Calm Your Mind, Heal Your Body

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome back to my blog. Now what's more important than almost any other factor in health? What's the cause or worsens 95% of all illness? What has been associated with dramatic reductions in disease and increased longevity? In fact, what is the one thing that's more important than cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, or any other risk factor in determining whether you will live a long and healthy life? It is your attitudes, your social network, community, and spiritual beliefs. Oddly, the biggest predictors of longevity are eating breakfast and psychological resiliency. Being able to roll with the punches that life throws at us. And I was browsing my old library, and I hate throwing away books because they're like treasures for me. I found an old book I read in college called Mind is Healer, Mind is Slayer by a friend and leader in the field of mind-body medicine, Kenneth Pelletier, who's the professor of clinical medicine at UCSF and University of Arizona Schools of Medicine. It was published in 1977. Now, I wish I could say that a lot has changed since the book was published. Maybe we filled in the gaps, learned more about the mechanism through which the body affects the mind and the mind affects the body, but the basic truths remain the same. There is a dramatic and powerful connection between our mind and body and also of our body on our mind. In fact, it really shouldn't be called a connection because it's just one bidirectional whole system. Hans Selye, the man who coined the word stress, first mapped out its biological effects. He said, the modern physician should know as much about emotions and thoughts as about symptoms and drugs. This approach would appear to hold more promise of cure than anything medicine has given us to date. It's true, the most powerful pharmacy in the world is right between your ears. We're seeing an epidemic of stress related disorders. Americans live on caffeine and Prozac. We use substances to manage our moods. In fact, the four top selling items in grocery stores are all drugs we use to manage our mood and energy. Caffeine, sugar, alcohol, and nicotine. Depression, anxiety, autism, ADD, memory disorders, and dementia are epidemic in our society and they are making the pharmaceutical industry highly profitable. But do we really deal with the root of this problem? Well, I'll tell you what the causes of brain problems are and how to fix them in a moment. But first let's look at the power of the mind to heal or harm. One of my long-term patients came to see me after his wife died. He suddenly developed heart failure. His heart just wouldn't pump. It was flooded with grief molecules, hormones like adrenaline norepinephrine, cortisol, and more. The New England Journal of Medicine published a study recently about how grief or emotional trauma can cause heart failure, literally a broken heart. Rather than just give him drugs for heart failure, as I was taught in medical school, I suggested he have healing touch, a form of energy and emotional healing. He did and he dramatically recovered. Touch, not medication, healed his heart. We all learned how to read and write in medical school, but we never learned how to use our minds to help us deal with the most important survival skills, staying happy and healthy. That is ultimately the power of our mind and our beliefs. Unfortunately, we're not trained to address the stressful psychic loads that are the burden of the 21st century and they're killing us. Just consider these facts. 95% of all illness is caused by or worsened by stress. Low socioeconomic status is associated with poor health outcomes and risk of death from all causes. This is not related as we might think to poor health habits, but to feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. Internalized racism and stress are associated with high amounts of belly fat. Stress hormones damage the hippocampus in the brain, that memory center in the brain that causes memory loss and dementia. In a study of people who volunteered to have cold viruses injected in their noses, only people with a high level of perceived stress got colds. Women with metastatic breast cancer survived twice as long if they were part of a support group. Belonging to a group, a religious group, a bowling club, a quilting group reduces the risk of death from all causes and increases longevity despite your health habits. In a study of doctors, those who scored high on hostility questionnaires had a higher risk of heart attacks than those who smoked, were overweight, had high blood pressure, or didn't exercise. Just being hostile and having a negative attitude can be more of a risk of dying from a heart attack than smoking, being overweight, or having high blood pressure. Amazing. The good news is that we can change our beliefs and our attitudes and their effects on your mind and your body. You may need to learn a new few skills, but they're essential survival skills that we never learned in school or from our families, and we cannot thrive without them. Even better news is that it is not only about our beliefs and attitudes. Our mind and our brain function is also influenced by what happens in our bodies. So by addressing the keys that are the basis of this new medicine called functional medicine or what I call ultra wellness, mental problems can often be cured without changing your beliefs. The effects of beliefs and attitudes are so important, but the effects of problems in our core body systems on our mental state and brain function, such as our hormones, our immune system, our gut, our detox system, our energy system, all the things I've been talking about in these blogs, and our nutritional status and other environmental inputs are just as important and mostly ignored by medicine. For example, a man I saw yesterday was completely stressed out. He had anxiety, palpitations, drank four martinis a night just to calm him down. He also had severe muscle cramps and eye twitches. Now, these are obvious signs of magnesium deficiency. Stress, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar all deplete magnesium. he was in a vicious cycle. What he needed wasn't Valium or Prozac but to address why he was magnesium deficient, getting rid of toxins, yeast, stress, alcohol and caffeine and fixing that through helping him detoxify, treating his yeast, cutting out alcohol and caffeine and giving him enough of the relaxation mineral called magnesium to calm his nervous system. Now that in combination with tools for calming the mind and the body can help him reset his nervous system. using the body-mind effect and the mind-body effect. So here's what we know about how to influence the mind and the mind-body system and the body-mind system. One, find the biological causes of problems with the mind by working on all the keys of functional medicine, all the basic core systems which will lead to optimal health or what I call ultra wellness. It could be mercury toxicity, or magnesium or B12 deficiency, or a toxic gut chemical, or a gluten allergy, that is changing your brain. So by changing your body, you can change your mind. Next, you have to learn how to actively relax. To engage that powerful force of your mind on your body, you must do something. You can't just sit there watching television or drinking a beer. You have to try learning new skills such as meditation or deep breathing, yoga, biofeedback, progressive muscle relaxation, or maybe taking a hot bath or making love or getting a massage or watching a sunset or taking a walk in the woods or on the beach. Exercise is also a powerful way to burn off stress chemicals and heal the mind. It is well studied and well proven. Just do it. It has been proven to be better than or equal to Prozac for treating depression. Next you have to clean up your diet from mind robbing molecules like caffeine, alcohol, refined sugars and eat regularly to avoid the short term stress of starvation on your body. You can also take a multivitamin and try magnesium, the relaxation mineral. You can also use special herbs that are called adaptogenic herbs that help you adapt to stress like ginseng and ashwagandha. You can also take a hot bath or a sauna to help your body deeply relax and turn on the relaxation response. You might also think about examining your beliefs and attitudes and responses to common situations and considering reframing your point of view to reduce stress. Consciously build your network of friends and family and community. They are your most powerful allies in achieving long-term health. In my recent blogs, I've introduced you to a set of new ideas and concepts that have the power to transform your health personally and to transform healthcare. It's no small job personally or for our society, but it is essential to stem the impending tsunami of ill health and economic burden facing us, our children and our children's children. The new solution is a model of medicine based on whole system thinking called Functional Medicine, a fundamental change in our world view about health. A view that helps us get to the core of illness, to learn self-care, to take control and empower ourselves for the transformation of our own health, and to transform our sick care system to a health care system. Each of us can contribute and make small changes that will have a big difference and we can move as individuals and as a community toward optimal health and ultra wellness. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Thanks to Margaret Mead. Thank you.