Superhealing: Engaging Your Mind, Body, and Spirit to Create Optimal Health and Well-Being (ARC) (7 page)

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What did the yogi, Norman Cousins, and this woman have in

common? Their minds were so intently focused on an objective

that it affected their bodies’ capabilities and helped them to adapt to stress
.
Other than being very committed and, in the case of the yogi, trained to focus, they weren’t necessarily different from anyone else. During my years in medicine, I have on occasion witnessed equal y special events: patients experiencing spontaneous healing

from life-threatening illnesses. In such cases, I’ve noticed that most people who experience these types of remarkable outcomes possess

an unflinching determination to get wel .

I believe your mind is as powerful as the minds of these people,

and I intend to show how your engaging it consciously is a funda-

mental component in ultimately enabling its superhealing abilities.

You don’t have to wait for a crisis to strike before you learn how to develop your mind. It is possible right here, right now.

One of the most significant keys to superhealing is transforming

your unhealthy responses to stress into healthier ones, with the understanding that your amazing body is highly adaptable and has the ability to manage acute physical and or psychological stress. Your mind has the remarkable ability to help your body heal and express optimal health and well-being, especial y when you are consciously engaging it to that end.

WHAT IS THE MIND?

The mind is the complex of cognitive faculties that enable con-

sciousness, including thinking, reasoning, perception, and judg-

ment. Your mind is the seat of your conscious and unconscious

awareness and the intermediary between your spirit and your body.

It is the element of your being that enables you to be aware of the world and your experiences. It is your thinking-feeling component.

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PART ONE:
Your Superhealing Mind

Many people, including most physicians, think that the brain is

the center and source of the mind, or the faculty of consciousness. It is not. In actuality, the brain is a sort of relay station; it receives information from the environment through your senses and translates

these perceptions into biochemical responses.

For the last few centuries, Western science has viewed the mind

as separate from the body. This has allowed doctors to view the body as a machine and treat it as such. But the truth is that your body is a dynamic, living organism, which in many significant ways is created by the mind. Your thoughts and feelings alter your body’s condition.

THE BIOLOGY OF STRESS

In order to actively engage your mind in superhealing, it is critical to understand the significant role stress plays in your health and well-being. Stress is a major factor in the development and progression of the vast majority of diseases, especial y the chronic and severe ones afflicting millions of us, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Even so, the significance of stress is often overlooked and unappreciated by doctors and patients alike.

Your body has the remarkable ability to maintain balance and

function without your conscious involvement. A portion of your

central nervous system, the autonomic nervous system (ANS)
,
is responsible for regulating bodily functions, like digestion, blood flow, breathing, and perspiration. The ANS is also called the involuntary nervous system, since you don’t have to think about these functions for them to occur.

However, you can and do influence these functions through your

thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Perhaps you’ve never considered

how a frightening thought or emotion triggers the gurgling in your stomach, the accelerating and pounding of your heart, the tightening

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of your muscles, or the quickening of your breath. It’s easy to take these things for granted and not pay attention to what it is actual y signaling the need for such changes. Since they are spontaneous, it’s easy to think they’re not under your control.

Why can thoughts and feelings affect you so dramatical y? Your

body’s remarkably intelligent design includes the fundamental ability to maintain balance.

During the early part of the twentieth century, Walter Cannon, a

Harvard University physiologist, first proposed the now ful y accepted notion that the body has a state of homeostasis: a self-maintaining, harmonious condition that responds to internal and environ-

mental factors. Maintaining homeostatic balance is a key ingredient in maintaining health. Anything that disrupts the body’s natural balance can be considered stressful. Fortunately, the mind-body system has regulators that enable it to adapt to stress.

The important point here is that your physical state is in constant flux, wavering about a homeostatic point that is your body’s optimal condition for living. Disease results when factors, whether internal and/or external, persistently disrupt your homeostasis and it cannot adapt to them quickly and effectively enough.

Although Cannon was ahead of his time with this idea, he pro-

posed that the personality was the controlling and regulatory aspect of the body. The subsequent work of psychoanalyst and physician

Franz Alexander, who was interested in the psychosomatic nature

of illnesses, supported Cannon’s conclusion that many chronic il -

nesses are not caused by external factors but are due to continuous functional stress on the body. Both men’s views contradicted the prevailing theory that bacteria, viruses, and external forces were the sole causes of disease.

Through research, endocrinologist Hans Selye, a Swiss scientist at 32

PART ONE:
Your Superhealing Mind

McGill University in Canada, made a significant discovery: he identified the physiological response to stress, which is regulated by the brain with hormones. In 1956, he published a landmark book,
The
Stress of Life
, in which he noted that stress is an unavoidable aspect of life, a response to the daily changes we experience, and the body’s reaction to any demands made on it. His discovery was termed the

fight-or-flight response
.

Fight-or-flight is a state of protective arousal, an instinctive response to life-threatening situations. This happens when your per-

ception of danger and experience of fear is triggered to release a cascade of hormones and chemicals that prepare your body to run from

danger or to stand your ground and fight. In stressful situations, heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension, among other things, all increase. Most of us believe that the body’s response to stress is automatic and that we therefore have no control over it, but in fact we do.

