The Mind-Body Connection

When I started exploring the world of health and wellness after my surgery for a pancreatic tumor almost 2 years ago, I had already had some experience with the connection between my mind and body.   

In elementary school, I suffered from frequent migraine headaches and went to a headache clinic in Baltimore to learn biofeedback.  Biofeedback trains you to control processes that your body usually does involuntarily, like your heart rate. I had electrodes attached to my hands and arms to monitor my heart rate and skin temperature.  I remember the technician starting the tape with instructions to relax and picture the blood flowing to my hands. 

Then, I remember the wonder I felt that the beeping monitors indicated that my heart rate was actually dropping and the temperature of my hands was increasing as my circulation improved.  You can also see this mind-body connection if you have ever been really angry and felt your heart pounding and your face flushing as a result of what you were feeling at the time. 

There is no doubt that there is a connection between what you are thinking at a particular moment, and how your body feels at that moment.  But what about the long-term impact of your thoughts?  Is there a cumulative effect on your body of all these thoughts and feelings that you have throughout the days, months, and years?  Can your thoughts and feelings contribute to disease or healing of disease?

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton’s book, “The Biology of Belief,” indeed your thoughts actually affect your cells, and your overall health.  Lipton is a cell biologist and researcher.  His research has shown that a cell membrane acts a bit like the brain of a cell, and is influenced by the environment around it.  This environment influences both the behavior and physiology of the cell, and turns certain genes on and off. 

His fascinating conclusion is that our DNA doesn’t determine our fate, and that we can turn genes on and off with chemical signals (from foods, drugs, internally-produced chemicals such as hormones, etc.) and our thoughts and feelings. 

Dr. Bernie Siegel is another well-known doctor who looks at the connections between the mind and spirit and the health of the body.  In the late 1970s he started a group called  "Exceptional Cancer Patients" that uses patients' dreams, thoughts, and feelings to enable their healing.  He has found that the attitudes, thoughts, and feelings of patients are a critical factor in their healing, and he works with his patients to discover unconscious thought patterns that are impacting their health.

It is a controversial subject for a number of reasons.  Of course it is complicated to do scientific trials on the long-term effect of thoughts and feelings on overall health, and, until recently, it  has been considered unorthodox.  More studies are being conducted every day and they are becoming more mainstream. 

The real difficulty is the implications for anyone in less than perfect health.  Does it mean, for example, that my thoughts and feelings are responsible for the development of my tumor and my complications after surgery?  Did every cancer survivor think more positively than those who didn’t survive?  This line of inquiry has the potential to heap guilt on people who are already struggling with illness, and it isn’t terribly productive. 

The truth is likely to be much more complicated than that.  So many factors go into our health, including heredity and lifestyle, and probably things we haven’t even considered yet.  But I believe there is a place for thoughts and feelings in that list as well.  And instead of feeling like a victim, I find it empowering to think that I can impact my health by paying attention to what I think and feel.

Over the next few weeks I am going to review some of the techniques for exploring this mind-body connection and how we might harness the power of the mind for our own health.