Mind-Body Health and Healing. Andrew Goliszek
Mind-body therapies can also contribute to (or deliberately create) more positive thinking. Evidence shows that people who believe they are doing better actually do better than those who have the same physical condition but aren’t as positive. (Research also suggests that anxiety, hostility, depression, and other negative states affect the immune system.)
• Placebo effect. When people believe that a therapy is working, it often does have a positive effect. The placebo effect is often deliberately invoked by mind-body therapies. For example, guided imagery and clinical hypnosis can use suggestions that the patient is getting better.
• Social support is a mind-body therapy in and of itself and is also part of many other mind-body therapies. It has been shown beneficial to health in many studies. “People with supportive social networks have been shown to have better overall health . . . shorter hospital stays when they do get sick, and better resistance to infection than those whose social bonds are not strong.”3
The principles that make mind-body therapies and practices effective in improving physical health also apply to other aspects of our daily life. These therapies can improve your mental and emotional health and your overall well-being.
According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there is a direct link between stress and aging. This study compared the chromosomes of thirty-nine women, ages twenty to fifty, who had been caring for children with serious chronic illnesses (and who thus had high levels of stress) with woman caring for healthy children (lower stress).4
Women with the highest levels of stress had changes in their chromosomes equivalent to at least one decade of additional aging compared with women with lower stress. But it wasn’t only the years of caregiving that related to the change, it was the perception of high stress. Women who had the perception of higher stress levels such as the inability to manage time or feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work, fared the worst. To paraphrase Hans Selye, an Austrian-Canadian endocrinologist and researcher on the responses of organisms to stressors, every stressful experience leaves an indelible scar and exacts a cost—after a stressful situation the organism pays for it by becoming a little older. Given this, could mind-body practices that reduce stress also reduce aging? I’ll examine this in a later chapter.
I’ve included chapters on spirituality, prayer, meditation, and imaging because all of these can have a significant effect on our state of mind and the way we feel and think, which, in turn, can have a profound effect on how our immune system responds to illness and disease.
Typically, the main ingredients needed to trigger a disease are an invading foreign substance and a lowered resistance. The invader can be anything from a virus, fungus, parasite, or bacteria to abnormal tissue growth, resulting in a tumor or cancer. The lower the resistance, or the slower the response to the invader is, the more likely the disease will establish itself and overwhelm homeostatic mechanisms. Stress is your body’s physiological response to anything you perceive as overwhelming, unpleasant, dangerous, or threatening. In the case of the fight-or-flight response, stress contributes to our survival, enabling us to quickly escape or fight our way out of a threatening situation.
Stress can also be caused by changes we normally think of as positive, such as a job promotion, a new relationship, or the birth of a child. It is excess or ongoing stress that interferes with relationships, work, and social life. Ongoing stress saps your energy resources, causes feelings of negativity and, according to medical research, is responsible for as much as 90 percent of all illnesses and diseases—most notably hypertension, heart disease, and cancer. In addition, stress can be a contributing factor in making existing medical problems worse.
Because each of us is shaped by experiences and a unique genetic makeup, we’re all inherently different in how we respond to and deal with stress. At a Biology of Stress conference, Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a research psychologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said, “We don’t walk into trauma the same way . . . and we don’t walk out of trauma the same way.”5 Yehuda is one of many scientists to show that reactions to stress can vary widely and that outcomes of stressful events arise from a complex interplay between genes and the environment.
Stress makes us all the more susceptible to illness and disease because the brain’s hypothalamus sends defense signals to the endocrine system, which then releases an array of hormones that not only get us ready for emergency situations but severely depress immunity as well. Even ordinary, day-to-day activities could push us over the edge, according to David Krantz, PhD of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, who found that blood flow to the heart is affected by what we’re doing and feeling each day and that serious problems can be avoided by keeping track of the simple daily stress in our lives.6 So just as in other physiological processes, the neuro-endocrine-immune system is at the very heart of the stress response—a series of chemical reactions that affect tissues and organs in ways that can wreak havoc on normal body functions.
It’s impossible to say exactly how many different negative reactions occur as a result of physical or emotional stress. What we do know, as indicated in Figure 2.2 below, is that the number is significant.
Figure 2.2: Physical Reactions During the Stress Response
In 1926, a young Hans Selye observed that hospital patients in the early stages of infectious diseases all exhibited similar symptoms, regardless of the type of disease they had. Later, while doing some physiology experiments, he noticed that three common responses occurred whenever any organism was injected with a toxic substance: (1) the adrenal glands enlarged; (2) the lymph nodes and other white-blood-cell producing organs initially swelled and then shrank; and (3) bleeding appeared in the stomach and intestines.
Selye called these three common responses the General Adaptation Syndrome and concluded that certain changes take place within the body during physical stress that disrupt homeostasis and trigger an array of diseases. No matter what type of organism he examined, from rats, dogs, pigs, and monkeys to humans, he found that chronic stress, if left untreated, induced a specific pattern that always led to infection, illness, disease, and eventually death (Figure 2.3). As shown in Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome, various stress reactions occur during each stage that make us more susceptible to disease.
Figure 2.3: Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome
Stage 1: Alarm Reaction: Any physical or mental trauma sets off an immediate set of reactions to combat the stress. Because the immune system is initially depressed, normal resistance levels are lowered, making us more susceptible to infection and disease. If the stress is not severe or long lasting, we bounce back and recover rapidly.
Stage 2: Resistance: Eventually, sometimes rather quickly, we adapt to stress, and there’s actually a tendency to become more resistant to illness and disease. Our immune system works overtime for us during this period, trying to keep up with the demands placed upon it. The danger here is that we become complacent and assume that we can resist the effects of stress indefinitely. Believing that we’re immune from the effects of stress, we typically fail to do anything about it.
Stage 3: Exhaustion: