Functional neurology approaches to stroke

Most of us have seen the scary after effects of a stroke, one of the leading causes of disability and the third most common cause of death. Though a stroke seems to hit out of nowhere, the truth is that research shows strokes are highly preventable by applying many of the techniques we use in functional neurology. Functional neurology can also significantly boost your recovery from a stroke.

What is a stroke exactly? A stroke happens when an area of the brain doesn’t get any blood or oxygen. This happens because an artery carrying blood to that area either becomes completely blocked or ruptures.

When an area of the brain is cut off from blood and oxygen supply, this can permanently damage and destroy that part of the brain. This explains why people lose function based on which area of the brain was affected, affecting speech, memory, movement, and autonomic function.

How you can prevent a stroke

In order to prevent a stroke, we have to understand what the typical causes are. Studies have found the following factors can trigger stroke. These are among the same factors we address in functional neurology when working to rehabilitate brain function in general.

• High blood pressure is the strongest risk factor for stroke.
• Smoking doubles stroke risk.
• A bad diet raises the risk by 30 percent.
• Exercising at least four hours a week lowers your risk by 30 percent.
• As little as one alcoholic drink a day raises your risk by 50 percent.
• Stress, depression.
• Diabetes.
• Excess belly fat.
• Cardiovascular disorders.

Functional neurology stroke prevention strategies

The strategies to prevent stroke are the same ones we use to help people boost and repair their brain health to address a variety of brain-related disorders.

Healthy, whole foods diet with lots of veggies. Ditching the sugars, sodas, junk foods, and fast foods and focusing on whole foods, lots of vegetables, and healthy fats nourish the brain and its arteries instead of harming them.

Stable blood sugar. Balancing blood sugar is foundational to all aspects of brain health, including stroke prevention and rehabilitation. High blood sugar inflames the brain and hardens and clogs the arteries, which can lead to stroke. The proof? People with Type 2 diabetes are up to four times more likely to have a stroke.

Regular exercise. There are few magic bullets in life, but regular exercise comes close. Exercise keep blood vessels healthy and open and boosts blood flow to the brain. Regular exercise has also been shown to lessen the severity of a stroke and improve recovery.

Custom supplementation. Targeted high-quality supplements that help support the arteries, stabilize blood pressure, improve circulation to the brain, dampen inflammation, and balance blood sugar can all help lower your risk of stroke or help you better recover.

Functional neurology rehabilitation. We use functional neurology exam techniques to identify areas of the brain affected by stroke and how to customize rehabilitation. We activate specific areas at and around the damage based on exam findings, and can measure progress, from subtle to obvious, and adjust treatment as necessary. We work within your brain endurance so as not to “fry” your brain and exhaust you while developing neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability to create new neural connections.

Ask my office how we can help you lower your risk of stroke and support your brain health.

Core exercises are a great way to improve your brain health

Back pain complaints are often met with instruction to build up your core strength, and indeed this is important for better stability and protection for your back. But building core strength helps in another important way — it activates areas of the brain that can enhance stability, reduce pain, and naturally improve posture.

When many people think of the core, they think of six-pack abs we see on gym posters. But the core is basically the entire trunk of your body. The core includes the:

• Abdomen, home to the fabled six-pack.
• Back extensors, which run along your spine.
• Obliques, which wrap diagonally around your waist.
• Transverse abdominis, which allows you to suck in your stomach.
• Multifidi, which connect the vertebrae to each other.
• Quadratus lumborum, which connects your pelvis to your spine.
• Iliopsoas muscles, which connect the spine to the legs.

Many people develop chronic back pain because of a undiagnosed brain imbalance. The brain coordinates with the eyes and the inner ear to perceive where it is in relation to the environment.

When that information is incorrectly interpreted due to a brain imbalance, the brain may believe the body is falling forward or backwards. To compensate, it adjusts the posture to lean in the opposite direction of the perceived fall. This all happens without a person’s conscious awareness, and can start in infancy.

