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Have a Heart that Exercises your Power of Choice

Blog post written by Dr Trevor Griffiths, co-author of ‘Emotional Logic’.

 

I discovered the other day, to my great surprise, that men are as emotionally literate as women, but they simply handle their emotional energy in a different way. Those people who say that men are rational and women emotional are like the dodos of old, unable to fly and heading for extinction.

If you doubt what I am saying, please check out the string of books produced by the award-winning neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. He found that people, men and women equally, need their emotions to make decisions whenever a choice is needed between equally rational options. The reason is: your emotions are gender-neutral, non-verbal information about your heart-level values. They are like the lights on a car dashboard, or blips on a radar screen, telling you that something is changing out there and needs attention. But they need interpreting to make the right decisions for action.

 

Emotions tell us about our values

Believe it or not, men have values! The thing is, though, that men tend to simply act straight away on the values-driven emotional movements within their hearts, their inclinations, not bothering to name their emotional feelings. Women (however you define gender) tend to be better at naming and talking about those inner movements. But there is one thing that men and women truly do share equally here. They both have heart-level values that move them. And they both, in different ways, tend not to be good at shifting their conversations from talk about feelings or behaviour onto naming their values and agreeing action plans that could build more responsive relationships around them. They tend to get stuck in a rut, a bit mindlessly, with either their feelings or their behaviours. That’s not good. So I wanted to find a way to change that.

 

By recognising our values we can make action plans rather than simply reacting

It so happens that my wife was quite pleased with my discovery of this. She’s a GP, and started using the method I came up with in her work. Cutting a long story short, we ended up writing a book together about what happened, getting permissions to tell the anonymised stories of how the emotional card-sorting tool and the Loss Reaction Worksheets transformed the way she handled common mental illnesses, and suicidal thoughts, and self-harming or compulsive behaviours for both men and women. I then added some chapters about how I had used the method in various community settings, at what I call the rough end of emotional literacy, where accumulating unrecognized grieving can lead to violence or other outbursts that irritate the law. In both settings, private and public, the same truths emerged. Accumulating hurts affect physical, mental, and social health equally. And learning a bit about healthy emotional adjustments to change reversed the harm.

 

The power of emotional literacy is gender-neutral but men and women tend to handle their emotional energy differently

If men are willing to learn how their heart-level loss emotions are there to protect their values, in other words for good reasons, they could harness their energy to make better decisions. They could then also become more responsive in their relationships around guess-checking someone else’s values. It opens a whole new way of talking that brings reasoning and emotions into a healthy partnership. Doing so usually sorts out the symptoms that often trouble people quietly in their hearts, or trouble them noisily outwards, removing their peace and driving them and perhaps others scatty. It is all so correctable with a bit of understanding and self-respect for naming values!

“So, what’s important to you in this situation?” Or, even better, “So, what did you miss when things went wrong?” Or, closer still to the point of this blog, “Listen, I’m on your side, okay. What are you worried you might have lost in this situation? Perhaps we can find a way to get that back together?”

 

Caring for your emotional heart is as important as caring for your physical heart

E-motions are energy in motion! They e-motivate people to act, either moving towards the signal or away from it. Either way, when you are next out taking some exercise to protect your physical heart, and choosing how to watch your diet, then try choosing also to exercise your increased power of choice by revising what you have learnt about naming your hidden heart-level values. You could learn to use the Emotional Logic method to do this, activating it as you face new situations. It has opened doors to people on all five continents to see themselves and life differently, and to get on better than before.

 

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How I Successfully Reversed My Type 2 Diabetes and Hypertension

Blog post written by Dr Eugene Kongnyuy, author of ‘No Pills, No Needles’.

 

Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with both type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure (hypertension). My GP prescribed Metformin for my diabetes and Ramipril for my hypertension. I was shocked and devastated because as a physician I had always thought that these two conditions were incurable. The diagnosis was like a death sentence to me because I knew its implications. Nonetheless I asked myself: ‘If diabetes and hypertension are caused by unhealthy lifestyle, shouldn’t it possible to reverse them if one switches to a healthy one?’ I decided that I would self-experiment through trial and error. I didn’t follow any complicated research rules. I was the patient and the researcher. My aim was to find out what could successfully reverse my diabetes and hypertension so that I could stop taking medicines.

