You’ve heard about the power of positive thinking and a positive mindset but does it really have an affect on your body?
So the body works pretty simply, right? You want to lose weight, you need to eat less calories. You want to reduce fatigue and feel more energised, you need to sleep more. You want to get fit, so lift more weight/run longer distances. If you’re sick, take the requisite medication, go to bed, and you’ll feel better.
Right?
Not so fast.
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
There is an increasing body of research that demonstrates that your mindset with regards to all these things, and many more besides, can have a really big affect on how your body responds.
Mindset and its effects are now considered to be so significant in healthcare that there are professional working groups around the world formulating clinical guidelines for the deliberate use of mindset and placebo in medical practice.
Your mindset has been shown to influence:
How fit you get when you exercise
Your hunger levels after you eat
The way you age
Your performance in exams and IQ tests
The development of your talents
Whether you respond to stress positively
Your experience of pain
The way you respond to medical interventions like drugs, surgery and possibly even manual therapies like chiropractic
Your mindset can have a big effect on your body.
Okay, I’m not making any radical claims that all you have to do is “ask, believe, receive”. You can’t magically lose weight, get fit, cure cancer or increase your bank balance just by saying positive affirmations (that I know of). But the studies suggest that your mindset plays a bigger role in your health than perhaps we’ve previously been led to believe.
Positive mindset
First, let’s unpack this a bit. I’m not talking about simply feeling positive.
I’m saying there is evidence your body, your physiology, literally responds differently depending on whether you have a positive mindset towards your circumstances or not.
Your body changes depending on your attitude!
Now, some may say that the effects described above are down purely to changes in behaviour as a result of your positive attitude. In other words, you convince yourself that the exercise is good for you, so you work harder at it, and this is where the results come from. And that’s not a bad thing if it happens!
There are some fascinating studies that have shown literal, measurable changes in things like hormone levels, blood pressure, and physical ageing that can’t simply be due to behaviour.
This is powerful stuff!
“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.”
Just to be absolutely clear: I’m NOT suggesting that all you have to do is think yourself healthy! Eating a good diet, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep and managing your stress are all still important. Also, I’m not saying you can just magically think yourself better when you’re sick or injured. Appropriate responses to illness and injury are important, including advice and treatment from a qualified health professional where necessary.
Mind and body: separate or together?
One aspect to this is the challenge to the long-held belief that mind and body are separate.
This has its origins in the thinking of 17th century French philosopher Descartes. He first postulated that the mind and body were seperate (although closely joined).
At the time it was a radical idea, but it came to underpin a great deal of the way the medical and human sciences regarded humanity. The body came to be investigated much as a biological machine that simply housed our minds, and the operations of the mind were thought to be entirely separate from the body, neither influenced nor influencing our physiology.
There is now a very strong shift back to the understanding that the mind and body are interconnected, and that in fact the mind and its operations arise out of the functioning of the physiological mechanisms of the brain and nervous system, and more broadly its interactions with the rest of the body (and in fact the environment in which we live).
In other words, what happens in your mind can affect your body, and vice versa.
Mindset TED talk by Carol Dweck
If you are interested in learning more, this TED talk by Professor Carol Dweck from Stanford University is really insightful. You might also want to get a hold of her book: “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”.
Mindset: further reading
This article is part of a series about how our attitudes, beliefs and mindset can affect our health.
There is a fascinating and growing body of evidence that there is a much stronger relationship between our minds and our bodies than perhaps we have been led to believe.
I hope that these articles stimulate some new thoughts and ideas for you, or perhaps shore up what you already knew.
Read more:
Want some one-on-one advice about mindset?
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