This constant over correcting creates not only bad posture, but also areas of muscular weakness and tension that affect the spine and other parts of the body, often resulting in chronic pain. These people may also find standing for a short length of time causes fatigue and back pain.

It’s also not uncommon for people with this issue to struggle with anxiety — the constant sense of falling is a source of chronic stressor that can manifest as anxiety, fatigue, and mood swings.

People often report a reduction in back pain and better posture when they take on a core strengthening program. Although strengthening and stretching the core muscles is a vital part of that rehabilitation, it also exercises the midline cerebellum, the area of the brain responsible for, among other things, movement, coordination, and posture. By repeatedly activating the core muscles, you are stimulating this part of the brain.

How do you know if brain imbalances play a role in your back pain or posture, and whether core exercises can help you?

The best way is to conduct your own field sobriety test — that’s right, the same one cops give to suspected drunk drivers. This is because being drunk also affects the cerebellum. It’s not uncommon for people with posture and back pain issues to also have poor balance due to a cerebellar issue.

A core strengthening program should emphasize good form so you don’t risk injuring yourself. It should also include attention to stability and alignment. A brain imbalance will often cause a person to stand or lie crooked when they think they are straight because the brain is incorrectly perceiving the body’s position.

Pilates is one excellent core strengthening technique that incorporates these strategies along with mindfulness and breath work, which are also great brain rehabilitators.

If you have back pain, poor balance, anxiety, mood issues, gut problems, a previous brain injury, or other symptoms, a functional neurology rehabilitation protocol may be the vital boost you need. Many times when people get stuck on a functional medicine protocol, it’s because a brain-based issue is promoting inflammation and metabolic imbalances.

Ask my office for more information on how we can help you achieve better brain health.

How to trick your brain into motivation instead of procrastination

Lack of motivation plagues even the brightest and most ambitious at times, especially when we have so many digital distractions these days. But you can trick your brain into becoming more motivated and it will hardly even notice. You simply need to know a little about the neurology of motivation and procrastination.

A key brain chemical, or neurotransmitter, involved in motivation is dopamine. It also happens to be the key neurotransmitter involved in bad habits and addiction, including digital addictions to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. We need plenty of dopamine to stay motivated and feel good about our accomplishments and ourselves. Otherwise we lapse into procrastination.

Every time you check your Facebook (or smoke a cigarette, gamble, take a drug, or engage in any other addiction), the pleasure center of the brain, called the nucleus accumbens, is flooded with dopamine and hence feelings of pleasure. Dopamine also encourages motivation to continue that feel-good behavior.

This system doesn’t exist simply to sabotage us with Netflix binge watching addictions. We are designed to find pleasure in certain activities that ensure survival of our species, such as eating, love, sex, and having fun (positivity is good for immune and brain health). However, these rewarding pleasures require, to varying degrees, a certain amount of work, attention, and time for modest releases of dopamine.

An addictive habit, however, can release two to 10 times the amount of dopamine a natural one does. In other words, jumping on to Facebook is going to give you a quicker and easier dopamine “high” than, say, building a fire so you can hang out with your tribe and cook that day’s catch.

In an attempt to maintain balance, the brain’s receptors lose tolerance to dopamine so that you get less of a high. However, dopamine has also wired your brain to connect the stimulus with the feelings of pleasure. As a result, compulsion builds with tolerance.

As the compulsion for the bad habit grows, the increased dopamine demand saps your motivation to engage in more positive but less extreme dopamine-boosts. If you have ever gotten sucked into binge watching a Netflix series over taking a walk on a sunny day, you know what I’m talking about.

You also probably know that willing yourself into better behavior often fails you and makes you feel even worse about yourself — dopamine is tied to self-esteem and when yours is running low, so is your sense of self-worth.

It’s not as hopeless as it sounds. The key is to redirect your brain’s dopamine system with baby steps that develop new pathways of communication so you think, feel, and behave differently. This is called plasticity. How? Pick a positive action small enough you know you can accomplish it. Trouble sticking to an exercise routine? Commit to one pushup a day. Wish you would work on that book? Write one paragraph, or even one sentence a day. Want to meditate? Start with one minute, or maybe a few minutes of reading.

