HEALTH-TIME: The Fourth Dimensional Nature of Healing
by Henri Roca, MD, Clinical Functional Medicine Specialist
You might think of the three dimensional framework of health as those things related to space – where we find ourselves, how we move within that space, and the choices we make within that space.
These aspects incorporate our social settings and relationships; our access to health food, water, and availability for exercise; exposure to nature or toxins; our rest and recharge; and our professional lives. These actions occur in this instant, in this moment, in the present. Yet healing is an action that occurs over time. Time is a key and missed component necessary to optimize health.
When an accident happens and structural damage occurs to your body, it is clear to everyone that a trip to the Emergency Room or the Surgeon is necessary. When you are exposed to a virus or bacteria, and become sick, it is clear that a visit to a provider and some sort of intervention is needed. In both cases, there is a perceived cause and a rather immediate effect. When the fourth dimension of time is so closely related to our three dimensional health, we find our selves easily motivated to access care and implement a plan to return ourselves to the best possible health.
These cause-and-effect relationships are rare. Health is a present state evaluation that we assess and describe in the moment of our reflection. Healing is a process that takes variable lengths of time. Without that direct realization of cause and effect, motivation to change is lacking. And for the young who lack the ability of foresight or the realization of human frailty, the motivation to make health-related changes are even more difficult. Given how our brains are wired, this makes perfect sense. We are hard wired and finely tuned to identify situations that may threaten our lives. How we define that threat is dependent upon what we have been trained to believe or have come to believe ourselves. Once we identify a threat, we take quick action. It makes sense that we pay particular attention to immediate cause-and-effect.
But what happen when there is no demonstrable immediate cause-and-effect.
We know that nutritional choices, movement choices, self-compassion, and stress resiliency have dramatic effects on health in the long term. And that’s the problem – the long term. An intellectual knowledge that a high carb diet can lead to diabetes is not the visceral experience of an immediate cause-and-effect relationship. Intellectual knowledge rarely compels behavior change. You have to feel the knowingness that your actions are causing negative impacts to your life and health to reliably complete the hard work of changing behavior. And that hard work takes time. There is no quick fix.
Given our hard wiring for immediate assessment and quick action, the medicopharmaindustrial-healing-complex has evolved to sell us the illusion of quick fixes: have PTSD, do EMDR; have obesity, get a gastric bypass; have skin issues, take this cream; have memory loss, take this supplement?
This process further clouds the health-time dimension by attempting to convince us that we can wait for symptoms to occur and then decide to attack that symptom. We wait until the damage is done before even trying to understand its cause or attempting to engage in health-related behaviors that could work to reverse the dysfunction. As a result we have a population that is burdened with many symptoms and a high degree of illness. We have a sick population with smoldering dysfunctional processes creating ever more diagnoses and disabilities. Our population has little to no awareness of the Health-Time continuum.
Some key observations regarding the health-time continuum are:
Health-Time is lifelong. It extends well before birth, through in-utero time, then throughout every age of life and is projected into the immediate and distant future. We may call this our Deep Health-Time Assessment and understanding health from this perspective is necessary for healing
Health-Time is a marathon made up of innumerable individual choices and interminable actions. Bringing our awareness to what we have the power to shift in the moment within the framework of Deep Health-Time and maintaining those actions are necessary for healing. The Present is the only time we actually live. We miss our present opportunities for choice when we focus on the past or the future. In Health-Time, even though past behaviors and patterns are necessary to understand and future projections are important trajectories for choice, the choices occur only in the present. All three – past, present, and future - are necessary for Health-Time.
Health-Time is a place of persistence and patience. We need to keep our eyes fixed on the dysfunctions revealed in our Deep Health-Time Assessment and have patience. The health changes we seek may occur over time and sometimes build very gradually.
Health-Time requires us to Morph Our Minds. Our beliefs in immediate gratification, our desire for quick fixes, and our search for easy answers reflect ways of thinking and believing. Every time we feel at all uncertain, uncomfortable, or unhappy in any way, we are receiving a message that our current beliefs are not serving us well. These are all opportunities to reflect on those beliefs and potentially make new choices or create new beliefs that can serve our health better. Morphing Our Minds can help us get unstuck so that we can successfully navigate Health-Time.
Health-Time is a place of self-empathy and compassion. In the course of changing actions and beliefs, we will inevitably occasionally fail. During these times we have the opportunity to learn the most or to beat ourselves up. Choose empathy and self-compassion and nurture a joy of learning through failing.
Having a robust Health-Time perspective facilitates healing and healthy choices that can optimize our life and health.
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