when compared with the outdoor experience,” the scientists found. But that was just the beginning. “The companion animal experience also provided greater speech gains, better nonverbal behavior, improved attentiveness, and an increased ability to control impulse behavior.” Moreover, these differences were still evident six months after the program ended.
Beck and Katcher were also monitoring their subjects’ physiological responses, and they found that the dogs weren’t just entertaining the kids; they were creating a pharmacological reaction. Pet a dog for as few as five minutes and your heart rate and breathing will slow; your blood pressure will drop; your muscles will relax and your breathing will moderate. That’s amazingly fast. For a narcotic to relieve stress in five minutes, you’d need a face mask and a tank of nitrous oxide.
Or a jolt of the “love hormone”—oxytocin. That’s exactly what was happening, as later studies demonstrated: By petting those dogs, the children were receiving a surge of oxytocin, a hormone that triggers acute feelings of trust, compassion, and affection. Oxytocin is the brain chemical that makes us feel safe and loved. It relieves pain, helps you sleep, and even boosts your immune system, so you’re less likely to get sick. Oxytocin is the reason you feel stronger after a warm hug, and why new mothers are able to nurse; that hormonal boost not only helps a mother bond to her newborn but
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But where the story takes a peculiar turn is when you look at raw body rebuilding. Take heart attack patients: If you own a dog, you’re twice as likely to survive the first year after a major coronary incident.
The real question isn’t what we get from animals. It’s what we lose without them. If the animal-human bond improves our lives in every way—if the sick get stronger, the traumatized feel safer, our children learn faster, our prisons become safer—then the reverse is also true: Without animals, we’re weaker. We’re sicker. We’re angrier, more violent, more afraid.
the five words that define Amish life: Slow down. Savor your world.
Amish district debates for itself whether this new thing will help them learn patience, self-control, and empathy. If not, maybe the smart play is to avoid it.
Patience and kindness don’t show up on demand; they’re disciplines that require constant practice, and there is no better boot camp for learning those skills than hitching your survival to your ability to discern—and respect—the needs of another creature.
When you work out, the pleasure centers in your brain are flooded with endorphins and dopamine, the “happy hormones” that make you feel the way Dwayne Johnson always looks: relaxed, strong, confident, intelligent. Brain opioids are so powerful that if you exercise, you can lower your “mental health burden” by nearly 25 percent and enjoy a much higher ratio of positive mental health days—a whopping 43 percent—than non-exercisers experience.
If you spend half your life getting a daily superdose of dopamine, what happens when you suddenly quit? Do you go through withdrawal, like anyone else kicking a chemical habit? Judging by Ashling’s and Zeke’s symptoms—insomnia, anxiety, mood and weight swings, acute depression—it certainly seemed a lot like they’d gone cold turkey. That hypothesis could explain why competitive athletes, who work out more than anybody else, may be nearly twice as vulnerable to depression as non-athletes. Did they pass some dangerous, invisible cutoff at which the cure became an affliction?
pets are a great way to spur the release of oxytocin, a hormone that functions much like dopamine.
Like acupuncture and meditation, equine therapy lives in that anecdotal world where plenty of credible people are convinced it works but can’t prove why. As a medical approach, it’s both older than the Hippocratic oath and newer than Lasik; ancient Greek healers, including Hippocrates himself, prescribed horseback rides as a treatment for chronic pain and emotional maladies, and by World War One it had been adopted by British hospitals to help heal wounded soldiers. Yet in the United States, equine therapy didn’t become widespread until the 1990s, when mental health workers began testing its
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Horse-based therapies have also shown impressive results for issues ranging from combat trauma and sexual abuse to anger management, eating disorders, and addictive behaviors.
During his lifetime of research and one-man experimentation, the Iceman came to believe that cold plunges were a lost secret of supreme health, and he makes a compelling case.
It all came down to oxygen: much the way you build a fire by blowing on it, you can crank up your internal furnace by sucking in air. That’s why you gasp and shriek when someone pushes you into the pool; the cold shock triggers your lungs into hyperdrive, accelerating your circulatory system. Super-oxygenating your blood not only warms you up, but calms you down; and because a clear head helps you survive in dire straits, your brain quickly releases soothing hormones to help you (ahem) chill out.
Put it all together, Wim Hof proclaims, and you’ll see why an occasional blast of cold should be treasured, not avoided. We inherited a tremendous gift, but we became so focused on constant coziness that we missed the connection between temporary discomfort and lifelong health.
Harvard Business Review even zeroed in on Wim to find out why workers who take cold showers are less likely to call in sick.
you want to burn fat, relieve depression, get stronger, increase mobility, and stay healthier, you might want to start with blue lips.
“Oxygen fires every cell in your body,” Laird says. “Breath is what dictates the failure. If you look at any fighter, any athlete, as soon as they start mouth-breathing, panting, they’re done. You can do without food for weeks, without water for days, but cut off the oxygen, and you’re gone in minutes. Breathing is your power.”
That evening, he went online and memorized the three specific steps of Wim Hof’s breathing drills (thirty to forty power breaths; deep exhale and hold; deep inhale and hold; repeat for three more rounds).