The magic isn’t in how much you do, but through the feeling of accomplishment. This sends rewarding dopamine boosts to the areas of your brain that need it the most so positive plasticity can develop. After you have been doing that one pushup or that one minute of meditation, increase it to two, and so on. The goal is to feel a rewarding sense of accomplishment and continue building on that in small, achievable ways.

Symptoms of low dopamine activity include lack of motivation, struggles with procrastination, inability to find pleasure in things you used to enjoy, fatigue, mood swings, memory deficits, addiction, feelings of low self-worth, bouts of rage, and other symptoms.

Low dopamine can have its roots in chronic health imbalances (gut, immune, hormonal, etc.) or in neurological imbalances, such as brain development disorders, brain degeneration, brain injury, or other brain-based mechanisms.

Ask my office functional neurology strategies to help you improve your dopamine activity so you can get stuff done, enjoy life more, and feel better about yourself.

It doesn’t take a blow to the head to injure the brain

You don’t have to receive a blow to the head to suffer from brain injury. In fact, you can even injure your brain while wearing a helmet. This is because brain tissue is very delicate — the consistency of soft butter or egg white — and floats inside a skull lined with hard ridges. Impacts to the body, falls, and neck injuries are all it takes to injure the brain, especially if they happen repeatedly.

Here are some ways you can sustain a brain injury without ever hitting your head:

Hard falls: When you fall your brain slams into one side of your skull and then the other. People who engage in activities that involve falling and crashing regularly (football, extreme sports, roller derby, etc.) should be aware of signs of brain injury, even if they wear a helmet.

Body slams (such as in contact sports): Likewise, full impact hits to the body knock the brain around inside the skull.

Landing on your tailbone: Although landing on your tailbone results in a sore bum, your brain is also victim to the force sent up the spine.

Whiplash: Whiplash is a double whammy to the brain, which is why car accidents can be so devastating even if you didn’t directly injure your head. Not only does the whiplash send the brain crashing back and forth inside the skull, but the shearing and twisting forces in the neck can also damage the brain stem. The brain stem may look simply like the connection between the brain and the neck, its an extremely important center of brain function. Damage to the brain stem can cause anxiety, insomnia, extreme moodiness, gut problems, autonomic problems, and extreme sensitivity to light, sound, and crowds.

Falls and crashes also damage the fragile inner ear, or vestibular system, which plays a vital role in brain function and integrity.

The reason football players and extreme athletes are making headlines is because repeated impacts to the body and head continually inflame and damage the brain, overwhelming its ability to recover until it eventually succumbs to dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Brain injury increases risk for more brain injury

One of the most prominent signs of brain injury is worsened balance and coordination. Unfortunately, these symptoms predispose a person to further injure their brain due to increased clumsiness. Just one concussion increases the risk of a second by 150 percent. After two concussions, your risk for a third goes up by 300 percent. This is why it’s so important to seek functional neurology and functional medicine interventions right away when you suspect you have injured your brain.

Poor brain health increases brain injury risk

It’s not just how many times your brain slams around inside your skull that matters, but also the general health of your brain prior to injury. This is why some people recover more quickly from injury than others. If you eat fast foods regularly, are deficient in vital brain nutrients — such as essential fatty acids and vitamin D have undiagnosed food sensitivities (especially to gluten), or suffer from hormonal imbalances or deficiencies, your brain is going to fare more poorly after an injury.

Because inflammation in the brain does not have an “off switch” the way it does in the body, brain inflammation is like a slow moving fire that can damage tissue for months and even years, causing symptoms long after the insults. The good news is that for all its fragility, the brain is an amazing organ when it comes to recovery and repair. It will eagerly respond to functional neurology and functional medicine protocols to improve function, dampen disorders, and enhance its overall integrity.

Ask my office how we can help you get back your brain health and function.