Faith in the Brain’s Healing Powers

We all have good days and bad days with our health, and it can be frustrating when our bodies are not performing the way we want them to or need them to. But our health is not out of our power to control. As a matter of fact, we all do have a super powerful tool right in our own heads. It’s our amazing brain.

Researchers that study the brain-body connection have shown in numerous experiments how the brain can be tricked into believing it is getting better. A simple sugar pill can relieve pain or even cure an illness if the person believes that the pill being taken is genuine medicine.

That’s how powerful our brains are. They can make physical changes in our bodies beyond what we would normally give them credit for. There is a book I reread regularly called Super Brain. The authors, Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi, point out that any of us can, if we so chose, set up or create our own placebo effect at any time without any kind of pill.

What’s supper interesting, as Chopra and Tanzi explain, is that “the effect isn’t limited to drugs, which is important to remember: anything you believe in can act as a placebo.”

They also ask where the relief comes from when the placebos are not actually doing anything themselves. They explain that it is simply, “the mind telling the body to get well.” The body really believes what it was being told and then it relieves the pain or heals the sickness because it believes it can. In other words, your mind can and does control healing of all kinds including pain, disease, and wounds that our bodies deal with from time to time.

These authors go on to say “Being your own placebo is the same as freeing up the healing system through messages from the brain. All healing is, in the end, self-healing. Physicians aid the body’s intricate healing system (which coordinates immune cells, inflammation, hormones, genes and much else), but the actual healing takes place in an unknown way.”

One of the conclusions that the authors come up with in regards to conquering and taking advantage of the mind-body connection is that, “In serious illness, doubts and fears play a marked role, which is why a practice like meditation or going to group counseling has been shown to help.”

That is certainly worth trying for most, if not all of us, whenever we want to cure our pain, problems, or disease. These kinds of things are probably very helpful to do on a regular basis even.

The authors suggest that there is a method through which anyone can apply their own placebo effect. It requires the same conditions as in a classic placebo response:
1. You trust what is happening.
2. You deal with doubt and fear.
3. You don’t send conflicting messages that get tangled with each other.
4. You have opened the channels of mind-body communications.
5. You let go of your intention and allow the healing system to do its work.

Our bodies have an amazing ability to heal themselves. When we get a cut finger or knee we slap on a band-aid and know that it will heal without further help from us. In doing that, we’ve just let our brain send a positive message to our cells to do their job. But when we get a serious disease we let our minds jump into the mix with all kinds of worry and negative thoughts doing pretty much the opposite of the list above. If we can have faith and believe in the body’s ability to heal itself then the brain will send the right messages to bring on and support that healing.

The bottom line here is if we are going to benefit from our own built-in ‘placebo effect’ we’ve got to, at a minimum, follow the list of 5 conditions above. If you can do that, you are supporting your body’s ability to take care of you, as it is supposed to do. I’m not saying modern medicine is not super helpful and needed, but it’s certain to get a big boost from your brain if you strongly believe in the ability of the medicine and your body to do their jobs and heal you.

Live Large, Take Risks

Back in 2015, Mitt Romney, former GOP candidate for President made some memorable and powerful comments to the graduating class at Utah Valley University. He advised the students “to experience a fulfilling, purposeful life.” But then he took it a step further and went on to say, “One thing you’re going to have to do is live a ‘Large Life.’” 

What great advice. That is something all of us need to think about and pay attention to. We need to go out and live large and do it our entire lives. So many times, we hesitate to “Live Large” in meaningful and fulfilling ways. Why? Because most of the time we fear that we will fail.

“Failures don’t have to define who you are,” Romney said in that same speech. “Through all my occupations, I have experienced successes and failures. I am asked what it felt like to lose to President Obama. Well, not as good as winning. Failures aren’t fun, but they are inevitable.”

How about you? Have you racked up a lot of failures or just a few? Do you think the frequency of your failures compared to your successes has motivated to try harder and go bigger or has it held you back?  

It seems to me, from my experience, that the number of failures I’ve had is in direct proportion to how large I’ve tried to live.  So, yes, I’ve had a ton of failures but I’ve also had some really huge successes. And I think I had those big successes because of all that I learned from my failures.

