Dr. Julia Jones uses a guitar to explain the gut-brain axis: the body is the guitar, the vagus nerve is the neck, and the brain is the headstock. Six strings represent movement, sleep, mindset, nutrition, breathing, and environment. Detuning any one string throws off the whole instrument.
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I'm going to just explain. I now use a guitar to explain the gut-brain axis. Oh, very cool. Because so the body of the guitar at the bottom end, I describe as the gut and the top at the other end, at the end of the neck is your brain. And then in between, so the neck of the guitar is the vagus nerve and the guitar has 6 strings. So if that's actually out of tune because we hadn't prepared this and so I tuned it, but that's the whole point is that what the way that what I do when I'm doing live sessions is that I play the guitar completely in tune and we talk about these 6 strings, right? As being one of them is movement, one of them is sleep. One of them is mindset. One of them is maintenance of just nutrition. So each string is a pillar of wellness. And if one of those strings is not in tune, the whole guitar is not in tune. When I do this live, I play a chord with the guitar in tune, it sounds beautiful, and then it plays out of tune. And even when you just slightly detune one of those strings, it sounds terrible. And I think that's what we need to remember with the gut-brain axis is that things that you wouldn't expect to impact your mental health and your gut health do, because every— the type of light that goes in our eyes, the way we breathe, the environments that we're in, every molecule of food that we put in our mouth touch, temperature, all of these things, sleep quality, how often we stand up, all of these things impact that. And if one of them is not optimized, then it's the weakest link. It can really cause, cause problems.
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