Chapter 7: Be aware about mind and heart game.
Well-educated, slender, and attractive, Julie seems to have it all. She has a PhD, an interesting career, and good friends. So everything's great, right?
Not exactly. Julie also has diabetes. And while she loves her job, she feels anxious about running a business. She often gets angry at herself, and snaps at others for small mistakes. Even scarier, despite careful monitoring of her blood sugar, she finds herself in a coma once or twice a month. What's going on?
It turns out that despite Julie generally healthy habits, her anxiety prevents her from paying attention to the cues her body gives her when her blood sugar is too low.
On her doctor's advice, Julie tries Mindfulness Based Stress-Reduction (MBSR) classes along with her regular diabetes care program. The MBSR practices help Sylvia slow down and actually pay attention to her body.
Julie begins to notice when her blood sugar is dropping, so she can eat to prevent herself from going into a diabetic coma. She also finds it easier to control her diabetes with insulin, probably because reducing her anxiety helps reduce her stress hormones. Her anger, a product of her stress, also fades away.
What is the mind-body connection?
Julie's story is a great example of what we call the mind-body connection. This means that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes can positively or negatively affect our biological functioning. In other words, our minds can affect how healthy our bodies are!
On the other hand, what we do with our physical body (what we eat, how much we exercise, even our posture) can impact our mental state (again positively or negatively). This results in a complex interrelationship between our minds and bodies.
"the brain and peripheral nervous system, the endocrine and immune systems, and indeed, all the organs of our body and all the emotional responses we have, share a common chemical language and are constantly communicating with one another."
Dr. James Gordon (founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine)
What are body-mind therapies?
Related to mind-body therapies are therapies that use the body to affect the mind, such as yoga, tai chi, qigong, and some types of dance (these are sometimes called body-mind therapies). Ultimately mind-body and body-mind therapies are interrelated: the body affects the mind, which in turn impacts the body (and the mind.)
collage MindBody therapiesPatient support groups
Cognitive-behavioral therapy
Meditation
Prayer
Creative arts therapies (art, music, or dance)
Yoga
Biofeedback
Tai chi
Qigong
Relaxation
Hypnosis
Guided imagery
What exactly is meant by the word "mind?"
NOT brainIt's important to note that "mind" is not synonymous with brain. Instead, in our definition, the mind consists of mental states such as thoughts, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and images. The brain is the hardware that allows us to experience these mental states.
Mental states can be fully conscious or unconscious. We can have emotional reactions to situations without being aware of why we are reacting. Each mental state has a physiology associated with it—a positive or negative effect felt in the physical body. For example, the mental state of anxiety causes you to produce stress hormones.
Many mind-body therapies focus on becoming more conscious of mental states and using this increased awareness to guide our mental states in a better, less destructive direction.
What is the history of mind-body connection?
Awareness of the mind-body connection is by no means new. Until approximately 300 years ago, virtually every system of medicine throughout the world treated the mind and body as a whole. But during the 17th century, the Western world started to see the mind and body as two distinct entities. In this view, the body was kind of like a machine, complete with replaceable, independent parts, with no connection whatsoever to the mind.
This Western viewpoint had definite benefits, acting as the foundation for advances in surgery, trauma care, pharmaceuticals, and other areas of allopathic medicine. However, it also greatly reduced scientific inquiry into humans' emotional and spiritual life, and downplayed their innate ability to heal.
In the 20th century, this view gradually started to change. Researchers began to study the mind-body connection and scientifically demonstrate complex links between the body and mind. Integrative psychiatrist James Lake, MD, of Stanford University, writes that "extensive research has confirmed the medical and mental benefits of meditation, mindfulness training, yoga, and other mind-body practices."
Thoughts are mental cognitions—our ideas, opinions, and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. They include the perspectives we bring to any situation or experience that color our point of view (for better, worse, or neutral).
An example of a long-lived thought is an attitude, which develops as thoughts are repeated over and over and reinforced.
While thoughts are shaped by life experiences, genetics, and education, they are generally under conscious control. In other words, if you are aware of your thoughts and attitudes, you can choose to change them.
What are emotions?
It may be useful to think of emotions as the flow and experience of feelings, for example, joy, sadness, anger, or fear. Emotions can be triggered by something external (from seeing a friend suffer or watching a movie) or something internal (an upsetting memory).
While emotions are universal, each person may experience them and respond to them in a different way. Some people may struggle with understanding what emotion they are experiencing.
Emotions serve to connect us with others and help cultivate strong social bonds. Learn more about relationships This may be the evolutionary purpose of emotions—people who were able to form strong bonds and emotional ties become a part of a community and were more likely to find the support and protection necessary for survival.
According to Christakis and Fowler, "People the world over have different ideas, beliefs, and opinions—different thoughts—but they have very similar, if not identical, feelings."
What influences emotions?
Researchers such as Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, authors of Connected, have also found that emotions are "contagious." We have a tendency to mimic each other's outward states (for example, by smiling when someone smiles at us), and our outward states can affect our internal ones (smiling can actually make you feel happy!).
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone