by Lawrence Wilson, MD

INERTIA AND HOW TO OVERCOME IT

Changing old habits and overcoming chronic health conditions usually requires handling what may be called harmful inertia in the body and mind.

Inertia and the general systems theory. Inertia may also be viewed in terms of cybernetics and the stress theory of disease. Here it might be defined as rigidity, or a type of inability to adapt properly. More precisely, it is an inability to respond to stress properly with negative feedback loops, and instead a tendency to respond with positive feedback loops, also called vicious cycles. For more information about stress theory and cybernetics, read the article, The Theory of Nutritional Balancing, on this website.

Physics definition helpful. Inertia may also be defined in physics terms as a vector with a certain momentum that just tends to keep going due to its mass, or mass effect. While this definition may seem a bit remote or irrelevant, it is quite apt to describe what happens in the body, at times. It just seems to keep wanting to do things the old way, so to speak, due to some kind of mass attraction or property. This is what needs to be overcome to accomplish any meaningful change in your life.

Inertia in the body. The body is what is called a complex, self-correcting system. This means it is always in a dynamic state and can get “stuck” in hundreds of thousands of ways in an inertial “rut”.

Unlike a car, for example, that cannot have inertia unless it is moving, the body is always “moving” in many directions at once, in fact.

Inertia in the body is also more complex than a simple object like a car because the body is designed to be self-correcting. This means that your blood pressure, your blood sugar, and thousands of other parameters or factors in the body are designed to change moment to moment in response to stress. If this self-correction ability fails, even for a few moments, deadly inertia can set in. The blood pressure might go up to high, the blood sugar might go to low, the hormones might go to low, and so on.

MORE EXAMPLES OF INERTIA IN THE BODY AND MIND

Inertia refers to patterns that are set in the body, the mind, the emotions, the personality and other levels as well. The key component is a rigid quality, or inability to adapt perfectly. The person has lost a type of flexibility or adaptability.

A structural example. Let us imagine that one leg is longer than the other leg. When this happens early in life, and after years of walking this way, the person has often compensated in the hips, the knees, the back, the neck, and even the vision and other senses, too. When one begins to correct the problem, the body will resist the change because there is a certain inertia due to all the changes that have taken place as a result of the original injury.

Biochemical inertia. If a person is born low in zinc, as is often the case, the body does its best to compensate for the zinc deficiency. Certain organs may hypertrophy and take over the function of other organs that simply do not develop properly. Digestion weakens and the body may compensate by learning to overeat on some foods in an attempt to get all the nutrients it needs. Less preferred minerals such as toxic metals will begin to accumulate in some enzyme binding sites because they can replace the missing zinc to a small degree. Even certain body structures such as the bones and the teeth may adapt as well to the nutritional deficiency of zinc.

Later in life, when one begins a nutritional balancing program with sufficient zinc, the body must not only replace the toxic metals that have taken the place of the zinc. It must undo dozens of adaptations to a zinc deficiency that have taken place over the years. This amounts to a kind of inertia and resistance to change that one must put up with, often for several years, as the body becomes properly nourished. One may feel tired one day, anxious the next, and so on, until the process of rebalancing and healing is completed.

Lifestyle inertia. A person’s patterns of living, eating, and responding to stress tend to take on a life of their own and must be shifted, perhaps dramatically, in order to reverse a health condition. For example, some people are in a rigid habit of going to bed late, or eating on the run, or in their car. These are simple examples of rigid tendencies that must be reversed for optimum health.

Personality inertia. At the level of the personality, most people also develop inertia in the form of fixed ideas, fixed reactions to particular stimuli or situations, fixed emotional reactions, and much more. Some people become habitually depressed, or habitually anxious, perhaps, or fearful. These negative personality traits, which are usually based on early childhood experiences, nutritional imbalances, or perhaps traumas, create an inertia in the personality of many people that must be overcome for complete healing to occur.

A type of spiritual inertia. This does not refer specifically to a person’s religious beliefs, although these may be an important source of inertia as well. However, everyone has a type of inertia in their life that may be called life planning inertia. It consists of patterns that are set very early in life, or perhaps even before one comes into this life. They are hard to change, and may take a few years of employing a nutritional balancing program and other methods. Fortunately, at this time in history, it is much easier to change some of them, though not all.

