I have used three hours a day for three years (more than three thousand hours) searching the internet for videos and studies that could give me answers. When I made my small test experiment with people with different diseases, I found that I could help them all with stress reduction. Regardless of diagnosis, I could help them reduce symptoms.
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Stress, Situations, Symptoms and Parkinson's Disease
It is in the nature of chronic diseases that symptoms manifest most when our survival instincts (fight, flight, freeze) take over our body's function. This is why the severity and range of symptoms can vary moment to moment, hour to hour, or day by day, according to how stressed or how relaxed we are in that moment, for most chronic diseases. Here, I use the word stress in its widest possible interpretation, to denote anything which may be troubling us in the present moment, e.g. feelings, accidents, trauma, troublesome relationships, financial problems, small unresolved situations from childhood, that may seem insignificant to an adult.
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Feeling Trapped and Parkinson's Disease
As a first step, we perhaps need to identify the places where we are stuck in our lives, those stressors which come with a sense of being trapped, the stressful things we can’t fight or flee from, and try to address these. This is because the tonic immobilization framework of PD predicts that it will be very hard to reduce symptoms in circumstances that our nervous system is constantly feeling trapped by a proximate threat. Examples include being in a toxic relationship, living in a house with neurotoxic mould infestations, workplace exposure a chemical agent, enduring a long and stressful daily commute to work.
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Eating Habits and Parkinson's Disease
This continues a series of posts which reframe major aspects of Parkinson’s Disease as habitual behaviours rather than symptoms. These are features of the condition which can be addressed and changed over time in order to assist with progressive symptom reduction. In this article, we consider eating and PD, but while there is a lot of literature on diets and supplements relevant to the condition, here we consider that the how and when we eat may be just as important or even more so than what we eat.
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Noradrenaline, Adrenaline, Dopamine and Parkinson's Disease
Dopamine itself is a building block of other neurotransmitters and hormones. Indeed, the reaction pathways can proceed further as:
DOPAMINE -> NORADRENALINE (made in the body brain from Dopamine) -> ADRENALINE (made in the body and brain from Noradrenaline).
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Chronic Stress and Parkinson's Disease
Some time ago, I discovered the strong correspondence between the symptoms of stress and the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Later, I found these conclusions were further strongly supported by the book “When the Body Says No” by Dr Gabor Mate. I highly recommend everyone with, or is involved with, Parkinson’s Disease read this book at least once.
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Fascia (Connective Tissue) and Parkinson's Disease
We discover that fascia is essentially the connective tissue which is found throughout our body, wrapping muscles and organs, nerves and bones. This connective tissue is incredibly important and has profound and primary roles in our biological system, health and wellness. This is an “emerging” field in medicine, but has been known about and worked with in other disciplines for a very long time.
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Meditation and Parkinson's Disease
Pragmatic answers for people with Parkinson's Disease can be gleaned by understanding that one of our fundamental problems is that we're stuck in the Freeze or "Playing Dead" stress mode of our parasympathetic nervous systems. This renders us completely unable to relax, which then necessarily leads to increasing inflammation and toxification of our brains and bodies, with the resulting increase in pain making us ever more stressed - a very vicious circle. Hence re-learning how to relax has to be a principle goal in our recovery: to regain the knowledge of how to switch our "rest & digest" parasympathetic nervous system back on for prolonged periods.
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Walking, Cycling and Dancing: Ankle Mobilization in Parkinson's Disease
In this article, we explore, with the assistance of my friend and mentor, Cheryl Townsley, Health & Wisdom Coach, how the concepts of stress interruption and nervous system resetting help us understand why walking, cycling and dancing - exercises that inherently involve mobilization of the ankle joints - are so beneficial for People with Parkinson's Disease (PwPs), and why we need to keep practicing these regularly.
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The Overlaps Between Stress and Parkinson's Disease, Part 2
Although the seven stage framework has been developed to describe acutely applied short duration stress, without any reference to PD, the very same framework also describes well the declining state of a PwPs body over time - if the disease is allowed to progress. Therefore, we believe that not only are PwPs permanently stuck in such stress response states, the degree of the stress that we are stuck in also moves through the stages as our situation is allowed to degenerated.
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The Overlaps Between Stress and Parkinson's Disease, Part 1
I have been reading Dr Jim White's "Stress Control" afresh, but now from the perspective of a Person with Parkinson's (PwP). This is a course written about stress itself, without any reference to or context in Parkinson's. Yet, anyone affected Parkinson's who reads it will be very familiar with what they find. I will be writing extensively on this subject, but to set the scene, first I would just like for us to consider a list Dr White provides which covers how stress can affect the body. People affected with Parkinson's the world over will recognize very many of these as the acute symptoms of their condition - but remember here Dr White is writing purely about Stress.
Read MoreMovement Recovery with Yo-Yo Stress Balls
Deb had the unique insight that a kind of stress ball (a squeezy, bouncy ball which fit the human hand well) which comes with an attached elastic string and a velcro finger or wrist strap would be hugely beneficial. She based this on our discoveries of how some hand-eye co-ordination movements are relatively easy for people with Parkinsonsim's. She was right!
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The Beast Within and Parkinson's Disease
There is a beast inside me. The beast is not my Parkinson's illness. The beast is myself. Parkinson's is just the empty cage. Let me explain, because although this is difficult reading, I believe it is important to share this epiphany.
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Caregiving for a Person with Parkinson's Disease
Here at Out-Thinking Parkinson's, it is our mission to help not only People with Parkinson's, but also the people who love and care for them, those who also have, in a very direct way, their own lives touched by the disease.
One of the most valuable contributions we can make, we feel, is simply to express the feelings and thoughts of what it is like to be a person affected by Parkinson's or to care for someone with the disease. We hope this humanization of PD will help others in the same situation come to terms with living with the disease and bring new understandings for the wider community too.
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