Your Body Wants to Heal
Your body is always trying to repair itself; your job is to stop getting in its way.
You cut your finger on the edge of a can. It stings, you rinse it, you wrap it, and you forget about it. A week or so later you go looking for the cut and you can’t find it. Nobody sewed it shut. You didn’t do a thing. Your body did all of it, while you were busy with your life.
I want you to think about how strange that is, because most people never do.
This is rule one again. You’re a whirlpool, and a whirlpool is always being made new. The fixing never stops. Each day your body swaps out close to three ounces of its own cells, mostly in your blood and the lining of your gut. A cut just lets you watch the work up close.
And it happens in order. First the blood thickens and the bleeding stops. Then the spot gets red, warm and a little puffy. That’s your body’s helpers rushing in, not the cut getting worse. Then new skin fills the gap from the edges in. Over the next weeks, the patch gets pulled tight and tidied up. Each step hands off to the next, and nobody has to run it.
Two things follow from this.
First, the red, warm swelling is a friend when it’s short. It’s how the helpers get to work. But the same swelling can also run low and slow inside the body for years, like a fire that never quite goes out. The people who study this now link that long, low burn to many of the big illnesses of later life. Things that seem to feed it are plain ones. Too much sitting. Poor food. Stress that never lets up. So it’s worth asking which fires in your life you keep feeding.
Second, your job is mostly to stay out of the way. Your body knows the work. What slows it down is the stuff we pile on top. Smoking slows healing. So does heavy drinking. So does eating badly. And so does stress, which most people don’t expect.
Here’s the study that shows it. Researchers at Ohio State made one tiny, careful wound in the mouths of eleven dental students, once during summer break. Then they made a second one, just like it, three days before a big exam. The same students healed the second wound about three days slower. That’s about forty percent longer. Not one of the students healed as fast at exam time as they had in the summer. Same students, same kind of wound. The difference was the exam.
Now, staying out of the way doesn’t mean going it alone. When you break a bone, the cast doesn’t heal it. The cast holds the bone still so your body can knit it back. Most good medicine works like that. A doctor cleans the wound, sets the bone, or stops a germ your body can’t beat by itself. Then your body does the rest. Never skip that help when you need it. A good doctor clears the way so your body can do its job.
This is where rule five comes in. You don’t have to take my word for any of this. Healing is one of the few things in the body you can see with your own eyes. Watch a scrape over a week and you can see most of the steps I just named.
Try this for a week.
Here is the short list of things that get in the way of healing. Smoke. Drinks most nights. Meals out of a bag. Sitting all day. Stress with no break in it. Pick the one you already know is yours. Just one. Take it out for seven days. Each morning, write one line about how you feel when you first get up. On the eighth day, read the lines from top to bottom and see what changed.
One line to remember
Your body is always fixing you. Mostly, your job is to stop handing it more to fix.
