Feeling tired and blue? Learn to improve your mood and increase energy by healing your gut-brain connection. The gut-brain connection refers to the communication back and forth of the intestinal tract and the brain. Recent research has discovered a complex system of communication involving the gut, the brain, the immune and endocrine systems, and all the microorganisms of the intestinal tract.
Chances are you're not thinking of your vertebrae when you suddenly feel like you could grow a cactus on your tongue and realize you haven't drunk water all day. Yet just like every other part of your body, your spine needs adequate water to function properly. And so hydration plays an important role in back health.
At Parkside, we're always looking not only to relieve the immediate discomfort a condition may be causing, but also to treat the underlying cause of an issue. When it comes to joint pain, the cause is often inflamation. Let's look at how small changes in your lifestyle, along with visits to your friendly neighborhood massage therapist, can help fight the fire of inflammation.
Because modern life doesn’t require us to be active, movement and exercise can often feel like a chore. Humans have had no evolutionary pressure to develop a love of exercise because it used to be built into daily life. It can feel like something we should do, instead of something we naturally want to do. Dance can keep us physically fit, make us smarter, and get us in touch with the joy of movement.
What allows us to balance on a bicycle without having ridden for years? Do our muscles remember? Well yes and no. When we’re learning how to do something for the first time, it takes conscious effort. But after we’ve got it down, it’s stored in our procedural memory bank, located in our trusty cerebellum.
Habits. They make or break us. Maybe you've heard the quote, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” And you may know that sleep is really important for our health. Even if your life is anything but routine in other ways, this is one area where it pays handsomely to establish a routine, or at least a small set of rules that you follow faithfully.
Ah, fresh air! Natural light. So nice. Remember being completely awestruck at the sight of a vast landscape? The kind where your whole body relaxes, your mind is humbled, and you feel immensely grateful that you get to be alive and witness such vast beauty? Turns out these mental and physical effects have been observed and measured by scientists, proving that time in nature is good for our physical, emotional and social health.
