The body is a complex, interconnected system. Unfortunately, conventional medicine often ignores the interconnected nature of the body, focusing on addressing symptoms and problems in isolation. This can work for some conditions, but it can also ignore some key causes of stress and disease. If you want to get to the core of your health concerns, then you need to go deeper with bioenergetics. This is a multidisciplinary and holistic view of the body and health. It helps some people find deeper and more lasting health, happiness, and life vitality.
Here’s what you need to know about this type of therapy and how it can change your health and wellbeing.
» Read our complete long-read article on the Bioenergetics Circuit
» Adrenal Fatigue FAQs
» Take our 3-minute test to see if you may have Adrenal Fatigue
The flow of energy is essential to every process and function in your body. And when the flow of that energy becomes impaired or blocked, you experience poor health and disease. Unfortunately, contemporary medicine often ignores this essential function. Bioenergetics focuses on the flow of this energy and on how energy is exchanged within and between your body and the external world.
Almost all the energy in your body indirectly or directly uses one of these three processes. They're also the focus of most bioenergetics work:
There are two main types of biochemical reactions in your body. Exergonic reactions are energy-releasing, and endergonic reactions are energy-consuming.
Bioenergetics seeks to understand the energy changes and blockages in these biochemical reactions. These reactions are essential to metabolism, which involves several complicated processes including:
When there is an imbalance or a blockage in your body’s energy flow, it can disrupt all of these processes. It will also cause stress and affect you physically.
The field of bioenergetic therapy looks to address physical, emotional, and cognitive conflicts. When you undergo this therapy, you work on freeing up the emotions that cause stress and energy blockages. It does this by connecting your personality, your emotions, and your body to release stress and tension. Basically, this is the idea that your body affects your mind and vice versa.
If you experience mental or emotional issues, then talk therapy can help. And if you’re stressed and tense, then you can try physical therapies like yoga and massage to alleviate the problem. But there are few therapies that address both the physical and the mental/emotional at the same time.
This is what bioenergetics does. It’s a deep dive into the link between the body and the mind. And it's also an attempt to understand the human personality in terms of the body. This process examines body functions like breathing and feeling in terms of the restrictions placed on them. These restrictions can be in the body, in the emotions, or in the individual’s understanding.
This therapy includes an analysis of character and personality along with physical exercises and techniques to identify and release muscle tension. This can encourage the body to heal itself and teach you to overcome the emotions, attitudes, and behaviors that detract from your enjoyment of life.
The flow of energy in your body can be analyzed using bioresonance. This is a therapy that uses a machine to analyze the energy that’s emitted by key points around your body. These machines may help identify places where the energy is blocked or unbalanced, providing valuable information for recovery. This is a non-invasive, safe, and painless test that is becoming more popular around the world as people seek balance in their lives and their health.
If you’re feeling unwell and your doctor can’t find anything wrong, then it might be worth looking into this kind of testing. It can be performed at certain alternative health providers or you can even get at-home testing kits that use your hair and saliva samples to test your energy flows.
The primary goal of bioenergetics is to relieve chronic muscle tensions. These aren’t natural. They develop in the body as a means of survival and are associated with ego values such as power and prestige.
When you undergo this kind of therapy, it involves physical exercises that attempt to merge your self-image with your reality. It can help you develop an understanding of body tensions as defenses against past trauma and unblock the flow of energy that causes these tensions for more open, joyful living.
There are 3 basic principles to bioenergetics therapy:
Working on these principles can help you to breathe more deeply, move more freely, and feel your emotions more completely. The goal of this work is not only to improve your health but to deepen your understanding of your body and to introduce you to a more vibrant life.
Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome (AFS) is an often-ignored condition caused by stress. When you’re stressed, it activates your NeuroEndoMetabolic (NEM) stress response. This stress response protects your body from the damaging effects of stress and also causes changes throughout your body that help you react to the cause of the stress. Basically, it activates your flight or fight response by causing your adrenal glands to pump cortisol into your body.
The NEM stress response is an ancient system, meant to be activated for short periods, during times of physical stress. As the world changed, this system hasn’t kept up with the changes. It doesn’t know that you don’t have to run from a predator. So, when work pressures, poor health, or relationship problems make you feel stressed, the NEM stress response reacts the exact same way.