I remember one huge loss that I learned a valuable lesson from which led me to some of those very, very large successes. I had decided to lend a large amount of money with a restaurant as collateral. This turned out to be a huge mistake on my part! Why? Because I don’t know much about that kind of business so if it failed, I had little knowledge or skills to save it or run it. And guess what? It did fail and I lost almost all of what I had loaned.

What did I learn? Well, first of all, I found out that restaurants have a very high rate of failure, and, second, I learned that I shouldn’t stray from what I know best.  Not that I shouldn’t ever loan money but if I do, I should loan it on assets that I understand as well as sticking to improved real estate which, ideally, would also be income producing.

I forged ahead and made many millions of dollars worth of loans that were backed by real estate and I was very successful there.  Later, I discovered that I could do even better by owning the right kind of income producing properties. I also, very successfully, ventured into the development of condos and warehouses, where the profits were even bigger although they did come with increased risks. The thing was, those were risks I was willing to take because I knew the business. 

Had the restaurant been successful, I might have gone on to make bigger mistakes in that and other businesses that I knew nothing about.  So, yes, I would say that much, if not most, of my success with real estate backed loans came from lessons learned from that one particular failure and, confident that I’d learned a valuable lesson, I went on to “Live Large”.

So, don’t be afraid to take those risks and make mistakes but just be sure you are paying attention to the really valuable lessons you’ll find in living large.

Teaching Your Way to a Better Life

I am often struck by the thought that there is this huge life enhancing potential available to everyone on the planet that maybe we don’t always take great advantage of. It’s our ability to teach other people and, through it, help ourselves and others by sharing the things we have learned by educating ourselves and through our successes and even our failures.

Doing this has been changing and helping my life for years now. I have been teaching and preaching from the time it occurred to me that I had some really great stuff to share. But, strangely, it took me a long time to really identify what it was that I was doing, at least enough to put it into words.

So, I’d like to share with you my thoughts on why teaching and sharing your knowledge can be so important to you as well as to the people around you. Please, think deeply and intently about this and then put it into practice in any way you can. See if it doesn’t profoundly enhance so many parts of your life, even in the areas you’re already super successful in.

Here is what makes teaching so great for the person doing the teaching. Any goal, habit, human quality, or desire that you start preaching, teaching, or pontificating about will automatically, and almost without effort, push you to do more of it yourself. The knowledge you share, whether spoken or written, is like a truth drug for the mind, pushing you to do what you are encouraging and teaching others to do.  I am totally convinced this will, and does, work that way for everyone.

If you have been reading my past blogs you might remember me setting some pretty tough and maybe even overly ambitious goals through the years. Some I reached, and some I didn’t quite manage, but I know I wouldn’t have done as well as I did if I had not been constantly sharing my thoughts and ideas with you, my readers. After talking about any particular subject or goal setting item, I usually find my mind fixating on the advice I gave to you and pushing myself to do more and do better in that area. I can now see that it’s been my inner brain keeping me on track as I dig up and share these ideas with you.

I guess you could say that my brain pushed me to remain “true to myself” and to my readers as well. You see, if you teach and preach to others what they could and should do for self-improvement, or just about any subject, your inner self gives you the message that you must live up to what you put out there. We all know the saying, “practice what you preach”, and our inner brain and soul does not want us to be a hypocrite, therefore our subconscious pushes us to be true to our words. I am pretty darn convinced that is the best way to become better at whatever subject, goal, or life enhancing idea we want to improve upon. We just need to talk and teach others about it.

What knowledge do you have, or have you learned, that you want to be reminded and pushed to improve in your life? If you want to do better at it, there will be plenty of others that will want to do better at it too. So, why not teach and share what you know and help yourself do better and better at these things?

I challenge you to start teaching and preaching now about something that you want to improve in your own life. Be sure to write down your goals and objectives as well so you can stay on track. And then, in a few months, take a look back and see what it has done for you as well as for other people’s lives. Once you see how well it works and how it is a win-win for everyone, you just might be hooked on teaching and preaching your way to a better life.