The Tao of Systems: You

It is fairly common nowadays to hear how we are being flooded with information, and it is quite correct that we are exposed to far more 'bits' of information on a daily basis than our ancestors had to content with. It is no surprising that the world seems an overwhelming and confusing place. This is as true for politics, or ecology, or economics, as it is for health, but seeing as I am a doctor and spend much of my working day trying to help patients make sense of their health, we'll stick to this for now. Health is after all, synonymous with wellbeing and as this is a thing we would all like more of, a little clarity might be helpful.

The good news is that understanding health is actually quite simple. Despite the huge number of articles and clickbait about wellbeing, little of it is saying anything new. Information is only really of interest if it is saying something surprising and most of the apparant flood is not. What is there boils down to a few simple points. Put another way, you don't need to swallow an ocean to understand water, a glass of it will do.

In order to understand health, you only really need to understand the following. Your body is a system (made of other systems) with the overall goal of optimising the conditions for survival. What you do with that survival is more or less up to you. That said, 'survival' is a bit of strong word for my liking. It conjours to mind images of humans sprinting from sabre-toothed tigers or hostile tribes. A word which would do just as well is balance.

So, for example, a decent portion of our metabolism - around 60% or so - is dedicated simply to maintaining our temperature within a comfortable range, so that the various chemical processes can bubble away nicely. For us, survival is actually mostly about keeping our internal state nice and cosy. In other words, in balance.

These systems strive to maintain a balance, both amongst themselves and with the external environment. However this is not some perfect balance. There is no such thing. At any given point you are always being pushed out of balance, so the body compromises and aims towards a certain range, and this process is always a 'work in progress'. In other words, it is dynamic.

Here we can see how a lot of our health problems arise. Here we are not making a difference between mental or physical health, because in either case the same principle applies. This is, if you, or your environment, push your body off balance, it will push back. It will do so not because it is annoyed, but because it simply wants to go back to that balanced range.

This does not need to be a problem. In fact, it is often good for the body to be challenged. The body has a huge amount of inbuilt capacity, and sometimes it is good to test this capacity in order to keep it ready, much like sailors go through drills during quiet periods to keep them sharp and their vessel 'ship shape'.

If, on the other hand, the body is pushed for too long and too hard, then it can forget what a normal balanced state feels like. The various ways it monitors its internal environment lose their sensitivity.

For examples, if our aforemantioned metabolic system is exposed to too much fuel (in the form of 'easy' calories) it won't know what to do with them, and so simply stores it all away. However, and this is an important addition, it also loses its ability to detect that extra fuel, and starts telling us that we are hungry, that we need more fuel, despite this not being true.

Here we often make the mistake of drastically cutting back on the 'fuel', but this has the opposite effect to what we want. The body, already lacking that sensitivity to fuel and fearing starvation, simply holds on more jealously to what it has. The answer is therefore not so much to stop the supply of the fuel as to increase our sensitivity to it.

Chronic stress is another example. If we are chronically pushing our body through fatigue, if we ignore those signals that tell us to rest, then our body will become insensitive to stress. It will forget what rest is, to the extent that when that blessed time off finally does come, we don't know what to do with it. We feel guilty. We fill the free time with activity. This in turn makes us crave rest even more. We might fantasise about that perfect night's sleep, or break that will recharge us for good! However, again the problem is no so much with the amount of rest but with our ability to hear the signals.

Which brings us to our ultimate simple 'formula' for health. When our body is pushed off balance and we lose our sensivity to our environment - both inside and out - we tend to seek solutions in 'things'. Less of this, more of that. I need to put more good things in my body, we think, and less of the bad things. This indeed is what most wellbeing information is about.

However, the body is not a thing, it is a system, and any given system is as much about the flows of information that connect its various parts, than it is about those parts. In fact, on a deeper level, there is no part of our body which is not, at any time, not communicating. We are less a composition of various organs and tissues than we are a system comprised of flows of information which are continually adapting those 'parts' of our bodies.

Quite naturally we forget this. We look at ourselves in the mirror and see a thing. A moving, smiling or frowning thing, but a thing, an entity, nonetheless. We see images of fit, healthy, relaxed people and they too are things. But an entity, still less the image of an entity, is not the dynamic 'work in progress' of the reality. It is simply an idea, and by the time we have fixed the idea, the reality has changed, much like a conversation does by the time we have thought of something witty to say.

It is not necessary to try to change the thing. Things change slowly anyhow, and a fixed idea not at all. It is enough to acknoweldge that our bodies are always changing and adapting. It is enough to re-learn how to become sensitive to the flows of information. The beauty of this is that it usually involves less, not more, doing. The body already knows how to monitor the flows, it has been doing it all our lives, for all of evolution in fact. To do this, it is often necessary to turn down the flow of outside information and ask, not what I should be doing, but what do I actually want to do? Not what do I think I need, but what do I actually need? And if that is to spend an hour doing nothing at all, so much the better.