This becomes a problem when you’re chronically stressed, as so many people are in the modern world. Ongoing, unrelenting stress forces your adrenals to produce high levels of cortisol over a long period. This not only causes the NEM stress response to become unbalanced, it also fatigues the adrenals and causes malfunctions throughout your body.
There are 6 circuits involved in and affected by the NEM stress response and they can become unbalanced and malfunctioning when you have AFS. This includes the Bioenergetics Circuit, which will negatively affect how your body makes and uses energy. The reverse is true as well. Problems with your energy flow due to emotional, mental, or physical restrictions will also impact the health of this circuit and could bring on or worsen adrenal fatigue and the associated problems.
The Bioenergetics Circuit is made up of the thyroid, pancreas, and liver. It’s the least understood circuit but is responsible for producing the body’s energy. So, when this circuit becomes unbalanced because of AFS, the results can be widespread and catastrophic for your health.
In the initial stages of AFS, metabolism is increased in order to help the body cope with demands on it. Problems associated with this stage are typically easy to resolve, but as AFS progresses and the imbalances in the Bioenergetics Circuit worsen, it can cause a range of problems to do with metabolism such as blood sugar problems, obesity, sleeping disorders, leaky gut, and dysbiosis or imbalances in the gut bacteria.
All of these problems will worsen imbalances in this circuit and cause additional demands and stress for the individual components of the circuit. It may also worsen any energy blockages that you’re already experiencing, which is why bioenergetics therapy, which may help to address these issues, could be very helpful. Here are some of the energy blockages that can occur when you have AFS:
Your pancreas is a key organ in energy production. It controls insulin levels and produces enzymes that help to break down food. When you have AFS or when your energy flows are impaired, the resulting inflammation can impair the pancreas, resulting in blood sugar problems and low energy.
Insulin, the key hormone produced by the pancreas, pushes sugar from the bloodstream into the cell. After a meal high in refined carbohydrates, insulin levels spike to carry excess sugar into fat cells for storage as well as the liver. Under normal circumstances, this is a short-lived phenomenon that lasts 1-2 hours at most. As sugar is pushed into the cell, blood sugar drops. The pancreas will slow down its insulin secretion until the next meal cycle.
However, if a person is chronically overeating or stressed, both of which lead to high blood sugar, the pancreas’ output of insulin will continue to be driven higher. This hyper-insulinemia condition, over time, can lead to fat cell saturation. This is when the fat cells can no longer accept excess sugar storage. Like a train already full of passengers, the excess will not be able to be packed into the cramped train cabin. Excess sugar in this case “spills over” back into the bloodstream, raising blood sugar.
This hyperinsulinemia is a precursor of type 2 diabetes mellitus (also called adult-onset diabetes mellitus or AODM). Insulin resistance has always been the proposed culprit of type 2 diabetes. This is when cells become resistant to insulin.
The traditional treatment of AODM has thus been to administer medication that enhances insulin activity or, as a last result, delivers insulin directly. While this makes sense for type 1 diabetes, where there is an absolute deficiency of insulin in the body, the same cannot be said for type 2.
Most type 2 diabetes patients given insulin or insulin-potentiating medication improve, but only for a short time. This insulin forces excessive sugar into the fat cell when the cell already is saturated and does not address the root cause. The key to reversing type 2 diabetes lies in reducing the overproduction of insulin from the pancreas.
The best way to reduce insulin is to avoid excess refined carbohydrates in the diet plus intermittent fasting to force the body to burn fat for fuel, thereby reducing the fat saturation and thus creating room for sugar to be stored as it normally should, without the spill-over effect. This is why most people with AODM, especially those that are overweight, have a fatty liver as pre-condition.
Insulin, when excessive, can trigger hypoglycemia. The most common symptom is a person experiencing a sluggish feeling not long after a meal high in refined carbohydrates such as pasta or bread. This is also called a food coma.
