A Crash Course in Back PAIN: Cause & Effect

Introduction

Welcome to the first discussion in the UnSit Your Back series. We aim to provide you with all the information you need to start with the UnSit Your Back movement protocol. We'll explain that the protocol is only one part of the puzzle, one side of the coin, or one wheel on the cart. This information should give you the other wheel, the other wing.

It's hard to be both comprehensive and concise. As long as this lecture or discussion is, I'll do my best to be concise. I think it contains the bare minimum. You may disagree, but I believe we need to understand a few fundamental principles and philosophical ideas to take the protocol seriously and use it to achieve long-term, compounded benefits. We need to understand it, know its goals, and apply the tools correctly. It's medicine, and to get the benefits, we must stop drinking the poison we're trying to fix. To explain this, let's start from a foundational truth and develop our ideas from there.

Cause & Effect

The root principle that we will be looking at for healing, pain, and injury is cause and effect. We can assume that we all agree upon this fundamental fact, this irrefutable law of nature that pervades and persists through all phenomena in our experience in the observable universe.

What does it mean to say that something is caused by cause and effect? It means that every single situation, every single state, every condition or possible condition exists as the result of conditions or causes that came before it. Conditions cause new conditions, and there is a causal chain linking one moment to the next. We can't arrive in any situation or experience without passing through the necessary and appropriate conditions that cause that situation or experience.

In essence, every single thing that we experience has its roots in causes that came before. Said differently, any situation or condition that we are in is the net result, the cumulative sum of all of the activity that has led up to this point. And as it pertains to us, it is all of the activity related to us that has brought us to this. All of our activity comprises of all of our actions and all of our reactions, physical, mental, and emotional.

Every activity, every action, every reaction has combined, compounded, and been linked together to bring us to this moment. Even the common debate of whether we are shaped by nature or nurture is affected by this principle. Any power that nature and nurture have over shaping what we become depends on their ability to shape our behavior first. Then it's our changed behavior, which changes us.

Cause and effect also means there are no shortcuts. There is no way to bring about any instantaneous change in any situation, in any condition or state. You cannot change it from one thing into another without passing through the necessary steps to get from one place to the other.

But most importantly, where this brings us is to a place of recognizing that we are where we are as a result of our activity, and that to change our condition or state in any way depends entirely on us changing our activity, our action. Acknowledging cause and effect demands that we take full responsibility for where we are at and where we want to go. There is no way for us to get anywhere without doing what is required to get there, and no one can do it for us.

Within this acknowledgement of our responsibility, there is a beautiful paradox. It's almost by passing through the portal of accepting blame, taking the blame, realizing that we have caused our own suffering, that we have caused our own injury, our own disease. It's by taking that responsibility that then we step into a position of claiming the power that is needed to change that to cause a new condition.

So by taking great responsibility, we access the necessary power to change things. Such a beautiful paradox. Only by acknowledging that we are responsible for our problems can we access the capacity to fully overcome them. If we think even 1% of the causes of our condition lie outside of our own activity, then 1% of the power to change our state is now outside of our control.

Pain and injury are not merely inconveniences to forget as soon as possible, but they become cues that we can use to evaluate what we have done to get here and what we are doing or not doing that is driving us to stay here or causing this condition to persist. Pain and injury become profound teachers on the journey to optimize our physical activity, not arbitrary misfortunes that we try and put behind us as quickly as possible and forget about.

All in all, wrapping up this philosophical foundation, which is important to establish because we can now agree that pain and injury are entirely our responsibility, our actions are both the cause and the cure for everything good and bad that we experience. And even if this doesn't sit as truth with you, now comprehend that that is what this protocol is based upon and I urge you to fake it.

If you want to experience something different, then fake it till you make it and use it as a guide tool. You may not believe that right now, but have patience and stick it through. If it really doesn't sit with you, then this protocol is not for you because the entire paradigm is built on us taking absolute responsibility.

