The part can never be well, unless the whole is well.
—PLATO
Like the weather, your health is constantly changing. This fact alone provides you with choice. You have a tremendous ability to influence that change. Simply put, you have the power to transform your mind and improve the functioning of your body. The key to this power lies in your ability to bounce back from illness, manage life’s stress efficiently and effectively, and truly believe in the possibility of good.
A meta-analytic review of the effects of optimism on physical health done at the University of Kansas in 2010 found that optimism was a significant predictor of positive physical health outcomes.1 Laura Kubzansky, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has found through her research that optimism can cut the risk of coronary artery disease in half. She says about genes: “They are 40–50 percent heritable, which means you may be born with the genetic predisposition. But this also suggests there is a lot of room to maneuver.”2 In other words, there is wiggle room in the power you have to positively influence your health.
The notion that you have a lot of “wiggle room” with your genes is an empowering fact. The burgeoning science of epigenetics tells us that by changing our environment, from stressful to nurturing, we can affect how a gene’s DNA expresses itself. Why is this so important?
The drastic changes in lifestyle and human social habits during the last fifty years has been linked to the rise in such diseases as obesity, diabetes, sleep disorders, depression, and certain types of cancers, disorders associated with disturbances in the circadian rhythm, or the internal timekeeper in each of your cells. This timekeeper, or clock, is connected with your stress response and stress hormones and is associated with “clock genes.” These clock genes have a strong impact on many biological functions like memory formation, energy metabolism, and immunity. A recent review in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that environmental factors like stress, drug abuse, or poor sleep habits compromise the circadian rhythm, causing the genetic landscape of your “clock genes” to change its shape.3 For instance, sleep loss causes subsequent changes in these clock genes, which then negatively affects these processes.4 Have you ever noticed that when you lose sleep, especially for a few days in a row, you have difficulty remembering anything, your metabolism slows down, and you are more prone to catching that nasty bug that is going around? You also likely have experienced the reverse, when a little more sleep goes a long way in improving these symptoms.
Herbert Benson, a physician at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, has found that meditation not only improves health outcomes and brain function, but can also positively affect the expression of genes. An analysis revealed that pathways involved in energy metabolism were up-regulated during the relaxation response, or the meditation practice, meaning that metabolism improved. Pathways known to play a prominent role in inflammation, stress, trauma, and cancer were suppressed, meaning there was less inflammation. The expression of genes involved in insulin pathways was also significantly changed for the better, implying better regulation of blood sugar.5
These clock genes and the genes examined in Benson’s study are intricately connected with the wiring in the brain. The ever-expanding science of neuroplasticity, or the examination of how the brain continues to change and remodel, confirms that, by adjusting the environment in the mind and body through diet, emotional balance, better stress management, more sleep, and more time in nature, it is possible to create positive changes in the brain resulting in improved health and well-being. In other words, by lowering the stress your body is exposed to and by improving your lifestyle habits and behaviors, you can actually change the course of your health for the better; the landscape of your brain and your genes improve.
Stress to your system does not come only in the form of the food you eat or a lack of sleep, but also in the thoughts and beliefs you hold and the negative emotions that can run rampant through your brain. Without addressing the mind, your beliefs and emotions, and the biochemistry and physiology of the body, the behavior and lifestyle changes you need to make simply will not stick.
Your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs, and therefore your perception of yourself and your world, are directly connected to your body’s biochemistry and physiology. Research tells us that your beliefs can affect your body’s biochemical responses and that you have the power to believe in good and thus feel good.6 When you expect good, and I mean really believe that a good outcome is possible, your body responds positively. The catch is that you also need to believe in and support your body’s strength and natural ability to heal. Expecting your body to be strong without supporting it does not work. You have to choose to change your mind and your attitudes toward health and your life for the good, so that good can also manifest itself in your body.
Are you as excited about this fact as I am? You should be, because it implies the possibility that changing the landscape of your beliefs and thoughts, not just your sleep habits, can offset your clock genes for the better. You actually have an active choice in what thoughts or beliefs you hold at any given moment in life. You can choose to be happy or choose to be miserable. You can choose to look at yourself, your life, and your predicaments from the standpoint of a victim, or you can choose to be a victor in the adventure that is your life.
If this sounds as though I am telling you that all you have to do is “Don’t worry, be happy,” I am not. It is not that simple. Fear and stress are naturally present in the world and in our bodies, but you have the ability to control your reactions, move beyond your negative emotions, and achieve a greater sense of well-being.
Your emotions and your emotional memory are directly connected to physiological responses, both positive and negative. When you face a challenge in your current life, your brain searches its memory bank to see how you have handled such a situation before and what you know about it. It will also try to match your current emotion to one in your data bank of emotional memories. When it does, your brain will respond in kind with automatic assumptions and physiological reactions associated with it. So if for the past five years you have experienced repeated pain, it is unlikely that you will really believe that next month you will be pain free or at least suffer less. You will be more likely to be fearful and apprehensive when thinking about it and throw “Don’t worry, be happy” out the window. In other words, stress and fear win out.
