Letting the Mind Heal the Body

Our brains are so powerful. They can make physical changes in our bodies beyond what we would normally give them credit for or realize. One good example is the placebo effect. Researchers that study the brain-body connection have shown in numerous experiments how the brain can be tricked into believing that a simple sugar pill can relieve pain or cure an illness if the person is told and believes that the pill being taken truly is genuine medicine.

Some years back, I was re-reading a book I’ve talked about many times before called Super Brain by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi. They point out that any of us can, if we so chose, set up or create our own placebo effect at any time and without any kind of pill.

Chopra and Tanzi explain that “the effect isn’t limited to drugs, which is important to remember: anything you believe in can act as a placebo.” The authors go on to ask the question concerning patients that took the sugar pill. “Where did the patient’s relief come from? It came from the mind telling the body to get well.”

The body really believed what it was being told and then it relieved the pain or healed the sickness. 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.”

Using the mind-body connection certainly takes a lot of work inside the brain but when you think of the huge possibilities you can quickly see that it’s certainly worth the work and effort. One of the conclusions that the authors suggest in conquering and taking advantage of the mind-body connection is summed up in this sentence: “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.

The authors suggest that there is a method through which anyone can apply their own placebo effect:
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.

When we get a cut finger, we slap on a band aid and know that it will heal itself. 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 often let our minds jump into the mix with all kinds of worry and negative thoughts doing pretty much the opposite of the list above.

The bottom line here is, if were 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.

The Friendship Boost

Last week I talked about the importance of reminding yourself to keep doing the good and healthy things that elevate your life. Having a good, active social life is a big one. It’s not only me that believes keeping up friendships can boost your health and the quality of life either. Some years back, I read an article on the Mayo Clinic website about just how important it is to maintain your friends and social circle.

According to this article friendships can:

• Increase your sense of belonging and purpose.
• Boost your happiness.
• Reduce stress.
• Improve your self-worth.
• Help you cope with traumas, such as divorce, serious illness, job loss or the death of a loved one.
• Encourage you to change or avoid unhealthy lifestyle habits, such as excessive drinking or lack of exercise.

Now, that’s a lot of benefits for something most of us would like to have more of anyways, at least we think we would. But we don’t always keep up those relationships, which is strange. Why don’t we?

It seems that life just gets in the way, and we always don’t prioritize our social life. We are constantly drawn away by things such as work, caring for children or elderly parents, or trying to make a dent in that long to-do list that is always hanging over our heads. We also move around a lot these days so even well-established friendships start to fade with the distance between us all. And then it’s hard to find the time and even motivation to go out and make new friends. But it would seem, we can’t really afford not to.

It’s not that we need to have a lot of friends to get these benefits, but rather, according to the Mayo clinic article, it’s the quality of the friendships. You want to have friendships that fulfill your individual need for a certain kind of closeness, comfort, and availability. This is different for everyone but the important thing is that they are friendships you value.

So, take time to call, visit, write or whatever else is appropriate for the relationship you have with your friends. Don’t let time and distance get in the way of acquiring all the great benefits friendships bring you. And, remember, you’re also giving those same benefits to others so you’re helping to boost their health as well as yours.

If you’d like to read the Mayo clinic article, you can find it at: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/friendships/MH00125

Slowing Down Time

I don’t know about you, but I am so amazed by how quickly 2021 went by. It was gone in a flash. And now we are almost a quarter of the way through 2022. Why does time seem to go at warp speed these days? Well, there are actually very specific answers to that question and your age has a lot to do with how quickly or slowly time passes for you, but it’s not the whole story.

The speed of time is, for one, perceived quite differently by kids and young people compared to older folks. When we are young, time seemed to go so slowly. Do you remember when you were 15 years old but just months away from turning 16 when you could then drive by yourself? Wow, the time then seemed to slow down so much it almost stopped.

But have you noticed that now, being older time seems to have sped up? I just turned 78 last week, but it seems so much less than one year ago that I cerebrated my 77th birthday. That was a really fast year.

The reason for this has a lot to do with how many new experiences we have. Our brain encodes new experiences differently than familiar ones and our subjective experience of time is tied to the number of new memories we create. The more new experiences we have, the more memories we are storing and the slower time will seem to pass. That does make sense to my brain as I get older and pay attention to my thinking and my life and the speed of our human existence.

In BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Dr. Kit Yates, author of The Math of Life and Death, writes that, “The greater our acquaintance with the routines of everyday life, the quicker we perceive time to pass and, generally, as we age, this familiarity increases.”  

He goes on to say that this theory, “suggests that, in order to make our time last longer, we should fill our lives with new and varied experiences, eschewing the time-sapping routine of the everyday.” I’d like to add that seeking out new and novel experiences is also really great for the health of your brain. It’s even been suggested that the desire to have novel experiences can be a predictor of a healthier, happier, and maybe even longer life.