What could be more valuable than information that can help us optimize our activity? The benefits of which we've covered a few implications. The benefits are many, but what I appreciate the most of really installing this program into my thinking and my perception of health, I feel powerful because I know that everything that causes our suffering is actually in our control. That is what I believe now and I have experienced, so I know.

It really shifts my perspective away from a victimhood stance or perspective, and has turned me into an opportunistic optimist. And I'm constantly looking for how I can use these experiences to improve how I can use something as negative seeming as an injury, as a tool for my growth, as a gift.

So thanks for coming with me on that journey as we laid out our philosophical foundation.

Ethics of Healing

Let's bring it home a little bit closer to the topic of low back pain. Let's bring it to health and to healing. What are the implications of cause and effect, or how does it play out in the process of healing now? Now, if we look at healing very closely on a molecular or cellular level, we see that it is largely the consequence of a shift in the balance between two opposing forces, one being a collection of forces which drive healing and the other opposing forces a collection of forces driving breakdown. And our body, which is absolutely not a static object or phenomenon in any way, is continuously changing.

Tissues are continuously cycling through life cycles. They are being replaced, they are being broken down. They are experiencing stresses from the environment, where they're experiencing healing from within. And this is completely natural. And our body is continuously managing many homeostatic balances or a state of homeostasis, which is a sort of equilibrium.

And when it comes to our musculoskeletal system, we are here talking about lower back pain and movement, physical activity, but it's not disconnected from other aspects of our life, from our psychology and our nutrition. But in general, breakdown has a role because, for example, when we go to the gym, what happens on a microscopic level, we are deliberately causing a kind of stress onto the tissues, onto the structures, causing a breakdown, which then elicits or promotes a response of healing. Healing, which actually increases resilience, increases strength, and prepares us better for those loads in the future, those activities now. So there's a shift into breakdown and then repair. But it's when there is an imbalance in this or there's too much of one and not enough of the other, or vice versa. Too much breakdown or insufficient recovery or impaired recovery can lead us into states of chronic healing or breakdown, chronic breakdown of persistent states of breakdown, which caused chronic pain, eventually leading to tissue breakdown injury and so on.

And so, in order for us to recover from an injury, we need to be able to shift that homeostatic balance back across the spectrum from breakdown towards the repair and healing side. And we probably, so what do we, how do we achieve that? We increase the forces that produce healing and we decrease the forces that are producing breakdown. And in this way, we can shift the balance in a set of tissues towards healing and away from breakdown. Because that is inherently what the body's telling us. That's what that pain signal is saying, "Hey, imbalance here. Too much breakdown. Starting to lead to a point where the tissues are actually not going to function properly and I'm just letting you know, please use that information."

So immediately that signal is asking us to look weight. If I consider my activity in its entirety, and I consider which actions in my general behavior might be influencing my lower back and which of them may be promoting healing and which may be causing breakdown, we immediately need to start evaluating our lifestyle, our behavior, our activity. But inherent in that investigation, we have acknowledged that we are responsible for this information that's coming to us from our lower back. It's not that I mean, this sounds very logical when we lay it out like this, it sounds very reasonable, but most of us think our lower back pain or any pain or injury is some, it's like random. It'll pass. It's come from nowhere and it'll go back to nowhere. It's just a phase that we are going through and phases pass. It's in my family, my parents, they have similar conditions. It was that one thing I did. I had a sneeze. I'm so lucky. The sneeze caused it for me, that's not the approach that we, that we use, that we promote. We need to go deeper. We need to acknowledge that we are responsible, and this information is telling me to take responsibility and to investigate.

And by acknowledging that we are the cause, we can then perform this in analysis. We can then start to understand what behaviors to increase and what or adopt if we haven't started them, or what behaviors to reduce or stop entirely. And in this way, pain and injury become the teacher, as I mentioned. And we can start to respect the body in a different way in some of these false beliefs that I mentioned earlier. In order for us to believe that the body just spontaneously and randomly spits out pain, that it arbitrarily breaks down unintended, that it's unavoidable for us because of our genetics or any number of these belief systems, ideas, they rest on a foundation of us essentially believing the body is blind and stupid and really, really prone to doing random, very inconvenient, uncomfortable things. And I mean, that, that's pretty sad. That's pretty sad.

And what I appreciate about what this philosophy or this approach to injury, what it's led me to is a, by me understanding that my actions are causing this, and that through my actions, I can change it, I start to have, I have started to have a profound appreciation for my body's ability to, first of all be resilient. To the ignorant activity that we insulted with somehow despite us behaving in ways which are completely opposite to our healing. It somehow puts up with that for decades. And on the other side of the coin, once we take responsibility and align our actions towards healing or towards the outcomes we choose, the body's ability to heal itself from anywhere is mind boggling. It's absolutely mind bending what this system of systems is capable of that we inhabit all day every day. So that's a profound and important shift to make as a human to go from this, I live in a blind and stupid and inconvenient body to holy smokes, this thing can do anything if only I take responsibility. With great responsibility comes great power.

And it's quite curious how even these experiences like pain, which we've demonized and run away from, tried to deny even those become our teachers. And so even these communications from the body, which we have assumed to be essentially side effects of side effects become intelligent signals that are genuinely rich with actionable information that improves us. I mean, come on. That is, it's amazing. It's really, really amazing. And so in this way, pain and injury become teachers of ours and we start to evaluate all of our behaviors. But now that you might be thinking is a tricky thing to do. How do I assess how everything or anything that I'm doing affects my lower back?

And, yeah, well we, we go, we are gonna look at it through the lens of eat, move, meditate. And just in short, why eat, move, meditate? Well, if we look at, on a really high level, what forces change us over time, and the forces that change us are things which interact with our genes, with our genetics, and then cause us to express or repress certain genetic expressions. We up-regulate and down-regulate balance imbalance, and through our genes we express ourselves, but through the epigenetics, the forces which control the genes, which direct the genes we are, our expression is determined. Our genetic expression is determined. So how do we look at all of the forces which then influence our genetic expression of all the epigenetic possibilities?

Three, come are clear leaders in a few ways, if we look at which are the most unavoidable epigenetic forces every minute of every day, every day of our lives, so unavoidable, well, that needs to be addressed because we never sees being influenced by that, which are the most influential forces, which have the most profound effects and far-reaching effects across our entire system, and which are the most controllable epigenetic forces, because if we can't control it or do anything about it, it's irrelevant. Um, and the three collections of behaviors or activities that all are completely unavoidable, are extremely influential, yet completely controllable are our nourishment, which includes everything from sunlight to water and food and what we put on our skin. All the energy and matter that flows into it, into us, our nourishment. Then our physical activity, every single thing we do with our bodies every day, that is composed of movement. And then lastly, our psychology. How we think, how we psychologically react to our experience and what practices or we use or don't use to change our psychological states.

So that's a discussion for another time to further justify why these three domains are, are, um, stand out opportunities for us. That's a very, very brief summary, but we are gonna incorporate that and that is the template we're gonna use to now analyze our behaviors as they relate to our lower back pain in terms of what harms or increases the breakdown in our lower back and what improves or increases healing.

Nutrition

Let's start with nutrition. And this is definitely not a course in nutrition. Nutrition itself is a beast of a subject to unravel and to seek any common ground on. But we cannot skip it because we will not achieve the results we seek without taking some serious steps in this way, in this domain.

So I'm not going to provide too much context or explanation as to why I'm sharing what I'm sharing or what I'm saying. That's for another series altogether. But, at this moment, you're going to have to trust what I'm saying or you're going to have to validate it for yourself. But what I would like to achieve with this brief mention of our nutrition and what you would most benefit from doing is installing an idea into your consciousness.

The idea that food is incomprehensibly rich with information, information that our bodies are extremely sensitive to. We may have desensitized ourselves consciously, but that doesn't change what is happening. Cause and effect, action, consequence. There is no free lunch. We consume all of that energy, information, matter, and it ripples through our entire system, touching all tissues, all genes, our nervous system, our hormonal glands, and right throughout the fluids and the bloodstreams, etc.

So please do not, however this idea might feel or seem to you, do not underestimate the role that nutrition might be playing, is definitely playing in your ability to recover effectively. And it also profoundly impacts or influences our sensitivity to pain in any moment, it's actually become a signal, another signal.

I use some of my oldest injuries that feel perfectly fine on most days when there's a subtle shift in the stability of it, my right knee is rich with information, a slight change in its sense of stability or a slight sensitivity on the side of the joint that's not there and I don't have a mechanical explanation for it, or I've just developed a sensitivity to tell the difference.

It immediately, because I'm learning to speak that language, I can understand, ooh, that is a cue for me to investigate. Why, how have I introduced an increased inflammation in my entire system through my nutrition? What have I eaten that has changed my experience of this area, this structure in my body, which is prone to easily becoming inflamed?

So it's become like a little meter, a little sensor that can indicate to me. And what I'm trying to explain, not very well here in a convoluted manner, is how sensitive my body's pain signal is as a direct result of what I'm eating at that time, or what I ate yesterday.

What I am eating in this general moment, so nutrition, and once again in a very logical and reasonable sense, is the actual energy, information, and structure that we ingest to then provide us with what we need to heal. It's not an indirect or optional part of the process. It is the fuel for the process and the signal rich with information.

It is the fundamental way our body regulates its general state of healing and if there is a medicine, like for our physiology, something that we can consume from our external environment, it is our food. And once again, there's another deep rabbit hole. Once you start to turn over all the rocks, optimized nutrition can heal anything. You just have no idea how optimized your nutrition can be.

So to wrap it up, food is no small deal. It is providing our body with the components to rebuild structures. It is rich with information. It ripples throughout the whole system. There is no free lunch. And it contains the energy we use to move, think, feel, and heal. So, if we now look at nutrition just briefly before we move on through the lens of harmful actions and beneficial actions, what are some categories of harmful actions you should be analyzing?

If you think, I'm not sure if my nutrition is optimized, what do I do now? Well, let's look if there are harmful actions present or in excess. Because harmful actions shift the balance towards breakdown. They are a new stressor on the system. They might lack, they may be insufficient in the tools we need to heal. And simultaneously they can become a stressor on the body instead of a gift part of the healing process. And in this way they move us away from a state of health, of optimal health.

Primarily, this is moving us towards states of increased inflammation, toxicity, and as I just mentioned, states in which we lack the fundamental components to heal, etc. So what foods are pro-inflammatory or pro-allergenic, they're allergy-causing like foods? I have a few six that I avoid: gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and seed oils. Of course, everything else processed foods. Most foods with the label, unless it says organic on there three times and you read the ingredients and it's very simple labels already, it's a very complicated product, far removed from nature.

So pro-allergenic foods are, like I mentioned, gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, seed oils, anything that's processed. Toxic food substances can often include factory-formed animal and plant products that come off massive factory farms and are usually riddled with everything from herbicides, pesticides, growth hormones, antibiotics, etc. Yeah. And then post-production, I mean from spraying apples to be greener, to anything you can imagine. So large-scale factory farm stuff. Tricky as well. Locally growing organic, grass-fed, pasture-raised. This is what you want to be looking for when getting animal and plant products.

And then it is not excessive at all. The skin has been called the second tongue. Our second tongue, what we put on our body, on our hair, nails, it all matters. So if you feel like you've optimized your nutrition, your movement's optimized and you're still experiencing, you still believe there's room to improve then and you're using very poisonous products, very toxic products by the standards I'm sitting here, not by what the commercial claims is suitable for human consumption or application. No. Then you need to start turning over those stones and having a look and why. And don't wait until it's a last resort, or you reach a plateau. See what steps you can take straight away. Every little bit matters because there's so many scenarios we can't control. And so many moments where it is actually justified. You, you know, go to granny's house and she's cooked your lunch and it's, there's something in there you would definitely never eaten your own. And maybe that's the moment you want to cheat.

So, in all the other moments, we can control, depending on your values and priorities, you want to control those moments. But before you know it, there are stresses and challenges coming from all angles. And I think it's quite easy to find some new products. Then what are some of the beneficial actions we can adopt when it comes to our nutrition?

Organic, whole food, nutrient-dense and a varied diet. Getting food from different food groups, getting foods with different colors, and typically foods that are more nutrient-dense than low on nutrients. So yeah, lots of water and again, listening to the body signs and symptoms. Do I feel better? How do I feel after eating this? Do I feel lighter, heavier, stuffed to the brim? Have I got a lot of gas? How's my visits to the toilet? All of these things, when you go down the nutrition path of self-guided intuitive nutrition, all of these signals are rich with information. The skin tone. Do you have any breakouts on your skin? Eczemas. All of these things are signs and symptoms that we need to use to investigate and analyze our behavior.

Movement

Now, let's move on to movement. This is not extensive at all because the majority of the beneficial movement practice is covered in the movement sessions that you will follow. I will cover that at the end. But what is important here is how do we reduce the harmful actions? If the movement protocol, the unset your back movement protocol is the beneficial actions we are adopting to create the conditions we choose, then how do we reduce or remove the actions which are increasing the breakdown in our lower back?

So when it comes to lower back pain, almost inherently in what we've said, there is an excess of breakdown in the tissues which make up the lower spine. Those are primarily the disks and the vertebrae in between the disks as well as the ligaments that house those entire structures and keep or connect them. Should I say so? Which activities on which types of activities tend to place an undue amount of stress and breakdown on those structures?

And those are what we need to hone in on. And unfortunately, our modern, sedentary seated lifestyle is rich with physical activities which strain our lower back structures.

So we need to inherent in the kind of unwanted activity on our lower back are a few factors. We have a lack of awareness of what position our lower back is in at any given moment or what it's doing at all, we don't have the support or the skill to support our lower back in any position, in any activity and any position. Um, and we have restrictions in our mobility throughout the body, which increase the strain on our lower back. So all of these issues that I've just described are caused by sitting.

And what do I mean by sitting? Well, sitting at the desk at work, that's what a lot of people think of. I'm a desk warrior, so I sit a lot, but we sit in our cars, we sit on planes and trains and bicycles and buses. We sit at meals, we sit at meetings, we sit when we help our children do homework or they sit when they're at school. We sit on the toilet. We sit when we wait for the bus, we sit when we, like, I sit when we on the bus, we, we sit all the time. And when we sit, we're going to cover this elsewhere. But when we sit, that natural concave curve in the lower back, the lumbar lordosis is almost always for all of us, almost all the time inverted into a convex kyphosis.

So that curve in the lower back is inverted, and this is when done for prolonged periods of time, repeatedly day after day, month after month, year after year, for a few hours at least every day. It starts to put a lot of strain on all of the structures, the bones, the discs, the ligaments that traverse, that outermost part of the lower back curve. Because if you think of how much, if the curve is naturally concave and then we invert it, all of those structures which run on the outside are in a stretched position and are straining under load, much more load than they would experience in a neutral position. And then we do that day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and eventually it adds up eventually at, it, it just, the breakdown overwhelms the repair.

There's a second layer to that and very underrated layer is that that concave or that inverted curve of the lower back actually starts to become the default movement pattern for the lower back for a number of reasons. Then we start to approach many activities that we do every time we bend over to pick something up. Every time we try and squat, every time we stand up from sitting off from sitting on a chair, all of these different movements where we should be hip movements or should be arm movements, we try reach overhead. Everything starts to now become the stress on the lower back because the, the lower back's not supported because all the muscles around it have become so weak and lazy. And the spine. We just even think about bending forward and where do we bend forward? Well, in that same lumbar curvature, because, well, that's just how we've programmed those, neuromuscular structures.

