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When we are tense we tighten up the sternomastoid muscle, which runs down the side of the neck, and this causes us to pull back our heads and jut the chin forward. This unnatural position causes a ripple of tension to go down the spine, through the pelvis, and even continue to the feet. This is why very tense people complain of jelly legs’. Imagine a column of dominoes set up; when the first one (the head) is tilted, the rest fall over. The importance of what you do with your head and shoulders cannot be overemphasized; after all, the head is such a heavy organ – about 14-21 lbs – that if it is not balanced, there is bound to be trouble.
How to Balance the Head
Sit on a chair with the spine straight, but not tensed. Look a few feet in front of you at the floor, (if your eyes are down you cannot shorten the muscles at the side of the neck), keeping your shoulders down, and raise your eyes enough to look comfortably around the room – this is the balanced position for your head. The chin is pointing downwards, not poking out in front. Whoever taught us to have our backs straight, heads up, shoulders back and chins up did us a great disservice; this is an unnatural position for the head and spine.
The Alexander Technique is one of the most successful methods of learning correct posture and how to move without tension. If you have a teacher near you it would be money well spent. Yoga is also very helpful.
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An amazing number of people come saying, ‘My doctor says I have low blood sugar and need to take frequent drinks with sugar.’ This chapter will show that in fact the opposite is true and that taking sugar makes the symptoms worse by making the pancreas work even harder. Hypoglycaemia could be said to be the opposite to diabetes. In diabetes the pancreas fails to produce the chemical called insulin which enables us to burn the food we eat to produce energy. In hypoglycaemia the situation is the reverse; the pancreas is over-stimulated, usually because of nervous exhaustion, and produces too much insulin. This causes the food we eat to be burned up too quickly and we cannot maintain the levels of blood glucose necessary to function normally.
The results are unpleasant physical effects such as a rapid heartbeat and feeling faint; because the brain cannot store glucose there are also unpleasant brain effects such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and neurotic behaviour. If you eat sugary foods, particularly when you are very hungry, the pancreas – which is already jittery and in top gear – pushes out more insulin than is necessary to cope with the sugar. The result is a rapid drop in blood sugar levels, and as we have seen the result is a flood of adrenalin.
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