Whenever you experience stress, whether it is triggered by a phys-

ical, an emotional, or an environmental event, your brain attempts to adapt the body to it by initiating a series of chemical reactions. This response results in the release of stress hormones known as gluco-corticoids and catecholamines, which stimulate your entire body in order to protect you. At the core of this reaction is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, an interconnected network of endocrine

glands that regulates the production of the hormones that include

cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline to name a few.

During the 1940s, another pioneering researcher, physiologist

Walter Hesse, studied a key structure in the brain, the hypothalamus.

He discovered that stimulating different portions of the hypothalamus produced two diametrical y opposed physiological responses.

One area triggered the fight-or-flight response, whereas the other created a state of deep relaxation, promoting physical restoration.

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The second response is one of the body’s protective, healing mechanisms. The body’s changes during this relaxation response include

the following:

• Slower heart rate

• Lower oxygen consumption

• Decreased muscle tension

• Lower blood pressure

• Brainwave changes, from beta (normal waking consciousness)

to alpha (wakeful relaxation)

Relaxation on many levels can be stimulated with a variety of

techniques, such as meditation, visualization, biofeedback, hypno-

sis, and controlled breathing. These ways are interchangeable if your ultimate goal is relaxation.

You probably have a good idea what causes stress in your own

life; it could be anything from running late to having an argument to paying your bil s. It is very difficult to clearly define stress, because it is a unique and subjective experience for everyone. But it has a negative effect on your mental and physical well-being. Any external stimulation that disrupts homeostasis can be identified as stress.

As early as the 1920s and 1930s, the term
stress
was used in some medical and psychological circles to refer to a mental strain, an un-welcome happening, or, more medical y, a harmful environmental

agent that could cause illness. Dr. Selye was the first to define stress as the “non-specific response of the body to any demand placed

upon it.”1 He conceptualized the physiology of stress as having two components: first, the set of responses previously discussed, called the
general adaptation syndrome,
and second, the development of a pathological state resulting from ongoing and unrelieved stress.

Contemporary scientists, based on years of subsequent research,

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Your Superhealing Mind

believe that the term
stress
“should be restricted to conditions where an environmental demand exceeds the natural regulatory capacity of an organism.”2 Despite the numerous definitions of stress, recovering balance and functionality is the key to staying healthy.

WHY YOUR BELIEFS AND

PERCEPTIONS MATTER

William James, the father of American psychology, asserted, “The

greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”3 He understood that stress is ultimately subjective, a fluid experience that depends on how we respond to the events in our lives, how we think and feel about whatever happens to us. But stress doesn’t reside only inside our heads. The circulating hormones released into the bloodstream when we’re feeling stressed dramatical y affects every cell in our bodies. For this reason, stress is a leading cause of chronic disease, doctors’ visits, and hospitalizations. Chronic stress weakens us and makes us much more susceptible to developing disease.

According to the American Academy of Family Practice, nearly

two-thirds of doctor’s office visits are motivated by stress-related issues.4 The most popular prescriptions doctors write these days are for stress-related disorders. Millions of people regularly take antianxiety medication to ease the stress in their daily lives. Constant stress weakens the immune system’s ability to ward off infection and destroy cancer cel s.

The majority of Americans feel stressed on a daily, if not hourly, basis. As I’ve already pointed out, more heart attacks happen on

Monday morning, between 8:00 am and noon, than at any other

time of the week. This clustering of heart attacks is uniquely human.

Scientists therefore theorize that it is not linked to biorhythms, but due to the psychological meaning of Monday morning.5 Monday

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morning is the most stressful morning of the week because it’s when people return to jobs of minimal, if any, satisfaction and resume other pressures typical of working.

According to the American Psychological Association, workplace

stress costs U.S. businesses an estimated $300 billion each year in healthcare costs and absenteeism. Studies have shown that stress

causes 19 percent of employee absenteeism and 40 percent of em-

ployee turnover.6

Since 2000, annual surveys have reported increasing levels of

stress in the general population because of the state of the economy, fears related to terrorist attacks, concerns about the environment, and other issues. Unfortunately, even people who are aware of feeling stressed don’t necessarily know how to effectively manage it. Because there are so many concurrent sources of stress in their lives, they are finding it much harder to recover and return their bodies to a normal state of balance.

Whenever you’re experiencing anxiety, fear, distress, depression,

and frustration (as well as other challenging emotions, to a lesser degree), your thoughts trigger the release of the same stress hormones from your brain that would be triggered if your life were in immediate danger. This alters the physiology of every cell in your body. Any continued pattern of negative emotional responses to

stress will contribute to prolonged physiological stress, which can turn into chronic adrenal stress and affect your health in devastating and measurable ways. It’s linked to an elevation of inflammation markers in the blood and an increased thickening of the arteries, an indication of the progression of the hardening of the arteries known as atherosclerosis, which leads to heart attack and stroke. Prolonged stress can also elevate your risk of developing certain types of cancer and even dementia.

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PART ONE:
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When we face long-term stress with an attitude of helplessness

and pessimism, our constant negative thinking and emotions in-

terfere with our bodies’ natural restorative capacities. In the presence of these feelings of helplessness and despair, we actual y create a helpless, hopeless body that is much more susceptible to disease.