You’re Only as Healthy as You Think

What exactly does mind-body medicine mean? Rather than some esoteric philosophy, I hope to give you some practical insight about how you can change the interaction between your mind and body.  I've loaded this blog with lots of resources because it is such a broad and important subject. Take your time, as it will be time well invested to get a better understanding about thought and it's relation to your physical and mental health.We've all heard a lot about mind-body medicine.  When I hear that term, it sounds as if it is a one way street from mind to body.  I'd like to expand on that a bit as we now know it is a 2 way street, and could be called body-mind medicine as well.  In the simplest of terms, there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that what we think, believe, and feel emotionally, has a direct and profound effect on our body and physiology.  It is also true that our body and physiology impact our thoughts and emotions. This includes things like posture, body language, diet and activity levels. I believe it is important to understand both sides of that equation.  I am seeing this personally in doing Foundation Training and would like to share that experience with you.  One thing that Foundation Training has done is to make me very aware of my posture.  I notice that when my posture is better, I just feel better, and have more energy.  Last week one of my Foundation Training classmates posted this great talk by Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy. Take a few minutes to watch her video; it's a fantastic example of how the mind and body interact with each other.http://youtu.be/Ks-_Mh1QhMc Another area of interest to me over the past several years has been in the process of thinking itself. It turns out that our thinking can be notoriously unreliable.  This quote from physicist David Bohm describes the problem:“Fragmentation is one of the difficulties of thought, but there is a deeper root, which is that thought is very active, but the process of thought thinks it is doing nothing- that it is just telling you the way things are.  The point is: thought produces results, but thought says it didn’t do it. And that is a problem.”So basically the issue is that we believe our thoughts are an accurate representation of reality, when in truth they are not. Fortunately we have a way to understand thought through feeling.  All feelings are produced by thought, so our feeling states can give us clues about our thinking.  This process is summarized by my friend Dr. George Pransky in this blogDr. Pransky has helped me immensely in understanding how thought works.  He believes that we all have innate mental health.  This aligns with the principle that we all have innate physical health if we can remove the sources of interference to it.  Understanding the nature of thought helps us restore our innate mental well-being.Click here to watch a video that gives an insightful look at our thinking process and how we have the choice to think outside our "default mode".The good news is that we by understanding the relationship between thought and feeling we can make a huge difference in our physiology.  There is an exciting new field emerging called "Positive Psychology" based on these ideas.  The leaders in this field have found that there are some simple steps we can implement that can actually change our thoughts and our brain. To learn more watch this video by Shawn Achor, a positive psychologist from Harvard.  I highly recommend doing the simple steps he outlines in this video for 21 days and see what happens.

So our thoughts affect our body, and we can learn to change our habitual thought patterns.  Our body also affects our brain, and being more physically active, and adding simple movements like Foundation Training can increase our levels of stress reducing hormones.  The bottom line is that you are in control and not the victim of your thinking.  I know I used to think "that's just the way I am", or that all my thoughts were really true.  I now see that just isn't so.  Much of what passes for thought is just habitual chatter that we think is who we really are.  I remember a saying from the 70's: Question Everything!  This is especially true of our thoughts.  Try watching your habitual thoughts.  Start a "Happiness Journal" using the steps recommended by Shawn Achor for 21 days : Write down 3 things you are grateful for each day , journal about one positive  experience each day ( a paragraph will do), exercise daily(even a 15 minute walk, or better yet 10 minutes of Foundation!), meditate ( sit quietly for  a few minutes daily to begin with, it's a great time to pay attention to your thoughts), and perform a random act of kindness daily like e-mailing someone to tell them how much you appreciate them, or better yet, do it in person.  I started this and have kept going for 2 months now.  It's something I look forward to daily.For those who would like to pursue this further, I recommend reading the following books:  Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge,  On Thought by David Bohm, and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.