The Mind and Health
Most folks are about as happy
as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
Contents:
Positive Thinking and Health
Self-Beliefs and Health
The Placebo Effect
Psychosomatic Illness
Using the Mind to Create Health
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Positive Thinking and Health
It's this simple (and research shows):
Pleasant ("positive") mental dispositions such as happiness, joy, optimism, hope, and feeling secure can contribute to health and well-being.
Unpleasant ("negative") mental dispositions such as fear, anxiety, anger, hostility, and depression can contribute to ill-health and even reduce longevity.
How is this so?
Mental dispositions are brain functions, and the brain communicates with the rest of the body via nerves and hormones to control physiology. For example, through the nervous system and various hormones, the brain can affect the function of the heart. You know this because fear makes your heart race when you have to give a speech. Chronic anxiety or hostility can alter the normal rhythm of the heart beat and raise blood pressure. These mental states also can cause the release of the hormone cortisol, which can suppress immune functioning, cause depression, and alter physiology.
If you are at peace with yourself and you live in harmony with your social and physical environment, your brain and body function harmoniously and you are more likely to feel good and enjoy good health. On the other hand, if you are chronically anxious, angry, frightened, tense, depressed, and at odds with your surroundings, your brain will direct your body to respond to these mental states with nerve activity and the release of stress hormones and other body chemicals, which over time can cause illness.
Self-Beliefs and Health
Good health is based on healthy thinking about yourself.- Self-esteem...valuing yourself (self-worth or self-esteem) is likely to make you feel more positive about life and to motivate you to engage in healthful behaviors rather than harmful ones because you won't intentionally do things to harm yourself. Also, by valuing yourself you are more likely to contribute to making your physical and social environments clean and healthy and support others' desires to be healthy and well because you see these efforts as supporting your own health and well-being.
- Believing in your abilities...believing in your abilities helps you make health goals, devise strategies for attaining them, and persevering to accomplish goals that you set for yourself. This means realizing that obstacles to accomplishing one's goals are ever-present; moving forward requires flexibility and willingness to change goals and strategies that are not working rather than letting discouragement grow into defeat. Repeated success at accomplishing goals leads to confidence and vitality rather than insecurity and passivity.
- Being optimistic...
People pursue goals with expectations about the outcomes of their efforts. Optimism -- imagining a high probability of attaining your goal -- motivates, whereas pessimism -- imagining a low probability of attaining your goal -- stifles.
Optimism is associated with perceiving negative events as specific, temporary obstacles to be overcome. Optimism also is associated with the tendency to perceive oneself as being able to move toward a desired goal and/or or away from an undesirable goal. Optimism is associated with inner self-talk that is encouraging and hopeful ("I'll find a way to solve this problem.").
Pessimism is associated with explaining negative events as self-caused (it's my fault), stable (it will last forever), and global (it's going to ruin everything). The self-talk associated with pessimism tends to be anxious ("I'm not sure what to do."; "I'm not sure it will work out.") and self-critical ("I'm inept."). A pessimistic explanatory style is associated with a greater degree of illness and a shorter life expectancy because it leads to anxiety, stress, depression, and the beliefs that living healthfully or getting help from others when ill won't make things better
Optimism is associated with consuming fresh vegetables and fruits and low-fat foods whereas pessimism has been associated with low fiber diets, greater consumption of fat and alcohol and negative physiological and immune consequences.Although optimism is associated with confident, encouraging inner self-talk, such as telling yourself "I can do it," and "I won't give up," be wary of slogans like "just do it." Whereas seemingly encouraging, they can undermine one's efforts because they ignore the fact that not every goal is realistic or attainable and no one can do everything no matter how hard they try. Generating false hopes to accomplish the impossible damages one's confidence and self-esteem.
The Placebo Effect
The placebo effect is the lessening of symptoms (including distress) or even curing a disease through belief in the healing power of a person, spirit, food, chemical, or behavior. The placebo effect works because a person expects it to. In other words, "thinking makes it so."
