Mind/Body Health

Science has only begun to explore the influence of our minds on our bodies.

It has been demonstrated that our responses to stress can promote many kinds of illness.  Optimists live longer, healthier, and happier lives.  Even sick optimists do better than their equally sick pessimistic counterparts.  Fifteen minutes a day of journaling can make a second heart attack less likely.  A daily 20 minute relaxation practice leading up to surgery can lessen recovery time.   Seeing a tree outside your hospital window leads, on average, to faster recovery.  Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn’t hold such fatalistic views. With biofeedback, people can learn to lower their blood pressure. These are but a few examples.  The evidence of our mental powers on health is mounting rapidly.   (For more complete summaries of the mind/body research see the bibliography below.)

In our culture, when we have a symptom we immediately ask, "what pill should I take to treat this?"  Often the right pill is indeed helpful.  However, I suggest that we also ask ourselves, "Do I want this symptom? (Is there something I am trying to do for myself with this symptom that could be accomplished in a different way?') And,  "Is there a way I can use my mind to change this?"

Have you heard of that pesky “placebo effect”?  People who received a placebo, who thought they were getting a treatment but got a fake pill instead, were often found to improve.  This placebo effect would interfere with the evaluation of a drug's effectiveness. Medical research is now done with a double blind design, where neither doctors nor patients know if they are giving or getting the real medicine.  The placebo results are subtracted from the treatment results to determine the effectiveness of the drug over placebo. 

The amazing people who benefited from the placebo were able to produce the good result of the medicine without having received it!   We need to study them to find out how they did it!  Based on my work with people who are suffering from allergies, I would guess

1.) that their symptom was not serving another agenda for them (or they were able to meet that need in another way), and

2.) that they used some combination of attention, instruction, and imagination to produce their miraculous physical improvement.   

Allergies are mistaken learnings on the part of our immune system. They can be created in animals by pairing something neutral, say saccharine, with a chemical that physiologically causes allergic symptoms. The animals then develop allergies to saccharine. Allergies are very demonstrable and the suffering is real.  There is no mistaking the runny nose, itchy eyes, sneezes, and coughs due to airborne allergies, for example.  In the past two years, I have worked with 10 people who had an allergy.  Nine of them no longer have the allergy and do not take any medication for it (references available on request).  These people, in effect, retrained their immune systems to regard the "allergen" as harmless just as you might train a loyal, protective dog not to get vicious with the person who delivers the mail.  They were able to do this in from 3 to 10 sessions using hypnosis and practicing on their own.  Incidentally, I observe that the clever advertisers for allergy medications are manipulating us in a reverse of this process!  If someone has a tendency to create an allergic reaction, those ads will make it worse – creating, of course, a great need for the medicine!

I do not know what the limits are of the powers of our minds to influence our health.  If you are struggling with an allergy or other health problem, and would like to align the powers of your mind with your own good health, I would be happy to assist you in that process.

Mind/Body Bibliography

Author	Title
Benson, Herbert and Eileen M. Stuart	The Wellness Book: The Comprehensive Guide to Maintaining Health and Treating Stress-Related Illness,
Friedman, H.S., and D. Ulmer	Treating Type A Behavior and Your Heart,
Goleman, Daniel	Emotional Intelligence, Bantum
Goleman, Daniel and Joel Gurin, ed.	Mind Body Medicine: How to Use Your Mind for Better Health, Consumer Reports Books
Hafen, Brent Q., KeithJ. Karren, Kathryn J. Frandsen, N. Lee Smith	Mind/Body Health: the Effects of Attitudes, Emotions, and Relationships
Moyers, Bill	Healing and the Mind
Northrup, Christiane	Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
Sarno, John E.	Healing Back Pain: the Mind-Body Connection
Seligman, Martin	Authentic Happiness
Seligman, Martin	Learned Optimism,
Sobel, David S., and Robert Ornstein	The Healthy Mind, Healthy Body Handbook,