How the Mind Helps Heal the Body
BY ED HALLIWELL
I’ve been fascinated to read several interviews with medical writer Jo Marchant. For her new book, Cure: A Journey Into The Science of Mind Over Body, Marchant has mined the literature on how thoughts and perceptions affect our physiology, developing a nuanced appreciation of how the mind and body interact. Her findings:
“Our mental state can be crucial in determining our experience of symptoms such as pain, nausea, fatigue and depression…Feeling stressed or afraid can cause your heart to race and your bowels to empty, and trigger an immune response called inflammation.
These processes aren’t usually under our conscious control—we can’t change to occur—but there are indirect methods we can use to influence them.”
While in no way suggesting that illnesses are “all in the mind,” Marchant’s analysis suggests that our mental and physical health is affected by the way we perceive and relate to it. Meditation, says Marchant, is one of those indirect, influencing, methods that can help, which is perhaps not surprising given that how we perceive and relate to our lives is precisely what’s trained in mindfulness practice.
The effect of mindfulness on inflammatory health was shown in a study by David Creswell that came out in February. This research showed changes in brain circuitry and reduced inflammation after three days of mindfulness training, while three days of relaxation did not have the same effect. Creswell explains the difference in impact between mindfulness meditation and relaxation:
“We show that mindfulness meditation impacts measurable brain circuits more so than helpful relaxation practices, and that these brain circuit changes help us understand how mindfulness meditation improves health. Mindfulness teaches participants how to be more open and attentive to their experiences, even difficult ones. By contrast, relaxation approaches are good in the moment for making the body feel relaxed, but… harder to translate when you’re dealing with difficult stressors in your life. This new work sheds light into what mindfulness training is doing to the brain to produce these inflammatory health benefits.”
How meditation helps me deal with the symptoms of depression and lingering triggers.
A mindful way of perceiving and relating to difficult experiences has helped in my journey with depression. I came to meditation around 15 years ago, when I was stuck in a two-and-a-half year depressive trough. I had thrown myself in desperation at various treatments, but mindfulness offered something different. The method itself meant practicing acceptance, just the opposite of what I was used to.
This marked the beginning of a transformation—a recognition that the way I was approaching the “problem” of depression actually helped perpetuate it. Through meditation, I learned to see how my attitude and behaviour, characterized by self-critical striving and resistance, was a significant factor in how I felt. Mindfulness offered a gentler way, and I learned how to be kind to myself, even—especially—when feeling stressed.
What’s really changed is that life’s troubles no longer seem to propel me into a prolonged, self-perpetuating funk, one that continues to endure long after the events that triggered it.
I still sometimes experience the symptoms of what I used to call “depression,” albeit usually for shorter periods, after a difficult event. What’s really changed is that life’s troubles no longer seem to propel me into a prolonged, self-perpetuating funk, one that continues to endure long after the events that triggered it. Why is this so? Well, I think that the meaning I give to my condition matters. Once upon a time, I saw depression on one hand as something I couldn’t control, a clinical illness that left me feeling powerless. On the other, I also saw it as my fault, a self-stigmatising belief that filled me with shame, and a sense of failure that I couldn’t shake off. These perspectives, I suspect, made me feel even more depressed.
When I believed that symptoms like heart palpitations, muscle pain, and racing thoughts were fearful catastrophes, signs of the devil depression, I was easily overwhelmed by them, and prone to try to push them away, with a sense of impotent rage. However, as I learned to let go of the labels and judgements about depression, I started meeting the same kinds of symptoms as normal reactions to unpleasant events. I no longer added to their unpleasantness with the stressful belief that something terrible or unmanageable was happening to me, that I couldn’t cope, that it was all my own doing, or that I had to wrestle with it.
Viewing difficult thoughts, feelings, and urges as impermanent events in the mind and body, trusting that they too will fade, just like the events that triggered them, I find I can handle life’s challenges with more competence, trust, and confidence. I’m less likely to add a secondary suffering to the unavoidable stresses of living. Difficulties come, but they also go.
This is a radical shift.
Gently practising steadfastness and self-compassion has not only made uncomfortable thoughts and feelings more workable, but allows them to pass more quickly, rather than reactively keeping them going. With this approach, I make better decisions when problems arise, and I’m more able to draw on my environment for support—rather than the old chaotic, lonely existence I used to lead, my outer life has come more to reflect the qualities of mind that I’ve gradually cultivated through mindfulness practice.
With my mind, body and life no longer in such conflict, stress has reduced.
Practicing a shift in view, a change of heart, over and over again, seems to be a vital mechanism through which mindfulness training helps our sense of health. As Creswell’s study elegantly demonstrates, it also leads to measurable biological shifts.