So now every activity starts to become even in our walking and are running our lifting and our jumping starts to be affected. I mean, I've been a, it's a very superficial and a quick summary here of the causes of the breakdown from a mechanical perspective of the lower back. But it's just enough to send you the message that you have to reduce the sitting, the total amount of sitting that you are doing, and you have to be aggressive. You need to stand more, as much as possible because there's a hell of a lot of sitting, you're still not gonna get away from. All the setting that you cannot get away from. We have to improve its quality. How do we restore that curving to the lower back when we have to sit and we can't get away from it then? Yeah, and these are strategies like using a lumbar curvature, but being very mindful about what we are doing when we are sitting, which is very tough, but this is also part of what you need to figure out if you start to pay attention to the shape of your lower back throughout the day, and I say keep it in a neutral position as much as you reasonably can.

What do you have to do to achieve that when you're sitting in the car? Feel. What shape does your lower back feel like? And you won't be able to tell with your mind initially. There's so little connection there. So use your hand, put your hand on your lower back. We are gonna cover this quite a bit in the movement protocol and feel the shape of your back in various positions.

And so in this way, we start to reduce the harmful movement activities. And for now, that's really it. Reduce the overall sitting, improve the quality of the sitting that we can't avoid. And of course, in activities where you are not certain, you can keep your lower back safe and in a neutral position because that's how we are reducing the stress on the lower back, whether it be golf or CrossFit or throwing ball with your kid, whatever it is right now, you will have to refrain. And the signal often for the lower back might only come as pain in the next morning. So if you've wake up any day with pain in your lower back being worse than that when you woke up the previous day, then you have to analyze what did I do the previous day that may have contributed to this lower back pain?

There is a continuous investigation and it's not that easy to pinpoint often what is the exact cause of my pain today. And sometimes that's why we have to remove a number of activities, which we are not certain of. If we cannot be certain that this activity is safe for my lower back, it's not putting my lumbar spine into that forward curve. It's not asking me to twist it or take it to end of ranges. Then I have to remove it for now. And once I've gotten to a point where we've removed all the harmful activities and we are only doing beneficial activities ideally, and we can start to wake up each morning time and time again, our lower back wakes, we wake up with our lower back feeling better. Sometimes there are small fluctuations which are difficult to avoid from day to day, but week by week there must be improvements. And of course, from day to day, I'm saying small fluctuations are normal, a little bit better, a little bit worse. But if something significantly worse the next day, then it's worth looking at what did I do that previous day? For sure.

And in this way we are kind of using the signals again, but also starting to pay attention to what shape is my lower back. And I didn't make it that clear leading into the section, but the lowest stress position for the lower back is in its neutral position. And so just like we would cast up any other joint that was injured, we could, with a brace or a cast to protect it, to reduce the movement and just allow healing and we remove all the stresses and allow the recovery. There is no way to brace up our lower back into a neutral position other than with our own skill and our own muscles and our own discipline by avoiding, the activities which would force us out of that position. And we'll get the quickest healing the more we are able to simultaneously honor the neutral position and avoid deviating from it.

And so that's what this movement. This is what you need to carry forth from now and no one can do it for you. I can, I can inspire you, I can motivate you, or someone can give you instructions. But you are the one that needs with your hands on the steering wheel of your lower back all day every day. And no one is gonna be there to check what the shape of your lower back is. When you reach into the bottom drawer to get a pot out for dinner, you are the only one who is there. You are the only one who can take care of your lower back.

Meditation

Also profound. Do you know in an instant that we slip from, uh, relaxation into stress, perhaps through some sort of fright? In that very instant, our entire physiological and hormonal profile changes from one that is in a state of calm, healing, recovering, resting, and digesting, they might say. And in an instant, it, um, it can flip into a state of fight or flight in which all of the energy in the body is rerouted. The priorities are shifted and different processes occur. And from through the lens of breakdown and recovery, it shouldn't take a long stretch of the imagination to see how our general state of repair and recovery will be far from optimized, or rather we can say, will be impeded by us being in states of stress or tension or depression for excessive amounts of times for unnatural amounts of times.