Intuitively, I followed three simple steps: I ‘try’ something, I ‘track’ my blood sugar and blood pressure, and I ‘tell’ whether or not it works. Over five years, I tried out over 70 different things involving different diets and lifestyle changes.

 

Reversing my diabetes

After 29 unsuccessful trials (over two years), the 30th trial successful reversed my diabetes (but not my hypertension). The trial consisted of stopping eating lunch, which made me lose 10 kg. The first week was difficult because lunch was more than a meal to me – it was an opportunity to socialise and have informal discussions with my colleagues. Missing lunch meant missing the fun and merrymaking with friends. However, with strong willpower, I managed not to eat at lunchtime. I joined my friends during lunch but drank water instead of eating. In three months, I then lost those 10 kg of weight and my BMI (Body Mass Index) dropped from 26.1 to 22.8. My blood sugar went down to levels I had never seen before. I stopped taking Metformin and the diabetes was gone. A series of laboratory tests with my GP confirmed that the diabetes had been reversed.

It was in fact the weight loss that reversed my diabetes – missing lunch simply helped me to lose weight. A recent study, published in the Lancet and involving 685,616 adults, revealed a BMI of 23 or higher significantly increased the risk of diabetes (see reference 1 below). The findings of this study are consistent with my personal experience – weight loss is the centre-piece of diabetes reversal.

 

Reversing my hypertension

After reversing my diabetes, I continued with self-experiments with the hope of finding a cure for hypertension. After five years of self-experimenting (70 trials in total), none of the things I tried proved able to reverse my hypertension and I felt disappointed. Then one day I was challenged by my sister-in-law, Charlotte, who was (and still is) running for 150 minutes a day to lose and maintain her weight. I went out for morning exercise with her. That day, I realised I needed to do more.

Over a month, I gradually increased my daily exercise from zero to 1 hour per day. That was a turning point in my life because I hated exercise and I still believe no one hates exercise as much as I did then. Six months after starting 1 hour per day of regular exercise, I took my blood pressure (BP) and it was very low. I stopped the BP medicine and my hypertension was gone. One hour of regular, moderate- to high-intensity exercise per day may be what you need to reverse your own high BP. Moderate to vigorous exercise, especially of a type that makes you sweat, is the centrepiece for the prevention or reversal of high blood pressure.

 

Reverse lifestyle diseases with lifestyle changes

Diabetes and hypertension are lifestyle diseases and can be reversed by adopting the appropriate lifestyle. It’s not easy to change our lifestyle. Some of the things that worked for me include strong willpower, support from family and friends, and making exercise fun – I play music (a motivational fitness song) when exercising. With behaviour change, ‘start small, think  long-term’.

There are other benefits to weight loss and exercise, apart from reversing diabetes and hypertension. I’m physically stronger and regular exercise boosts my self-esteem, makes me concentrate, sleep and feel better. It helps me to combat stress and I feel better mentally.

Over the years, I have kept with 1 hour of exercise per day while tracking my BP and blood sugar, and I have learned a lot more. I have also continued practising my ‘no lunch’ strategy. My blood sugar and BP have remained within  the normal ranges. I have continued to learn from personal experience. Initially I wasn’t thinking of sharing this experience. It was the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, which showed a higher mortality rate amongst people with diabetes, that pushed me to decide to share my experience. If it worked for me, it can work for many, and the methods I used to explore my own health can be applied by anyone to find out what works for them. You will find all my lessons in my book ‘No Pills, No Needles – how to reverse diabetes and hypertension by finding out what works for you’.

 

References

  1. Teufel F, Seiglie JA, Geldsetzer P, Theilmann M, Marcus ME, Ebert C, et al. (2021). Body-mass index and diabetes risk in 57 low-income and middle-income countries: a cross-sectional study of nationally representative, individual-level data in 685 616 adults. Lancet 2021; 398(10296): 238-248.