For me, mindfulness has been the “master key” to understanding how the mind and body work, as well as a skillful method for managing them. It’s not magic, of course. Our physiological and psychological habits are strong, and we can’t just think our way out of them—believing this would be falling prey to the pseudo-science which has given mind-body medicine an undeservedly poor reputation. Our experience is conditioned not just by our mentality, not just by our biology, but also our relationships, external environment, society and culture, and we have limited control over all of these. But practicing a shift in view, a change of heart, over and over again, seems to be a vital mechanism through which mindfulness training helps our sense of health. As Creswell’s study elegantly demonstrates, it also leads to measurable biological shifts.
There’s a traditional mind training slogan which says: “Change your attitude, but remain natural.” I think this captures the paradox that mindfulness training invites. Without getting caught in trying to change the moment, we nevertheless change our relationship with the moment—the meaning we give to what’s happening, and our way of responding. This, it turns out, changes the moment too.
Journalist Jo Marchant explores surprising new research into
curing the body with the mind.
The Science of Healing Thoughts
By Gareth Cook on January 19, 2016
Credit: Penguin Random House
For centuries, the idea of “healing thoughts” has held sway over the faithful. In recent decades it’s fascinated the followers of all manner of self-help movements, including those whose main purpose seems to be separating the sick from their money. Now, though, a growing body of scientific research suggests that our mind can play an important role in healing our body — or in staying healthy in the first place. In the book Cure, the veteran science journalist Jo Marchant brings her critical eye to this fascinating new terrain, sharing the latest discoveries and telling the stories of the people —Iraq war veterans among them — who are being helped by cures aimed at both body and mind. Marchant answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
You have taken on a topic where, historically, there has been a tremendous amount
of quackery. What convinced you that there was a compelling scientific story to tell?
The misunderstandings and false claims were one of the elements that drew me to the topic of mind-body medicine in the first place. The mind influences physiology in many ways — from stress to sexual arousal — so it has always seemed reasonable to me that it might impact health. Yet the question has become so polarized: advocates of alternative medicine claim miracle cures, while many conventional scientists and doctors insist any suggestion of “healing thoughts” is deluded.
I was interested in those clashing philosophies: I wanted to look at why it is so difficult
to have a reasoned debate about this issue. What drives so many people to believe in the pseudoscientific claims of alternative therapists, and why are skeptics so resistant to any suggestion that the mind might influence health?
At the same time, I wanted to dig through the scientific research to find out what the evidence really says about the mind’s effects on the body. That took me around the world, interviewing scientists who are investigating this question (often struggling for funding or risking their reputations to do so) and their results persuaded me that as well as being an interesting sociological or philosophical story, this was a compelling scientific one.
Examples include trials demonstrating that hypnotherapy is a highly effective treatment for patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and studies showing that perceived stress correlates with telomere length in cells. But what I personally found most convincing were studies suggesting an evolutionary rationale for the mind’s influence on health.
There are now several lines of research suggesting that our mental perception of the world constantly informs and guides our immune system in a way that makes us better able to respond to future threats. That was a sort of ‘aha’ moment for me — where the idea of an entwined mind and body suddenly made more scientific sense than an ephemeral consciousness that’s somehow separated from our physical selves.
What is known about what the placebo effect actually is,
and what do you see as the biggest open questions?
“Placebo effect” can be a confusing term, because it has several different meanings.
It is sometimes used to cover anyone who feels better after receiving placebo (or fake) treatment, which of course includes all those people who would have improved anyway. But researchers are finding that taking a placebo can also have specific, measurable effects on the brain and body.
As neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti, one of the pioneers of placebo research, puts it, there isn’t just one placebo effect but many. Placebo painkillers can trigger the release of natural pain-relieving chemicals called endorphins. Patients with Parkinson’s disease respond to placebos with a flood of dopamine. Fake oxygen, given to someone at altitude, has been shown to cut levels of neurotransmitters called prostaglandins (which dilate blood vessels, among other things, and are responsible for many of the symptoms of altitude sickness).
None of these biological effects are caused by placebos themselves, which are by definition inert. They are triggered by our psychological response to those fake treatments. The active ingredients are complex and not fully understood but include our expectation that we will feel better (which in turn is affected by all sorts of factors such as our previous experience with treatment, how impressive or invasive a treatment is, and whether we’re an optimistic person) and feeling listened to and cared for.
Another element is conditioning, where if we learn to associate a particular treatment — taking a pill, say — with a certain biological response, we experience that response when we take a similar pill in the future, even if it’s a placebo. This influences physiological functions such as hormone levels and immune responses, and works regardless of our conscious beliefs.
Future questions include teasing out the psychological factors that shape placebo responses, and investigating why honest placebos (where someone knows they are taking a placebo) seem to work — this research has barely begun. Scientists also want to pin down exactly what conditions placebos work for (most research so far is on a few model systems, like pain, depression and Parkinson’s), and who they work for (both genes and personality seem to play a role). And then of course there is the question of how we can maximize these responses, and integrate them into routine clinical care in an honest way.
The Science of Healing Thoughts – Scientific American
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