It’s amazing that our body operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from before we are born, to even after we pass. The biggest aspect of activity in our body is communication, within our brain, and between our brain and the rest of our body. When communication pathways are not optimised we find ourselves disengaged, unmotivated or with a foggy brain, so it’s vital that we protect, and enhance these pathways as much as possible.
How the Brain Communicates to the Body
So, how does this communication work? Your brain uses neurons to communicate. There are different types of neurons including sensory neurons, motor neurons and multipolar inter-neurons, and whilst they have different uses, their make up is similar. Neurons have a head, the dendrite, which is where all communication is received, it also has an end, which is where all communications are transmitted. These neurons are not connected to one another physically, they have between them something called a synaptic cleft, just like in music, a cleft is an empty space.
The signals we are sending must bridge this empty space, and like a spark that jumps between two wires, so to do our neurotransmitters jump between neurons. This is done by the pre-synaptic cell and the post-synaptic cell, the sender and receiver respectively.
Now when either of these areas start to degrade, not sending the full message, only receiving part of a message, we begin to see signs of neurological impairment.
When Cells Begin to Degrade
There are many reasons that pre & post-synaptic cells may begin to degrade, but we are going to look, in this article, at nutrients, and deficiencies. When we see a decline in nutrients within the body, we also start to see a decline in function. How often have you been so hungry that you can’t focus on anything else? This is because our body is using all remaining nutrients to signal you to eat, or to find more nutrition. These nutrients allow our body to make the things we need when sending signals through the neurons.
As an example, if you were deficient in tryptophan, it would reduce the bodies ability to produce serotonin, which would compromise any transmissions dependent on serotonin, This may rapidly lead to things such as depression, anxiety, brain fog, and insomnia.
The fact is that many of us have some kind of deficiency or poor neuron transmission. So what can we do?
Proper Support for Your Body
Ensuring that you are supporting your body with the right nutrients for your activity is essential. What you need as nutrients is probably very different to what your partner needs. Each time you go into a situation and manage it, from the gym to a board meeting you are plowing through your nutrients at an incredible rate.
Ensuring you eat the right foods, a variety of foods and put your body under the right kind of pressures (think exercise, cold therapy, meditation) then your body can create and utilise the nutrients you give it. However, with so much going on in our lives it’s virtually impossible to eat the required nutrients we need, that is where selective supplementation can help us to reach our potential.
Ensuring you are getting the nutrients to support dopamine, acetylcholine and GABA as well as serotonin, helps to give an all round nutrient boost and gets those neurons performing at their best.