You can see for yourself how your emotions affect your physiology:
AWARENESS EXERCISE
Think of a situation that you are stressed about. Perhaps you are angry with someone or something or feel anxious, worried, or upset. Choose a situation in which you feel you have little control over the outcome.
Notice how you feel. Notice how strong the emotion is that you are experiencing. Notice the thoughts that come up for you. Be aware of the sensations you are experiencing in your body, particularly in your chest, jaw, stomach, and the movement of your breath.
Now redirect your focus and think of a situation of awe, love, or laughter. For instance, you might remember how it felt to be looked at by someone who absolutely adores you, when you watched your child walk for the first time, gazed at an incredible sunset, or laughed so hard you couldn’t breathe. Try to stay in this experience for a minute or two.
Once you have spent some time with the positive experience, go back to thinking about the stressful situation and notice if you feel or think differently.
You may notice that you do feel differently, in your body. You might also observe that you feel slightly differently, perhaps less charged, about the situation. By changing your emotion, you change your experience of the current problem, and therefore your perception of it, even if only slightly at first.
The key here is that when you change your physiology from stress to balance, you are able to change your emotion and then have access to positive expectation. When you don’t make this necessary change, stress, fear, and the ensuing physiology tax your body, your health, and ultimately the strength you actually have to heal. The more pressing problem is that you may not even realize how much stress you are under and how overtaxed your body is.
Most of you probably will admit to having a lot of stress in your life. You also know whether you feel good or not; whether your life is moving smoothly or not; and whether you feel you have or are enough or not. What you may not know is that every time the answer is “not,” you are in stress, or more specifically your body is in stress.
Your body lets you know that it is in stress by causing you some kind of discomfort—physical, emotional, mental, or psychological. Experiencing hunger? The body is letting you know it needs food, that you don’t have enough fuel. Feeling tired? The body is letting you know it needs rest, that you don’t have enough energy. Feeling frustrated? The body is telling you to reassess your situation, because you are not getting your needs met, that you are not, perhaps, feeling validated enough.
The body first communicates subtly, in whispers—a pang in the neck, a tingle in the stomach, a slight feeling of being run down or out of sorts. It speaks to you through emotional symptoms—like overwhelming sadness or experiences of annoyance. It communicates through your own thoughts, whether they are judgmental notions about yourself or worries regarding your future.
Through discomfort of one kind or another—physical, mental, emotional, or psychological—the body lets you know that there is an underlying problem it would like you to address. It has to do it this way; otherwise you would not know when it was time to eat, sleep, or change positions. For instance, if you sat in the same position for ten hours and your body did not make you conscious of some sort of discomfort, you would not move and your muscles would atrophy. Now imagine that your body did register discomfort, but you could not move because you were trapped. The mild discomfort would become outright pain. Your mild irritation might turn into outright panic. Your body is no longer whispering; it is now screaming for help.
When stress accumulates and is not taken care of, the stress response, which uses every system of your body, goes into overdrive, taxing your body and ultimately its fighting power. For example, high levels of chronic stress can deplete your immune system, causing you to be more susceptible to viruses or infections.
Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, coined the term “fight or flight” in the 1930s to describe our inborn defense response to threat or danger. He believed this defense response is meant to ultimately ensure survival.7 When we face a threat or danger, the release of stress hormones like adrenalin and cortisol into the bloodstream catapults us into a state of readiness, our senses become aroused and hyperalert, our pupils dilate to allow in light, and peripheral vision is blocked to enable us to hone in on what must be done. Our muscles tense to prepare for battle or flight. The liver releases stored sugar into the bloodstream, while the breathing rate becomes faster and the breath more shallow to economize on oxygen consumption. Blood flow is diverted to the brain, heart, large muscles, and lungs to make sure the oxygen gets to the areas that will be used to mount our defenses (as opposed to the digestive tract or reproductive system). These are all great defenses when a tiger is chasing you—not so much when your body wants to rest and heal.
To your brain, it doesn’t really matter what stressor you are facing. Endocrinologist Hans Selye, in the 1950s, expanded on Cannon’s work and explained that you do not have to be chased by a raging animal for the fight-or-flight response to be triggered; this heightened reaction occurs regardless of whether the challenge at hand is life threatening or not.8 You could be late for work, preparing for public speaking, or worried about paying your mortgage. To your brain, stress is stress.
What you may want to be clear on is what the definition of stress actually is: any threat or challenge to your state of stability, or homeostasis. This could be a change in your blood-sugar levels or the fact that the temperature outside has dropped twenty degrees.
And when you experience any kind of stress, your brain initiates physiological corrective responses that will bring your body back into a state of stability, which can range from regulating your body temperature to finding shelter, food, or love. In other words, stress is not necessarily “bad,” but rather the real reason you are able to maintain and sustain life, or pretty much do anything.