For example, patients who are tricked into believing that sugar pills are pain killers actually experience less pain that those who know the pills are fake. The reason the fake pain pills work is the belief that they will. This belief changes physiology in at least two ways.
- It causes the body to manufacture and release its own painkilling chemicals (called endorphins).
- It lessens fear of pain, which reduces stress hormones and nervous system alertness, and hence sensitivity to pain.
Doctors are aware that what they say and do can affect the outcome of their treatment of patients' illnesses. A doctor who says to a patient "You're going to be fine soon" engenders in the patient's mind the expectation of a cure, which can act as a placebo. A doctor who says "I'm not sure you're going to recover" -- even if that is the truth -- isn't helping things.
When you are unwell, you can help yourself get better if you have confidence in any healing process you undergo. This could be a drug or medical procedure, a healing art, positive thinking, or faith. There is no guarantee that belief in a healing process will always work, buy there is sufficient evidence to suggest that confidence can lessen stress, which helps the body heal.
Psychosomatic Illness
Psychosomatic illnesses are diseases caused by unpleasant mental dispositions such as anger, fear, and stress. Although the root of psychosomatic illnesses is mental, they are not fictitious ailments. They really exist. Through nerves and hormones, unpleasant mental dispositions cause the brain to send signals to the rest of the body that alter physiology for the worse.
For example, people who experience real or imagined discrimination are at increased risk for heart disease, breast cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, substance abuse, and self-reported poor health. Believing that others dislike you and try to make your life miserable sets into motion nerve and hormone patterns that result in altered physiology and eventually disease.
Also, discrimination experiences can lessen a person's self-care desires and efforts, potentially increasing participation in unhealthy behaviors or decreasing participation in healthy behaviors. Battling discrimination can rob a person of the energy and resources for making healthy behavior choices.
College students experience psychosomatic illness in the form of increased risk of colds and flu around exam time. Studying for exams is often accompanied by the fear of failure. This fear causes the body's adrenal glands to release into the bloodstream the stress hormone cortisol, the role of which is to help the body respond to any kind of stress. One effect of cortisol is to lessen immune functioning. So, when students become stressed over an impending test, their immune systems weaken and they are more susceptible to colds and flu.
Using the Mind to Create Health
- Be aware of your thoughts (meditation is good for this). When you notice that your thinking is making you feel bad, change your thoughts. Two ways to do this are thought-stopping and cognitive reframing.
- Give your stress hormones a time-out. Stress causes more stress. Relaxation can stop the body's stress reactions, and give you a chance to regain some sense of harmony. Some relaxation methods: Also, quieting your mind give you a chance to come up with non-stressful strategies for dealing with what is going on in your life. Remember this: Thrashing around in a pond of water only stirs up mud and makes things unclear. However, being still in the pond allows the water to be still, enabling you to see clearly.
Research Resources
Emotional style and susceptibility to the common cold Cohen S, et al (2003). Positive emotions such as happy, pleased, and relaxed were found to be associated with lower risk of developing a cold.
Positive psychological well-being and mortality: a quantitative review of prospective observational studies. Chida Y. and Steptoe A (2008). Reports on research showing that positive psychological well-being is associated with reduced mortality in both healthy and sick individuals.
The Placebo Effect. Freedman JH and Dubinsky R (2008). A description of the placebo effect at work in a study of patients with Parkinson's Disease. (More on Parkinson's Disease)
Positive affect and psychobiological processes relevant to health. Steptoe A, Dockray S, and Wardle J. (2009). A discussion of research showing that positive psychological states are associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease risk and increased resistance to infection.
Perceived discrimination and health. Pascoe EA, Smart Richman L. (2009). Reports on research showing that perceived discrimination is linked to specific types of physical health problems, such as hypertension, self-reported poor health, and breast cancer, as well as potential risk factors for disease, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and substance use.
