"It’s your body and it knows what is best for you."

This is a common mantra you may have heard. It sounds so wholesome and natural but "following the cues of your body" is often not a good idea and in fact can take you in totally the wrong direction.

Following the cues of a balanced brain, a vital body, and a peaceful mind is a good idea. But if you are stressed, not naturally balanced, out of whack, or otherwise driven, your body and brain actually push you to do the things that keep you out of balance. They drive you in the direction of your imbalance.

Think about addictions - both the notorious kind like smoking, drinking, and drugs and also the soft addictions like exercising too much, needing to socialize with people to feel good, and working too much – these are all clear examples of being pushed in the direction of an imbalance.

A couple of years ago I was working with a woman who was a chiropractor. Someone you would think knows about the body. She was also a marathon runner. She came to me because she wanted to work on her nutrition during her marathon training.

In our conversations, I discovered that she was only sleeping 3 hours a night – and she was thinking that was too much. We talked about the need for sleep to help her body recover each night from the stress of her training regime. Yet, she insisted that she felt great after 3 hours of sleep - alive, awake, and ready to go. She was into meditating and thought she probably didn’t even need that much sleep because meditating could take the place of sleep - and she was looking for ways to sleep less. 

I explained to her that the intensity and frequency of her training was most likely driving her dopamine levels very high. (This based on her absolute need to exercise every day and how bad she felt before she exercised and how good she felt after she exercised.)

It appeared that her serotonin levels could not keep up with the rise in her dopamine levels to help balance out her brain chemistry. (This based on her intense craving for all kinds of sweets and baked goods.)

I told her about dopamine "being its own reward" and because of this you tend to feel better and better - like you can take on the whole world and win hands down - until you crash. You can only push the body so far in one direction before it attempts to swing back to balance.

I wanted to explore some ideas about bringing balance to her brain and body but she insisted that listening to her body was the way to go – and her body was telling her she did not need to sleep because sleeping more than 3 hours made her feel terrible. I said OK, but think about the need for your biology to be respected and honored. Every body sleeps and probably yours needs to sleep also – no matter what you think you are hearing. If you keep raising your dopamine levels, those high levels of dopamine will keep driving you to seek more and more excitement and soon intense exercise and little sleep won’t be enough to satisfy that need for excitement. I warned her that those increasing dopamine levels can drive people toward more excitement and more speed with things like cocaine, gambling, high risk sports, fast driving, and sexual affairs.

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