Digging deeper: Biological Resilience part 1

In my last post, I gave an overview of the "Four Domain" model of resilience.  The next several posts will explore each of these domains further and provide some guidelines to how you might go about "building up," your resilience in each of these areas (at least according to the model).

The first domain, the biological, I defined as "the ways our physical body deals with the stress of life."  Though it sounds pretty simple on the surface, there are books and books written about this stuff.  Let's take a bottom up perspective and start with the smallest parts of this: molecules!

Our body is a huge bio-chemical factory!  Everything from the hair on our heads to the hormones in our veins has been manufactured by the brilliant cells of our body.  Tiny signals, both inside and outside our cells, provide information that influence what kinds of other chemicals our body makes, in what quantity it makes them and what our cells themselves should do (grow, shrink, move, change shape...etc.).  

For example, if you scrape your knee while chasing after your dog, Tiger, on a long run by the beach near your home, the injured cells around the scrape release tons and tons molecules that all do things to ultimately 
help your knee heal.  One of these chemicals, arachidonic acid (AA) tells the nerves around the scrape (and ultimately your conscious mind) that there is something painful that has happened and you should probably take a look at your knee before resuming your chase.   Another one of these chemicals, serotonin, is released by the platelets nearest to the cuts in your knee, encouraging other nearby platelets to clump up and form a clot to prevent too much bleeding.  A third chemical, IL-6, tells your immune system to rev-up and be on guard, making sure that any virus, bacteria, fungus or parasite living on the sand in your scrape get identified and quarantined.   This all happens without us thinking about it at all and its just one of the myriad things our body does naturally.  

Amazingly, there are ways that you can make your body more resilient (or more vulnerable) to a knee scrape, a cold or a more complex stressor.  How?  By modifying your baseline chemical balance before and after the stressor.   How do we do that?  

Arachidonic Acid

Let's dive into this next week!

-B

p.s.  For those of you who want a sneak peak, here's a link to an article I like about inflammation and a link to the website of one of my favorite authors on food and brain health.