The Thermostat Inside You
Your body has a built-in regulator that keeps you steady, found so recently that medical schools are still catching up.
Some days a thing knocks you off center. A near miss on the highway. A sharp word from your boss. A bad night. For a while your heart is loud and your thoughts are fast. An hour on, you’re making a sandwich and you feel fine. You never chose to be fine. Something in you brought you back.
You should know about it, because you will lean on it every day of your life.
This is rule one again. You’re a whirlpool, not a rock, and a whirlpool is never still. It keeps its shape by moving all the time. Your body does the same. It keeps your warmth, your blood sugar and the water in you inside a narrow band. It does that with small moves all day. Stand on one foot and you can feel it. Your ankle never stops moving. A hundred tiny catches keep you up.
Your body has many ways to keep itself steady. One of them was found less than forty years ago, and how it was found is a good story.
People wanted to know how the cannabis plant works on the brain. In 1988 they found the spot where it acts, a kind of lock on the outside of brain cells. That raised a question. Why would a human body carry a lock for a plant? Four years on, a team in Jerusalem found the answer. The body makes its own key. It makes it from the fat in its own cells, right when it’s needed, and breaks it down almost at once. The plant led them there, so the whole thing got the plant’s name. That’s the only reason the name sounds the way it does.
What does it do? Mostly, it calms things back down. Say a brain cell is being shouted at too hard. The cell on the far end can send a small note back up the line, and the note says to ease off. After a scare, the same part of you helps switch the alarm off. My teacher, Dr. Bob, said it works like a thermostat. A thermostat doesn’t stop the weather. It answers it.
Now rule two, because this part is about maps. Your doctor works from a map of the body drawn in school, and maps change slowly. In 2017, a team at Washington University in St. Louis asked the young doctors in training there what they had been taught about cannabis as medicine. About 85 out of 100 said they had been taught nothing. The same team checked the course records of 145 medical schools. Only about 9 in 100 listed any teaching on it. That survey asked about the plant as medicine, not about the part of you named after it. Still, it’s the closest honest count I have found, and it shows how new this part of the map is.
None of that is a reason to trust your doctor less. Most of what a good doctor knows saves lives. It’s a reason to ask a lot, and to know that every map has a blank edge.
Two things follow from this.
First, you’re built to come back. When something knocks you off center, coming back is a job your body knows how to do. Every animal with a backbone has had this part for a very long time. Fish have it. So does your dog.
Second, you can help it or get in its way. A hard run turns it up for a while. Stress that never lets up wears it down. In the lab, weeks of stress cost rats and mice some of the locks this part of them needs. So the plain old habits matter more than they look. Sleep. Moving your body. Time when nothing is after you.
Try this for a week.
Each night, write down one thing that knocked you off center that day. Next to it, write how long it took to feel like yourself again, how you slept, and whether you moved your body. At the week’s end, read the list. Look at which days the way back was short, and what those days had that the others didn’t.
One line to remember
Steady isn’t still. You stay yourself by coming back, over and over.
