When we are addressing optimal health, its important to understand the rain barrel effect. The rain barrel effect is an analogy for our overall toxic load. As humans, we are exposed to a large amount of stressors and toxins everyday. Our body must process and detoxify from every single one, otherwise, we begin experiencing negative symptoms in our health.

As you can see in the illustration above, there are lots of different ways we are being exposed to toxin and stressors. These toxins are chemicals in our skincare, pesticides, GMOs, household chemicals, tap water, processed foods, air quality, etc.

Then we have stressors that come in the form of financial stress, emotional stress, work stress, family stress, relationships, etc. while they’re not exactly toxins, they produce cortisol in the body which must be processed by the liver along with the toxins causing a burden on this detoxifying organ and they keep our bodies in a constant state of fight or flight which naturally inhibits, our body to restore itself.

In this analogy, these stressors are the rain and your body is the rain barrel. There are only so many stressors your body can take until it you start experiencing symptoms. Let’s say some of the stressors get processed and detoxified by the liver, however, when the stressors & toxins overload the detoxification pathways, this is when the bucket overflows or when the body starts showing symptoms of toxic overload.

Unfortunately some of these things are just out of our control. We can’t live in a bubble and we can’t control our external environment so this means that we will just have to focus on those things that we can control, what we put on our body and what we feed our bodies.

So what can we control?

Our intake of processed food

The quality of our food

Water quality

Household products

Cleaning Supplies

Hand soaps

Laundry soap

Use of Fragrances/ perfumes

Candles

Air Purifiers

Make-up

Lotion

Sunscreen

Hair Care

Body Wash

Bug Spray

Cleansers

Soaps