If you are interested in these challenging ideas that we face as we age, I encourage you to search the internet and find out more about why time passes quicker as we age as well as ideas for adding new experiences to your life so you can slow time down and benefit from a happier and healthier brain.

Our Amazing Brain

Wow, what an incredible machine we all have and often take for granted. I’m talking about the human brain and it does so much more than we fully realize. Even as I write this, I have to stop and take note of the fact that my brain knows where each key on my computer is located to the point that I don’t even have to think about it. Likewise, when we are sleeping, the brain continues to work without our input. Then, when we are awake, we can, again, choose what we want to think about.

When I decide to accomplish a particular thing, I can think about it and set my sights on it, keeping my decision and the steps I need to get there in my mind. I can set a goal with a time frame on it and most of the time I can reach that goal, mainly because of the powerful machine in my head.

When we take a big look at the world, we can see what the human brain has been able to come up with. It came up with the automobile, airplanes, rocket ships, computers, space stations, and even heart replacement surgery! And that’s just a tiny list of the amazing things it can invent.

I’m very, very impressed by the brain’s ability to remember things, especially my wife’s. She remembers everything and with so many details that I am constantly surprised. On the other hand, the older I get, the less my brain remembers, although it’s still amazing.

The change, however, has motivated me to find various methods to kick it into gear. One that works really well for me is when I am trying to remember a person’s name that I haven’t seen or talked to in a very long time. I mentally go through the alphabet and usually, when I come to the first letter of their name, bingo, I remember it. For example, I was trying to think of a tennis friend in Kauai that I hadn’t seen in sometime so I started going through the alphabet and, wow, the first letter did it. His name was Al.

So, how do we wake up the power of our mind and intentionally and productively choose what we think about? To start, we all need to be conscious of what we are putting into our brain. What kind of information do you feed it? Do you give it challenges and problems to figure out to keep it agile? And what do you eat to keep your brain healthy?

There are a lot of ways to support your amazing brain. But the first thing you need to do is decide to intentionally take care of it and make it a priority. Once you’ve done that, be on the lookout for ways to keep it fit, healthy, and amazing.

I’ll talk more about what you can do to keep your brain fit and healthy in next week’s post.

The Big 5 and Brain Stimulation

Okay, I must start out this week exclaiming … WOW, WOW, DOUBLE WOW! That’s the kind of brain reaction most humans have when they experience something totally new, unexpected, and novel. I’ve had a ton of novel experiences in my 72 years of living and certainly a big part of that has been new places I’ve visited, new things I’ve seen, the people I met, and the activities I’ve been involved with in the 84 different countries I’ve visited.

In the last two weeks, however, I saw and experienced something totally different that I’ve ever seen or done before. And yes it was in a country that I’ve never even come close to before. In fact, four new countries in total. It was an African Safari! I never had it on my bucket list but some friends did it and said it was fantastic so I thought I’d give it a try even though just the thought of it made me very nervous.

We started the adventure by flying into Johannesburg, South Africa and after a few days we headed for Kruger National park. There we met out guide and his spotter man who rode on a platform on the front of the jeep, on the lookout for one of the “Big 5” (the 5 most dangerous animals for humans to hunt or to be around) and yes, he was armed with a big powerful rifle. So off we went looking for the wild ones. Less than an hour later the jeep stopped and the lookout man got off with his rifle in hand. He had spotted lion tracks. Off he went on foot into the wild using a radio to let our guide know exactly where he was and what he was seeing.

A short time later we left the beat up dirt road and dove over trees, bushes and huge rocks that I swear were about to tip us over. About 15 minutes later, there they were–a pride of 14 lions, 7 of which were cubs. My wife and I and a dear friend from Park City, Utah who joined us on the trip, were frozen in our seats as the lions slowly approached our very wide open jeep. The jeep had stopped but let me tell you my heart rate didn’t–it doubled! All I could think of was how easy it would be for the papa lion to leap into the jeep and have me for lunch. But slowly the entire pride walked by us, looking us in the eye and coming within 6 or 8 feet of the jeep! We watch as they walked away and then drove on to look for the next on the list of the big 5.

I want to talk more about what other brain pumping stuff we saw but I do want to emphasize that to introduce yourself to novel experiences and sights that really stimulate your brain you don’t actually have to travel to foreign countries, so please don’t think you have to go far and wide to pump up your brain. However, visiting other cultures and or countries or even other religions does help. There are lots of very simple things you can do that don’t cost a ton of money or take a lot of time that will pump up your brain.

My son David, for example, gets this with 2 AM phone calls for his volunteer search and rescue work which is very challenging. It takes him into the mountains, on cliffs, and into rivers and lakes. It’s very exciting, brain pumping, and life enhancing stuff for him and it’s all in areas not far from where he lives.

Next week I will talk about and suggest some other simple things each of us can do to pump up our brains and, as a result, enhance our lives.

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