Examples might include developing a particular illness or disability in order to learn a specific lesson, or perhaps to teach a lesson to another person. Other examples may include getting into a difficult relationship, taking on a difficult job, having children who are hard to handle, and much more.

In each case, there are lessons to learn and life challenges to overcome. It seems like this must be done as part of a greater plan for your life that we don’t understand. This represents a powerful type of inertia for some people that will slow progress on any healing program.

A nutritional balancing program, in particular, can help overcome this type of negative inertia by deeply removing toxic metals, increasing vitality and adaptive energy, and helping the brain function better so that one’s lessons can be learned faster and better.

FACTORS THAT OFTEN CAUSE INERTIA

The following factors in a person’s life may be important to cause inertia. One may be more important than another, depending on the person and the illness or situation:

Age. In general, children have much less harmful inertia than adults. This is because as one ages, inertia generally sets in on all levels.

Lowered vitality. A healthy body with plenty of energy is generally quite adaptable, and does not “make peace” with infections and other disease conditions. As one’s energy and vitality declines, the body simply cannot adapt as well, becomes more rigid, and is prone to all health conditions.

The same applies mentally and emotionally. Those with the most vitality tend to resist negativity and mental aberrations. As vitality declines, negative thinking, low self-esteem, harmful emotions and other imbalances tend to increase and become more deeply ingrained.

Medical drugs, particularly hormones of all kinds, antibiotics, and others. Some drugs, particularly hormones, tend to ‘fix’ or force the body and the glands to be function certain way. They may stabilize the body, but in a rigid, rather than a natural way.

This is one of the main complaints about all bio-identical hormone therapy, for example. It fixes the glandular responses, when in fact your thyroid, adrenals and other glands should be responding to stress in different ways each minute. Fixing the regimen with an oral or other hormone is unnatural in the extreme. While it may work or appear to work for some people, I find their use unnecessary and quite harmful in the long run for most people.

Herbs, vitamins or minerals. Taking herbs, vitamins, minerals and other supplements that are incorrect for the body also often sustain and worsen inertia in the body. The supplements can act as stimulants, for example, or depressants, or have many other effects.

Even nutritional balancing programs impose a type of rigidity on the body. Minimizing this problem is one of the main reasons for periodic retesting of the hair. This can prevent the development of harmful inertial mineral patterns due to the use of improper diets or supplements.

Pain or other irritating conditions in a person’s life. These include physical pain, such as found in the joints, organs, head or elsewhere.

Pain can also include psychological, social, financial and other types of pain or irritating conditions. The effect is to upset a person so much that they adopt rigid postures, rigid habits of thinking or behavior or various neuroses in some cases to minimize their pain.

Rigidity is inertia. In this sense, rigidity is a common form of inertia. This is a critical issue that starts in childhood or infancy. Every effort should be made to keep children flexible – in their bodies, their thinking, their emotional responses, and their habit patterns as well. However, parenting styles often have the opposite effect, as does most schooling, unfortunately. This is a very important cause of the type of inertia that causes illness and premature death later on.
Types of rigidity are:

Rigidity in the body. This may include symptoms of joint pain, arthritis, stiffness of the muscles, impaired posture and movement, ligaments or tendons, reduced range of movement of the joints, nearsightedness or farsightedness, reduced flexibility of the skin, constipation or diarrhea, high blood pressure or very low blood pressure, and even imbalances in the blood sugar, for example, and other parameters of the body.

Rigidity of the personality. This may manifest as fixed ideas, neuroses or psychoses, emotional suppression, a habit of being out of control of emotions, fixations, projections and other mental or emotional imbalances.

Rigid habit patterns. These might include rigid dietary preferences, sleep patterns, rigid exercise patterns and many others. It might include negative or harmful ways to relate to others, for example, that were learned early in life and have become habitual.

Chronic disease of any kind. This might include chronic ear infections, for example, or hardened arteries, diabetes, cancer, or practically any other chronic type of illness. By definition, anything that is chronic means the body has adapted to it and “made peace with it”. This situation must be changed in order for the person to completely overcome the condition. The state of peace must be upset and ended, so the body can fight off the infection thoroughly, or overcome the disability or illness.

