Mind over Healing

I shall share what I learned from listening to David Hamilton, Ph.D this week. He is the best selling author of the book, "How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body." He leads workshops to help people understand the link between their minds, their health and their lives. The power of the mind and positive thinking can actually bring about physiological changes in the body, through visualization, belief, and affirmations to heal. How do thoughts and visualisation affect the neurosystem and our brain?

As we imagine something over and over again, we start to cause changes to the physical structure of the brain. In a research, volunteers were asked to play a simple combination of notes on the piano with all five fingers daily for 2 hours. Their brains were scanned daily and scientists found that the area of the brain connected to the finger muscles had grown in size. The brain actually generated  hundreds of neurons. but not only that, genes were being turned on and started changing.  To study the effects of visualisation, another group was asked to visualise that they were playing the piano notes for 2 hours daily. At the end of  5 days, a brain scan showed that the brain had changed in identical ways. In many ways, the brain does not distinguish whether something is really happening or it is just an imagination.

He believes that the power of visualisation can be used to heal, provided that it is done properly. An example is the visualisation of tumours shrinking. However, it has to be visualised in great detail, thus taking time and must be done consistently everyday.

In another study, 150 married couples were asked to talk about a topic of their choice for 15 minutes  From their interaction, couples were grouped into those who were hostile, aggresive and those who were more compassionate to one another. What they found was that the hostile group had more cases of heart disease whilst the other compassionate group had healthy arteries. The difference was the way they treated each other. He said that hundreds of genes are turned on by the way we treat people.

When two people are interacting, their emotions and body language has an effect on each other. The phrase “emotional contagion” embodies the idea that humans will synchronize their personal emotions with the emotions expressed by those around them, whether consciously or unconsciously, and thus that an emotion conveyed by one person will become “contagious” to others. In the presence of a happy person, others around them become happier. This unfortunately applies to negative emotions as well. Gentleness and compassion can protect ourselves.

It is indeed true that the people we spend our time with are very important. They not only have great influence on our thoughts. They also have great impact on our health.