Of course, if we are dealing with something in life, an acute event to experience stress and depression on normal depression, I mean, is like you break up with someone and they die or someone dies and you go through a period of mourning. But when these states start to, when we don't recover from these states, when our stress becomes a chronic stress, which never ceases or it's something that we experience from wake until sleep, these start to have profound implications for our ability to recover from injury.

So what do we do? We need to reduce the stress and that kind of, it, it's in conjunction with what are the beneficial actions? Well, we need to increase our relaxation. It really is that simple, and it's, for most of us, it's a difficult thing to achieve because we have almost become identified, addicted, attached to the whole notion of being a busy, um, stimulated human. And we are not even familiar with the concept of relaxation. Like the word bored is something I think is, it's, it's a non-word. A bored person is actually a restless person. They're not bored. Someone who has lost the ability to relax.

And that is something that we need to inherently cultivate. Whether that's, uh, walks through nature bathing, um, body tension releasing and trauma releasing practices, um, uh, mindful movement and yoga type practices, um, uh, even things like saunas and cold water immersion. They, they play a role here in nervous system regulation. And, um, then of course the meditative practices, which is the most, um, advanced, challenging, yet profound forms of relaxation in which we really, really minimize the body's and, and the mind's tension.

But at whatever our level is, we need to consistently ask the question, Am I getting enough downtime in? Am I able to bring my nervous system all the way from a state of sympathetic activity down into a state of parasympathetic relaxation? Super important. Am I regularly getting into states of relaxation? Can I relax? And if not, if you can't wind down, then you need to up the game. You either need to increase the duration, you're trying to relax, the form, you're trying to relax, or your approach to relaxation, technique assistance. And like I said, there's so many ways to go about this, but you need to find ways to completely relax and stay there for a while.

Sleep

And moving on to the last section, which is kind of its own pillar, Eat, Move, Meditate is always supported on the bedrock of healthy sleep. If you'd like to know more about sleep at this stage, researcher and author Matthew Walker covers it extensively, but through the lens of this introductory course, I'm just going to keep it simple.

How do you feel when you are waking up? Do you feel like you've had enough sleep? And do you feel great before you've had any coffee or anything of the sort? Even though I did recommend not having caffeine, it's definitely better for me. And one of the reasons I don't like caffeine is it disconnects me from my own body's energy and I can't tell if my energy is good or not.

Um, so then it becomes confusing in that sense. And then simply, how much are you sleeping? Are you sleeping seven to nine hours? Do you feel like you've got enough? And are there any days of the week, two, three, four days of the week that you're able to wake up without an alarm, um, and feel great, feel super rested?

So, sleep is always going to play a big role. One or two nights of bad sleep, you could feel your pain increase, your body's recovery is going to decrease. These all matter. And if you're not getting the results you want, then there's a lot of places to look. Now I've covered everything that I advise people to address in this course to get recovery in the lower back.

Conclusions

If the thought of changing your entire life feels like too much, then take a moment to be grateful. Change is necessary and, if ignored, can lead to a path of debilitating circumstances which are out of your control.

Take the radical, revolutionary option now and own it. As mentioned before, this discussion is meant to bring you on board with my thoughts and the tools necessary to move forward. All of this can be done in a day or two.

Start the email course of four weekly exercise sessions that are easy to follow. You can sign up for that at craigvan.com for the UnSit Your Back course. If you haven't already, do it now. After watching this video, you are ready to begin. Pay close attention to the movements, exercises, and differences between harmful and beneficial postures. Use headphones to cut out all distractions and hear me clearly.

To take it to the next level, read the book "OnIt Back". This will give you an alternative way of learning and repeating the information. This discussion is the first in a series about unset your back. Listen to all of the sessions and make this part of your everyday life. There is no way to achieve full healing without taking a holistic approach.

Take responsibility and listen to your body. This is a gift, not a burden. If you follow the protocol, you will have what you need in a year. Having a fulfilling body and mind is more enjoyable than anything else. We must deliberately choose to nurture our vitality. Now that you have the information, the choice is yours. Let's help each other and be as capable as we can. Cheers!