Your emotions affect your brain chemistry. Your brain chemistry affects your body chemistry. Your body chemistry affects your health.
Back when I graduated from Medical School in 1998, I didn’t think that mind could affect your health to that extent. But after years of talking to patients, I no longer am that lame. Everyone has heard of friends that go on vacation and become pregnant.
Recently, I had a friend that was going to our church that had hot flashes. So I gave her a bottle of progesterone cream, and asked her to try it. I saw her the next month and asked her how it was going. She said she never took the progesterone cream. She no longer had hot flashes. She and her husband took a 2 week vacation in Maui, and the hot flashes were gone. Everyone should take a 2 week vacation in Maui!
Kiecolt-Glasser, PhD from Ohio State University took 28 men and women with a history of hay fever and seasonal allergies to investigate how fear / stress / anxiety would affect their allergies. The first day, she made them read a magazine in the morning and then did an allergy pin prick test. She measured the diameter of the wheal. A wheal is a raised “hot” red bump on the site of the skin from the area where the allergen was pricked into the skin. The bigger the wheal the more reactive, the body is to the allergen. On the second day, she made them give a speech on a video camera, and then graded them. Or she made them do math problems with paper. Then she did a prick test. The wheals were 75% larger after stress. The next full day she followed up with a third prick test. The wheals were still larger. She concluded, the delayed allergic response is “really what’s ugly about allergies. The are typically unresponsive to antihistamines.”
Ohio State immunologist, Dr. Ronald Glaser states that increased anxiety is associated with increased production of catecholamines (adrenaline) and interleukin-6. These two compounds are responsible for the delayed allergic response.
What I find in my medical practice is that women with fear / stress / anxiety have heightened allergies sometimes so much so that they can be considered to be “chemically sensitive”. These chemically sensitive women can have headaches to perfumes and newsprint. They have multiple allergies. They typically have a hypersensitivity to smell or complete loss of smell. Here are the 3 questions I usually ask them.
1. Do you have a hypersensitivity to smell?
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2.Put your feet together, stand on your tip toes, and close your eyes. This is a Rhomberg test. The more you wobble the more sick you are. Compare yourself to a healthy young teen.
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3. Does a cup of coffee keep you up all night? Or are you more sensitive to drugs than your friends? This means that you have trouble excreting caffeine or the drug. This means you have trouble excreting all chemicals including xenoestrogens on your skin.
Show me a women with these signs and I’ll show you someone that is Estrogen Dominant and with low libido, if they haven’t gotten rid of xenoestrogens.
So people with fear/stress/anxiety have increased allergies and decreased excretion of all chemicals including xenoestrogens.
Endometriosis patients have endometriosis because xenoestrogens cause endometriosis. Endometriosis patients have increased allergies and increased loads of xenoestrogens because they have fear / stress / anxiety issues. Endometriosis patients have increased xenoestrogens because they cannot excrete them because of fear / stress / anxiety issues.
Researchers found allergies and asthma were higher among women with endometriosis than among women in the U.S. population, and even higher if they had other diseases. They discovered that 61 percent of the women with endometriosis reported allergies (this compares to 18 percent of the general female population) and 12 percent had asthma (this compares to 5 percent). 72 percent of woman that had endometriosis and an endocrine disease had allergies. If a woman had endometriosis plus fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, the rate for allergies rose to 88 percent.
So basically it is this, fear makes you retain xenoestrogens. Xenoestrogens are “strange” estrogens. Xenoestrogens (environmental estrogens) make your sexual desire lower. Conversely, eliminating xenoestrogens boosts libido.