The problem is not so much stress, but the inability to manage it and resume stability. You see, the body is constantly moving in and out of homeostasis. You are comfortable, then you are uncomfortable, then you shift positions, and you are comfortable again. This process is called allostasis, or the ability to achieve stability through change.9 Not being able to make a change to bring about comfort or stability creates a problem, or an allostatic load.
Let’s just say you are exposed to a virus during your very stressful day at work, when you barely have time to eat lunch, let alone manage to eat something that isn’t fast food. By the time you get home, you notice you feel more tired and achy than usual, but chalk it up to the stressful day, brew some coffee, and get to working on (and worrying about) your next project. Unbeknownst to you, your stress response is working too, kicking your immune system into action, and the inflammatory products that are flying through your bloodstream are causing you to feel more fatigued.
This is the important part: your immune system has kicked in to fight the infection and create a sense of fatigue to motivate you to rest, so it can work more efficiently and effectively. But you do not rest. You stay up late working on your project. Your immune system works overtime, and the next day you find yourself immobilized with profound fatigue and a high fever.
You see, the whole time you had choice. At any point along the way you could have chosen to listen to your body’s symptoms, taken heed, and employed more self-care. Your ability to bounce back from a viral invasion could have been drastically improved, thus altering the destined course of your health. You could have, for example, gone home, rested, perhaps taken an Epsom-salt bath, and eaten some chicken soup, which is loaded with healthy vitamins and minerals that support your immune system, and perhaps you never would have succumbed to the virus.
This is true for every aspect of your life and health. You always have the ability to make empowered choices that enable your body to heal itself, choices that keep your stress levels down and the stress response active only when it is needed to do its work. Being exposed to a virus, for instance, does warrant the activation of the stress response and the immune system. You want the stress response do to its job and help your body get rid of the virus. When the work is done, you also want the stress response to turn itself off, so that your system can get back into its steady state. Adding more stress to the equation with your beliefs, habits, and behaviors is only going to push the response to stay active, become overactive, and maybe even burn out, so that your symptoms lead not just to a passing illness, but a full-blown disease.
You’re in control.
Having said that, even when you have been diagnosed with a “disease,” whether it is cancer or heart disease, you still have the power to make different choices that will keep the stress response more controlled, which prevents the problem from worsening and the symptoms from rearing their ugly heads. You might even discover that the process can be reversed altogether.
Let’s say you receive a diagnosis confirming that something is “wrong with you.” Perhaps you are told you have “carcinoma in situ,” a precancerous condition that often progresses to cancer. How would you react? If you are like most people, you would feel scared, worried, and anxious. Your mind would jump to automatic negative assumptions, and the extent of the negativity would depend on how bad you perceive your diagnosis to be. This negative emotional state stimulates your stress response to varying degrees and for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to the stress in your life that is already present, the stress of the actual disease process, and stress that comes from fear and apprehension of the unknown.
You don’t want to be told that you are not well, whole, or intact. Just knowing there is something wrong with you can get you trapped in a loop of negative thoughts, emotions, and beliefs, which could have negative physiological implications caused by a heightened fight-or-flight response, including increased blood pressure, muscle tension, and inflammation. These physiological changes, in turn, can negatively affect your body’s natural ability to heal, your own capability to cope and function, and ultimately your belief that overcoming this diagnosis is possible.
In reality, a diagnosis reflects a pattern of discordance or imbalance in the body that is caused by a variety of factors—genetics and lifestyle behaviors are just two of them. When my patients understand they are not their diagnosis, nor are they prisoners to it, they start the process of breaking free from limiting beliefs and labels, enabling them to open the door to the possibility of a positive outcome. They begin to perceive that their illness or life problem is a challenge that can be reckoned with, that other options for an outcome are possible, and that they have a choice about how they handle their situation. They have a choice to expect good. And science does show that positive expectation can confer better health.
Think about it yourself. If you were told you had diabetes, what would it make you think about and how would you feel about it, about your chances of getting better and the idea of now having to take medication? Conversely, what if you were told that your body was showing an imbalance in its ability to process sugar? Would you feel the same or think the same thoughts? I personally would feel more in control when presented with the latter explanation, so I could think of it as just needing to find a way to get my system more balanced. In other words, I am more likely to believe in the possibility of a positive outcome. When a diagnosis is made, you have two choices—feeling scared and powerless or responding with hope and the belief you can change your health destiny.
Which brings me back to the power of expecting good. A diagnosis is not necessarily a bad thing when you have a set of tools that enable you to make healthy life choices and change your beliefs about illness and health. Beliefs are the result of where you choose to put your focus. When you choose to focus on what you can do, not what you can’t, you successfully change your beliefs and begin to expect good. When you expect good, your stress response lightens up, and your body’s chances of healing improve.
What will you choose?