HAIR ANALYSIS PATTERNS ASSOCIATED WITH INERTIA

Any hair analysis pattern may be evidence of inertia in the body. A few patterns, however, are perhaps even more associated with feeling stuck in a rut. They may include:

1. Bowl pattern. This is a yin or blood deficiency in acupuncture. A person often feels emotionally stuck when this pattern is present. The pattern is present when the sodium/potassium ratio is less than 2.5 and the calcium/magnesium ratio is greater than about 9.5.

2. Calcium shell. This is a psychological withdrawal pattern in which a person also feels trapped, often, and has given up to a degree and is just existing, rather than living.

3. Four lows pattern. This common pattern is also related to deficiency in acupuncture, severe nutritional depletion in most cases, and a psychological and physiological disconnect involving the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis or HPA axis. It is one of the most important inertial pattern on a hair mineral analysis.

4. Low phosphorus (less than about 11 mg%). This is associated with reduced vitality or chi. It is a strongly catabolic tendency in the body, or tendency for tissue breakdown in most cases. This also makes it harder for the body to respond to stress and adapt properly.

5. A step up pattern. It, too, is a ‘double’ or reinforced inertia pattern because it involves or includes a double low ratio pattern. Step up involves moving in a direction that is simply not working, and is perhaps the closest analogy in the body to a car that is moving toward a cliff and needs to be stopped or slowed at once.

6. Sympathetic dominance. In this pattern, a person keep pushing himself, although he is exhausted.

Combinations. If several of these patterns combine, or if the mineral readings and ratios are further out of balance, even more inertia will likely be present in the body chemistry and often in the personality structure, as well. We sometimes call more extreme patterns double, triple or quadruple patterns.

MINERAL PATTERNS INDICATING A RELEASE OF HARMFUL INERTIA AND AN INCREASE IN POSITIVE MOMENTUM

Some mineral patterns indicate that a person is overcoming harmful inertia. These include:

1. A hill pattern.

2. A step down pattern.

3. A rise in toxic metals on a retest hair analysis when a person is following a nutritional balancing program, in almost all cases.

4. Enhancement of the oxidation rate on a retest, and perhaps other retest patterns when one follows a correctly designed program.

REMEDIES AND LEVELS OF DEALING WITH HARMFUL INERTIA IN THE BODY AND MIND

One can correct individual feedback loops in the body and therefore undo harmful inertia at a very microscopic or low level. This is what symptomatic approaches to healing accomplish, in general. In other words, they address very specific symptoms or evidence of inertia, such as an ache or pain, an upset stomach, fatigue, or an infection.

This is fine as far as it goes. However, the patient often develops other symptoms later because:

· It is not a systemic or whole-system correction.

· Fixing one symptom may upset other feedback loops and cause side effects or unintended consequences.

· Focusing on symptoms often distracts one and may mask more serious problems.

· Fixing a symptom with a drug often actually reduces the overall vitality or positive inertia of the body.

The nutritional balancing approach is to focus on whole system behaviors and attempt to undo thousands of faulty feedback loops and therefore make correction in millions of subtle ways at the same time. This can be slower and more trouble, but it often works far better in the long run. It can also take care of problems that do not respond well, if at all, to symptomatic or partial approaches.

The Roy Masters meditation and positive momentum. An interesting aspect of inertia has to do with the meditation that we recommend to all adults as part of every nutritional balancing program. This exercise actually sets up a new kind of momentum in the body. It is an energy that moves down the body from head to toe. One begins by focusing on the right hand, but eventually one wants to have the energy move downward all the way from the head to the toes. This energy slowly builds and, of itself, has a healing effect.

This type of correction of energy to restore a positive momentum in the body and mind is very real, even if it cannot be seen, except perhaps for a gleam in the person’s eye and better health. It is an ethereal energy that moves all of life toward greater complexity and greater health. This is the end goal of life, whether we are aware of it or not.

When life wanes, we become ill. When the life energy returns or increases somehow, we become healthier. It is found in food, water, air, remedies, and can be enhanced through balancing the body, resting the body, nourishing it well and even by shifting how one thinks.

The Roy Masters exercise directly enhances this type of energy in the body, but the process can be sped up greatly today by a healthful diet and lifestyle, a few targeted nutritional supplements and certain detoxification procedures. This process of restoring the proper momentum to the body and mind is the ultimate goal of nutritional balancing science. Another name for it is mental or spiritual development, as understood on this website only.

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