The Most Commonly Missed Oral and Systemic Health Factor

When talking about and implementing a healthy lifestyle, diet and exercise always jump to the head of the line.  Next in line many start concerning themselves with environmental pollutants and food supply toxins.  While fresh air, fresh water, and clean nutritious food are certainly important, a critical but commonly overlooked factor is the INCOHERENCE of our 21st century lifestyles.  Inco- what?!!

So much in life just doesn’t make sense, and I’m not only talking about when Joe Biden opens his mouth!  Anytime our perception fails to match our expectation, we experience incoherence.  And this happens so often that we hardly even recognize most of it anymore; consciously that is.  But internally, it has a profound affect.  At work, at school, at home, on the news, every time a driver does something stupid, we experience a drain of vital energy, energy needed to invest in those we care about, energy needed to fight disease, energy needed to work on our goals.

A practical way to understand incoherence is to imagine that expectation is in our head and perception is in our heart.  Many scientists are now actually referring to the vast network of neurons surrounding our heart (more than in our head by some accounts!) as the heart-brain.  These two brains actually talk to each other, and when they are in sync, coherent, we are in a state of energy renewal.  But when they are out of sync, our energy reserves enter a state of depletion.  Renewal is most often associated with feelings of gratitude, empathy, creativity, contentment, cooperation, and love.  Depletion on the other hand accompanies feelings of stress, anger, irritation, fear, frustration, impatience, and egocentrism.

Systemically, incoherence is known to be a major contributor to heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, cancer, insomnia, asthma, auto-immune disorders, inflammatory bowel disease, and ADHD – and that’s just for starters!  Although I am not aware of a study directly linking incoherence with dental disease, the strong inflammatory nature of incoherence makes connecting those dots pretty obvious.  Certainly when addressing systemic inflammation as part of our efforts to help manage dental decay and periodontal disease, ignoring incoherence would be a major oversight.

Often the source of our incoherence is obvious – that driver just cut in front of you without blinking and you had to slam on your brakes to avoid a collision!  The choice you have to make now is whether that is worth depleting your energy reserves over.  All your ranting and raving isn’t going to change a thing about that driver, but it is going to cause a significant cortisol spike in your bloodstream and rob you of that vital energy your body needs for more productive things.  Add up all the incoherent disconnects we all face in a typical day, and what you are left with is a biologic system on fire!  Especially when you begin to realize how much incoherence you have just gotten used to and aren’t even conscious of.  But how do you fix it, especially when you don’t even recognize it?

To really fix incoherence and cut it out by the roots, one of the first things you need to do is to take full ownership of your choices, not the least of which is responsibility for your feelings.  The truth of the matter is that no one can make you feel anything.  Anger, irritation, joy, gratitude… the choice is always yours.  Admittedly, oftentimes these choices are so ingrained that we are barely cognizant that we are making them.  But the fact remains that you are in control, fully capable of choosing to act and feel differently.

And one way we can take that control is to adjust our expectations.  Too often they are based on either faulty or unrealistic assumptions (no, your spouse shouldn’t be expected to know what you haven’t communicated).  Other times it is our core values, the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts “of our lives, that create the incoherence.  Most commonly these values are past on through our families and/or our theologies with little thought as to their legitimacy; do they foster gratitude and empathy, or do they lead more to stress and anger?

Being aware of our expectations and how they affect us and those around us, however, requires a great deal of mindfulness – the ability to see through all the distractions and honestly evaluate the root of an issue, or to even see that an issue exists.  Often it takes an outside perspective, the observation of someone outside of your personal echo chamber, to help us see what we are missing.  So, start asking.

Another practice that can help facilitate our mindfulness is HeartMath.  HeartMath is based on the discovery that coherence and incoherence between our heart and our brain can actually be measured through the variability of our heart rate.  Incoherence looks very disorganized, while coherence is much more rhythmic.

With over 300 peer-reviewed or independent studies, the HeartMath Institute has developed a series of simple exercises that, alone or in combination with other practices like prayer, meditation, or counseling, train the heart and mind to function in coherence, thus facilitating the mindfulness needed to bring coherence to the rest of our lives.

If you have health issues, medical or dental, that just aren’t responding the way they should.  If you are feeling stressed.  If important relationships in your life are feeling strained.  I would encourage you to take a look at HeartMath and give it a try.  You can learn more at HeartMath.com, or you can ask me – I just happen to be a certified HeartMath professional:)