When you get sick, it’s easy to point the finger elsewhere. Maybe the fault lies in your genes; perhaps it was that sniffling lady on the bus; what about the last thing you ate? In reality, it could have been any number of things. Don’t get us wrong, genetics has a lot to answer for – as does that dodgy burrito – but our minds may be inextricably tied up in it all too.
Burgeoning research appears to be suggesting that the way we think and feel could influence our health. But is this the case? And, if so, could we exploit it to “think ourselves well”?
Body vs brain
It’s easy to think of the body and brain as pretty disparate, but they are far from separate entities. In fact, they’re incredibly interconnected, as Dr Monty Lyman, a research fellow at the University of Oxford and author of The Immune Mind, recently told IFLScience at CURIOUS Live. Lyman works in the emerging field of immunopsychiatry, which explores how the immune system can influence mental health – but also how mental health can influence the immune system.
“[Previously] the idea was that the brain focused on defending us against big threats – macro threats – like a lion or […] another human trying to attack you, and the immune system was more for the microscopic threats. But actually, in the last 10 or so years, we’ve discovered that that’s completely not the case and there’s some really exciting science […] that shows how they are completely interlinked. You could say that they are a combined defense system.”
Anecdotally, Lyman references his own experience of eczema, which would flare up during periods of high stress, as an example of how the mind can affect the immune system. It’s well known that stress can have far-reaching consequences on the body, affecting all systems from respiratory and cardiovascular to gastrointestinal and reproductive.
There’s also some research to suggest that personality may have a part to play. Back in 2003, one study hinted at this. In a group of over 300 healthy volunteers infected with the common cold, those with more positive emotional styles demonstrated greater resistance to developing a cold.
It’s becoming very clear that there’s no mental health that isn’t also physical and there’s no physical health condition that doesn’t have a mental aspect.
Dr Monty Lyman
This link between personality and health is something that C. Robert Cloninger, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied extensively. As he told IFLScience of his most recent research, “We found that our personality strongly accounts [for] the way our brain and other organs in our body function by regulating gene expression and adaptations to changing life conditions.”
“Specifically, we found that our level of self-awareness – our insight into what habits, goals, and values provide satisfaction and meaning in our life – predicts how well we are able to regulate the functioning of our body and mind, and so our health and well-being.”
In addition, our outlook on life can be important, and, according to Cloninger, “influences all aspects of health, including physical, emotional, social, and cognitive well-being. […] It affects our longevity and risk of the full range of diseases of the body and mind.”
But it’s a two-way street, and just as the brain can impact the body, the body can impact the brain. “It’s becoming very clear that there’s no mental health that isn’t also physical and there’s no physical health condition that doesn’t have a mental aspect,” Lyman added.
Mind over medicine?
With our body and brain so deeply entwined, how we think, feel, and act can indeed influence the way our bodies function, but what does that mean in terms of “thinking ourselves well”?
“We all can observe that when we are stressed and worried, we experience mental problems with negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and anger. Then we are also more likely to develop physical problems, like catching a cold or the flu,” Cloninger told IFLScience.
“It is less clear to people from their own observations that their thoughts and feelings also make them vulnerable to developing many severe chronic diseases as they age, including cardiovascular diseases, chronic lung diseases, cancer, diabetes, and arthritis.”
At the moment, medical specialties tend to be very divided: if what’s ailing you is hormonal you might seek out an endocrinologist; if you’re struggling mentally, perhaps you’d visit a psychiatrist. But maybe, in light of what we now know about the overlap between mental and physical health, the best solution might lie somewhere in the middle.
A growing body of research is accruing, in which scientists are attempting to investigate how we could harness the power of the mind to help treat some physical health conditions and vice versa.
Therapy, for example, might benefit more than just our brains. Promising research has suggested that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) could help relieve some symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, and so could be a useful addition to current treatment programs.
There are even some who tout meditation as an option. While the practice has been claimed to help reduce chronic pain and improve blood pressure, high-quality studies supporting this are few and far between.
Despite these limitations, some studies have hinted at its potential impact beyond the brain: it’s been suggested that meditation may reduce stress at a cellular level and that Tibetan Buddhist monks who practice it daily may have healthier gut microbiomes as a result. It’s still early days, but with more robust research, such practices could have their place in medical interventions.
“Because we can learn to better understand ourselves, we can change our personality and improve our health,” Cloninger added. “Consequently, psychotherapy with meditative practices can improve personality organization and, in turn, health and well-being. In other words, health is a creative learning process.”
Beware the power of positivity
But that’s not to say that you could fight off an illness solely by willing it so. While there’s undoubtedly power in positivity – research suggests that sick people’s quality of life can be improved with a bit of positive thinking, and even that optimistic people are more likely to turn up for regular treatments – some things can’t simply be thought away.
This idea of having a more genuinely holistic idea of mind and body is hopefully going to permeate medicine moving forward.
Dr Monty Lyman
And in some cases, enforcing an expectation of positivity could actually be detrimental to patients. In a 2013 piece for The Conversation, Dr Michael Vagg, now an Affiliate Associate Professor at Deakin University’s School of Medicine, makes the point that people with, say, a cancer diagnosis may be made to feel unduly anxious if they’ve had that rhetoric forced upon them, when they – quite justifiably – feel scared, sad, or anything less than peachy about their prognosis.
Similarly, no patient should be made to feel like a condition is “all in their head” or that their diagnosis was their fault in the first place.
“You don’t need to feel that you should be completely positive 100 percent of the time, because not only does that not happen, it’s not healthy either. Coping the best way you know how to is all you should be aiming to do,” Vagg writes.
At the end of the day, positivity is only part of the picture. “A positive mindset is one aspect of personality that is needed to optimize health,” Cloninger told us. However, there are a multitude of other factors that influence our susceptibility to disease: our genetics, lifestyle, and environment, for example, are not to be overlooked.
From a clinician’s standpoint though, embracing psychological therapies as part of physical interventions could have a lot of merit for certain conditions. In that sense, it may be possible to “think ourselves well”, at least to some extent, and with the help of medical professionals – and it might just be the future, Lyman hopes.
“This idea of having a more genuinely holistic idea of mind and body is hopefully going to permeate medicine moving forward.”
This article first appeared in Issue 23 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. Subscribe and never miss an issue.