The body's internal sensors are activated when this situation occurs. The immediate response is to trigger more adrenaline to be released from the adrenal medulla. The adrenaline effect is to increase blood sugar for survival. This is accomplished by various mechanisms, including the conversion of protein into sugar in the muscles as well as converting sugar storage in the form of glycogen in the liver into sugar. Blood sugar thus rises. This, in turn, can trigger more insulin release from the pancreas. This loop, if allowed to propagate over time, can lead to AODM as discussed above.
The role insulin plays in the stress response cannot be underestimated. Along with cortisol and adrenaline, they form the key triad in the blood sugar regulation of the body.
The liver stores sugar once it receives it from the bloodstream through the action of insulin. Excess sugar is stored in the liver as triglycerides. Excess triglycerides beyond the liver’s ability to store will be converted into fat, resulting in a fatty liver over time. The liver will then produce LDL, in an attempt to get rid of the fat, to create more storage for fat. LDL (bad cholesterol ) thus rises in the bloodstream and may trigger atherosclerosis.
A high triglyceride level, along with low LDL (as the liver tries to package the unwanted fat by making LDL and excreting it) are thus classic symptoms of Metabolic syndrome. Having a well functioning liver is therefore an important part of the Bioenergetic circuit's normal functioning to start.
When your energy levels are low because of AFS or energy flow problems, the liver can start to slow down. This will result in a build-up of metabolites in your liver, which are then released back into the body to damage the cells.
As the liver becomes dysfunctional, it will also affect the release of glucose, which will further impair the flow of energy in your body.
The thyroid produces the hormones T3 and T4 which are essential to metabolism, so as this organ starts to malfunction because of AFS, it will severely impair your energy production and flow.
A body under stress will produce more adrenaline and insulin, and excessive adrenaline has the direct effect of converting T4 into rT3 (reverse T3) as a braking mechanism, instead of into T3 as it normally should. rT3 is a braking mechanism designed to slow down thyroid function. Its actions are opposite to that of T3. This is the body’s way of slowing down to allow recuperation of the Bioenergetic circuit when faced with stress.
There should be no surprise that those with high stress or adrenaline levels often suffer from low thyroid function as well. A common mistake is to administer external thyroid hormones to force the production of t3 and t4 when it is against the body’s wishes. It should come as no surprise that the body will often resist this approach through a mechanism known as thyroid resistance.
This is clinically evidenced by the fact that a large percentage of those put on thyroid replacements to increase energy either feel no difference or end up requiring an ever larger dose over time to achieve the same effect. Worse is that some may feel actually worse.
Bioenergetics therapy could be a good way to relieve stress and strain at the source. This could help prevent you from developing AFS or alleviate it. This type of therapy may also help to correct imbalances in the Bioenergetics Circuit by increasing and unblocking the flow of energy in your body, improving the health of the individual components, and encouraging natural healing.
This therapy could also be helpful in alleviating AFS because it’s safe and gentle. When you have AFS and your Bioenergetics Circuit is unbalanced, positive changes that are meant to improve your energy levels can cause additional stress. This is the last thing you want when you have AFS. But if you do gentle exercises that are tailored to the condition of your body it could help give you more energy. It could also start to repair some of the damages and imbalances caused by AFS.
Just make sure that you work with an experienced or professional on this therapy. You should also get the advice and guidance of a medical practitioner who’s aware of your AFS and overall condition before you begin. This will help you avoid additional stress and a worsening of your adrenal fatigue. They may also be able to help you find an alternative health practitioner who can help with your unique condition.
If you’re stressed or generally unwell but can’t find a specific cause, then it’s time to look for more holistic systems of health. There are numerous therapies that look at your body, your personality, and your mind as a whole. These can be very helpful when used correctly.
This includes bioenergetics, which will help you understand how energy flows throughout your cells and your body. It will also help to identify blockages and impairments that could be impacting your health. This can make all the difference in choosing a recovery path that’s right for your overall condition. Here’s how to do that:
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» Read our complete long-read article on the Bioenergetics Circuit
» Adrenal Fatigue FAQs
» Take our 3-minute test to see if you may have Adrenal Fatigue
Bioenergetics refers to the way that energy flows throughout your cells and throughout your body. It’s often neglected or completely ignored in conventional medicine. However, if you’re unwell and can’t find a specific cause, then your energy flow might be the answer.