The body and mind are interconnected. It's a fact. Scientific research has shown that how we treat our bodies affects our thought processes and our habits of mind impact our physical health. Simple. The choices we make regarding both body and mind matter to the overall quality of our lives. Our lives literally depend on the choices we make. There's a great book called The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton M.D. that presents scientific evidence that how our DNA is expressed depends on the environment; not just the climate and location, but lifestyle choices of what we eat, how we exercise and how we perceive the world around us. Literally, what we believe. For a long time scientists touted genetic determinism- that the genes we inherit, dictate our fate. But with the dawn of the field of Epigenetics in the latter half of the 20th century- the science of "how environmental signals select, modify and regulate gene activity"- we now know that our life choices make us "co-creators of our own destiny".
Exciting, huh? And simple, yes. If I make all of the right choices in the ways I take care of myself, that colon cancer my father died of at age 47 might not become my fate. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. How we perceive the world and form our belief systems is difficult to control. The medical profession is only now realizing that, because of research on the placebo/nocebo effects, what health care professionals say to patients and how they are perceived by the people they care for, is hugely powerful. If a person is told they have 8 weeks to live by a doctor who is perceived as an authority in the field, they might not live much beyond that time frame. Unless they change their belief, the power of suggestion is so compelling as to dictate the outcome in many cases. We have all heard of the placebo effect, but I thought it had to do with drug trials and giving the control group a sugar pill instead of the drug to verify the findings of the study. But when studies found that a very high percentage of the sugar pill group were getting better simply from the belief that they were being given a drug, it opened my eyes to the power of belief.
Once they started to really look at the way our minds impact our bodies, and vice versa, they found that our beliefs manifest themselves in many ways. There's a famous case from 1996 when a three year old boy with autism was given the hormone secretin (stimulates the pancreas to secrete digestive juices) as part of a routine endoscopy. Immediately after, many of the boy's symptoms- gut function, sleep and even communication- improved radically. Almost completely mute before the test, he was suddenly smiling, making eye contact and talking. By process of elimination, they determined it must have been the secretin and when NBC's Dateline did a story on the family, the news went viral and parents from all over the globe were seeking out this treatment. Never having been tested for this purpose or for repeated use, a battery of clinical trials on secretin were mandated. Once again, a control group was given a placebo to verify the effects of the actual drug. The results were astounding. Turns out, there was no significant difference between the two groups; secretin showed absolutely no benefit when compared to the fake treatment. The promise of secretin was an illusion invented by parents desperate to see an improvement in their kids. Belief is a powerful thing.
Being around stressors that we are not equipped to handle or negative people who bring us down, not to mention the barage of demoralizing news coming at us at break-neck speed, all of these things impact our health and wellness as part of our environment. And we now have scientific evidence of the effects of stress, fear and negativity. These external stimuli trigger the fight-flight response in the sympathetic nervous system resulting in shallow chest breathing and the production of stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, all meant to handle situations of trauma/danger when we have to harness our resources to save ourselves. On a chronic basis, stress has a toxic effect on the body, never mind our psychological state; shallow rather than diaphragmatic breathing deprives the body of sufficient oxygen needed to fuel all of the cells in our body. And stress hormones create an acidic environment in the body promoting inflammation and the production of free radicals associated with heart disease and cancer.
But we can't change much of what we encounter on a daily basis- difficult co-workers, work-related travel, and just the basic reality of things piling up and going wrong. But what we can change is how we respond to these things; how we choose to integrate them into our perceptions and beliefs about ourselves in relation to the rest of the world (You Can Lead a Horse to Water...). Good health is a choice.
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