Prepare Your Heart to be the Best by Dr Melendez

In San Diego, cardiovascular heart disease is still the leading cause of death. With the month of February being National Heart Health Awareness Month, much responsibility is placed on diet and exercise for cardiovascular health, but little is written about how our hearts love: our emotional heart is controlled by our emotional brain for healthy love relationships.

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, emotional health starts in the brain, in an area called the Limbic System, the seat of emotion. This is the area of the brain that produces all the feel–good chemicals called neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine. Dopamine gives us a sense of well–being. If dopamine is in short supply, one often feels anxious, more depressed, has difficulty focusing and is easily distracted. Those that are dopamine deficient often seek ways to stimulate or self–medicate with sugar, caffeine, alcohol or drugs, all of which artificially stimulate dopamine. This unhealthy approach often leads to abuse, addiction and emotional instability.

Prepare your heart and mind to be the best Valentine you can be by developing habits that heal and promote your emotional heart health.

Regular exercise, especially high intensity interval training, promotes your emotional heart health. Adding intensity to your regular cardio workout (burst training on treadmill or elliptical, for example) stimulates a healthy flow of neurotransmitters and pain relieving endorphins (endogenous morphine). In addition, adding weight training with your aerobic exercise stimulates even more neurotransmitters that mitigate chronic anxiety, stress and depression. In fact, research shows that exercise can often match or surpass psychotherapy results.

To make sure your body has all the ingredients to make an abundant supply of neurotransmitters and pain–relieving endorphins you must feed your brain. The ingredients your body needs to make plenty of feel–good neurotransmitters are amino acids, the building blocks of protein. Make sure you’re eating a diet rich in high–quality protein, such as organic grass-fed beef, antibiotic and hormone–free turkey, chicken and eggs, and wild cold water fish like salmon and cod, which are rich in omega 3 fatty acids. All of these proteins provide your brain and body with the necessary ingredients to feel good, heal good and love well.

Another common bad habit that affects our emotional health and sense of well–being are faulty postures such as "tech–neck." Our constantly flexed cervical spines, looking down all day at our smart phones and tablets or slumped in front of our computers and driver seats, set the stage for chronic pain. This continuous rounding of shoulders and reversing of the neck curve interferes with your spinal cord, creating abnormal tension and short–circuiting nerve supply and endorphin production, which restricts cerebral spinal fluid flow and diminishes that vital feel–good neurotransmitter dopamine. The top four vertebrae in your neck must move properly for your body to produce a sufficient amount of endorphins. Faulty posture and repetitive flexion of the neck shuts down these vital pain–relieving endorphins, resulting in increased pain, irritability and disability. Specific chiropractic care that incorporates posture training and spinal molding can do wonders for relieving chronic pain in the head and neck by taking tension off of the spinal cord, which increases the release of dopamine and endorphins, restoring a sense of wellbeing and emotional brain health once again.