The Connection Between Mind and Body Health

Most people understand the need to live a healthy lifestyle, even if they don’t fully understand the impact of their lifestyle choices on disease processes. What many people don’t recognize is the need for proper mind-management and how it both supports and sustains a healthy lifestyle.

As a society, we can no longer rest on our laurels and tell ourselves that things are getting better or that we’re great. This is simply not the case, for America or for the wider world. Life expectancy has also been falling in the United Kingdom, for instance, and the leading causes of death also appear to be lifestyle-related, including drug use, financial pressure, depression, and isolation.” We can no longer avoid the irony staring us right in the face.

Our social media feeds are full of good advice on how to eat, great quotations and tips for managing stress, inspirational stories, wellness trends for longevity and improved life quality— and we’re still getting sick and dying. Suicide rates are on the rise, toxic addictions are increasing, people are more depressed and anxious than ever before, and our children are the most medicated of any generation in history.

We as humans have evolved to think deeply, differently, and collectivistically. When our knowledge isn’t being effectively applied, just consumed, our minds become nutritionally starved and can’t get from point A to point B. We stop making the jump from knowledge gathering to knowledge application. Gathering information without processing and applying it is counter to how the mind works and how the brain is structured and has a deleterious effect on our mental and physical well-being, creating a mental mess in the mind and a physical mess in the body. As marvelous and necessary as modern technology and all the advances that have come along with it are, we need to learn mind-management skills to use them properly, or we can end up only making more of a mental mess, one that will continue to reduce our quality of life and shorten our life spans.

Of course, mental distress and ill-health are not new. Humans have always battled them. Life has always been tough, and people have always gone through tough stuff. I don’t believe that mental health issues are on the rise, just that they look different in the twenty-first century and we’ve become far more aware of the pervasive effects of mental distress.

Obviously, a lot of things can go wrong as we go about our lives in vibrant, dynamic human communities. People make choices, and those choices affect us just as much as our choices affect others. We should not, and in fact cannot, medicalize the complexity of the human experience. As much as we love classifications, labels, and systems, we also have to respect that they have their limits and they have their sting, especially when they follow you into job applications or insurance eligibility or lead you into being too afraid to talk about how you feel because you will be seen as “crazy.”

Labels may give a little comfort, but we have to be careful of getting too comfortable, because we may end up avoiding doing the hard work needed to treat the root problem and create sustainable positive change. Don’t use labels as a coping mechanism. Rather, use them to better understand where you are and to challenge yourself to overcome what you are dealing with.

Yes, our biology can affect our mental state. For example, a thyroid hormone deficiency can contribute to the onset of depression, and amphetamine abuse can lead to psychosis. However, humans’ multifaceted experiences cannot be understood as isolated events. They’re intrinsically connected to the whole life history and experience of the individual, and the society in which that individual has grown up.

How we react or respond to various life situations and the world around us is called mind-in-action. The mind-in-action is how you uniquely think, feel, and choose. This changes the way our brain functions, our biochemistry, and the genes associated with mental and physical health, which is why mind-management is essential— and a skill to be learned. You, with your mind that is always in action, are the change agent. Correct mind-management means responding in a way that builds healthy neural networks rather than simply reacting and building toxic neural networks. You can be a “first responder” in every and all situation.

When people get into toxic thinking habits, it can mess up the stress response. The stress response is actually good for us if it’s part of a balanced lifestyle, just like exercise is a type of good stress on the body. Think about taking a test: a healthy stress response helps us stay energized, focused, and awake, which boosts our mental performance. However, if we start panicking in the middle of the test, we start experiencing mental fog and can’t think clearly-—that is toxic stress, and it occurs when we let our thoughts run amok.

Toxic stress is no joke. Psychoneuroimmunology research has shown how conscious thinking controls the function of the immune system—when we stress, we impact the body’s ability to protect itself. In fact, research has shown how healthy and constructive thinking can lead to the placebo effect, allowing the mind to fight disease, while toxic thinking can create the nocebo effect, which can increase our vulnerability to disease.

Toxic stress has been demonstrated as being responsible for up to 90 percent of illness, including heart disease, cancer, and diabe-tes.’ When an individual is in a toxic thinking state, the release of stress hormones such as cortisol, ACTH, and even prolactin shut down the immune system to conserve the body’s energy for the flight-or-fight response. This is good if you’re running away from a threat, getting ready for the day, need to be focused in a business presentation, or dealing with a relational crisis. However, stress works in cycles of tension and release, and works in cycles of tension and release, and if the release does not come if this state of stress response becomes chronic-we get in the habit of perceiving the physical sensations of stress as bad for us instead of good for us.? We then react negatively to daily stressors over long periods of time, which compromises instead of enhances the immune system.

Source : Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking by Caroline Leaf

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54080933-cleaning-up-your-mental-mess