If you think that your body is “broken” and cannot be repaired, and pain is just a part of getting old, consider that the body is created to heal.
Your body is designed to be a self-healing system. When it receives a paper cut, if kept free of infection, it heals on its own without intervention. The body recognizes the cut and adapts to the situation and closes the wound— all without your help or instruction. The same body that heals a paper cut is able to heal torn muscles, fractures, broken bones, and torn ligaments, largely without intervention.
The self-healing intelligence that heals a paper cut can heal “bad” knees, hips, wrists, and elbows, given the right support. They aren’t actually body parts that don’t work; they have simply adapted to the stressors placed on them. The best thing you can do for your body is give it the ingredients it needs to self-heal and then get out of the way of the healing process. Aging is natural, but you don’t have to age with pain and bad health. People say, “I have knee pain in my right knee because I was a runner, and now I am just getting old.” The reality is both knees are the same age, so why doesn’t the other one hurt? Pain and deterioration don’t have to be normal or what you expect.
Most of what we call aging is decay, and decay is optional: it’s under our control.
– Henry S. Lodge, MD, coauthor, Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy—until You’re 80 and Beyond
Fresh Ideas to Extend Your Expiration Date
Most people know surprisingly little about how their bodies work. Your body is what allows you to access the world. A key to wellness is tuning into how your body works on a day-to-day basis—appreciating all of the things it easily allows you to do. For most people, eating, breathing, walking, digesting, rebuilding, repairing, and blood circulating are done without much notice. It is amazing if you stop to think about it. Learning about and paying attention to what your body does may enhance a sense of gratefulness versus contempt or compassion for yourself because a body part is not working right.
Steps to allow healing:
- Stop thinking you are “broken” or hurting because you are getting old. You become what you think.
- Make choices that nourish your body’s inborn ability to self-heal. These include good nutrition, good movement, good sleep, and good thoughts.
- Instead of using the label of “bad” to describe something, consider that you have an area that is in the process of healing and needs some attention.
Learn More
A best-selling, interesting look at aging versus decay and what you can do about it is Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy—until You’re 80 and Beyond, by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, MD. This one is geared toward men, but they also wrote Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy—until You’re 80 and Beyond.
We overlook the reality that most of us are healthy most of the time, the reality that the human organism has remarkable self-healing capacities for adaption and survival.
– Arthur J. Basky, Worried Sick, Our Troubled Quest for Wellness
