Wellness as a Family Business

Hi Byte Wellness Fam!

How are you feeling?

I’m feeling pensive. Been thinking a lot lately about all the clues to our personal health and wellness that our ancestors hold.

One way to learn from ancestors is to talk to family members and friends in older generations. Aunties and Mamas have all sorts of folk wisdom that their elders passed down in an attempt to care for themselves and each other. Not all these people had college degrees, but they were experts in taking care of themselves- particularly at a time in American history where they couldn’t rely on the U.S. government or other institutions to do right by them.

For most of Black folks’ time in the United States, we’ve had inadequate access to healthcare resources. In 1965, much of healthcare was still segregated, and the federal government was still funding hospitals that refused to serve Black patients. That’s what the MLK was talking about in his often-quoted line about injustice in health being the worst, most inhuman type (paraphrase).

Our ancestors living in the U.S. at that time knew they only had themselves to rely on. That’s an unfortunate lesson that has been reinforced for so many of us in present times. Just look at anecdotes and statistics around Black women’s child birth experiences or Black folks’ inability to get quality hospital care while fighting for our lives against COVID-19.

We have an obligation to ourselves, to future generations and to our ancestors’ legacy to do the best we can to support our own wellbeing. We should be able to rely on our healthcare system a primary wellness resource, but data (and experiences) show us it’s secondary at best. We need to be our first, best resource.

We spent a lot of time on that notion in this week’s #PhyteWellWednesday Workshop. Watch above to get into the conversation.

We also broke down the stress and wellness relationship. Long story short, thanks to the way our ancient human ancestors evolved to stay alive, we’re especially sensitive to stress .

Constant psychological stress triggers our body’s fight or flight mechanism. Our fight of flight mechanism prompts increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol and increased inflammation.

Increased inflammation probably serves the purpose of pre-emptive wound healing (which our ancient ancestors would’ve needed to deal with the things that caused them stress- like a dangerous animal).

Inflammation serves an important purpose in he short-term, but if it lasts too long, chronic inflammation increases our chances of developing conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, unhealthy weight gain, heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancer!

It’s likely that our ancestors didn’t have to face much risk of chronic inflammation.

Probably, once our ancestors got away from the animal unscathed, the fight or flight response would normalize and the inflammation would die down..until the next time they we faced with a similar threat.

In our modern world, we’re not as likely to run into physical threats as our ancestors. The things that trigger psychological stress are likely to be social threats, which don’t disappear as quickly as that animal our ancestors managed to scare away.

What is a social threat? A social threat is considered anything in the social world that our brain reads as endangering our well-being. Our brain sees threats in micro-aggressions and all-out discrimination; it sees threats in poverty-not having enough money for our basic necessities; it sees threats in structural racism and other systems of marginalization that result in repeated disadvantage, even if there’s no individual human causing the harm.

These realities can be stressful for sure. And it’s hard not to process those threats as psychological stress. If/When we do, our bodies respond just like our our ancestors’ used to in the face of an animal.

When we live with these stressors day in and day out, that chain of events that leads from stress to fight-or-flight to increased inflammation becomes a never-ending cycle.

Suddenly, the acute inflammation that’s helpful for wound-healing and should die down within 24-48 hours once the threat is removed doesn’t. It becomes chronic inflammation, lasting weeks and months, and maybe even years. Unlike short-lived acute inflammation which heals, chronic inflammation is a nasty so-and-so which kills (literally).

So, you see how we’ve got to use our tools to manage our stress levels? Watch the video above to see how we can use the 3As to shift our perception and block social threats from creating stress in the first place.

And, because some stress seems unavoidable, make sure you have a method of lowering your stress levels physiologically (either though exercise or meditation or deep breathing, or even socializing with supportive people).