Does Your Immune System Listen To Your Thoughts?

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm just sort of marveling here because what you're talking about is a total paradigm shift in how we think about medicine. It's not only about treating the disease, it's about the science of creating health.

And it's a very big paradigm shift. Hi, I'm Kiah Perowitch, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Chronic stress has become an epidemic in our society where faster is considered better and packing more obligations into your ever-expanding schedule earns you a badge of honor. And while we know that chronic stress wreaks havoc on your and emotional well-being, emotions are often dismissed during the conversation around stress. In a recent interview, immunologist Dr. Leonard Calabrese shared fascinating clinical results with Dr. Hyman about how things like joy and gratitude have been found to be beneficial to health outcomes.

Let's listen in. It's well accepted that stress is bad for your immune system. I mean, classic chronic stress, you know, acute stress run from the saber-toothed tiger, that's really good. Chronic stress of my job, my life, the environment, politics, and the world is bad. We are now starting to appreciate that the opposite of that, the immunology of joy can be immunologically potentiating. And you mentioned a very nice example. I call this the immunology of gratitude. And gratitude has wide-ranging biologic effects. There's a recent study done at UC San Diego that showed that patients with Asymptomatic echocardiographically documented congestive heart failure with six weeks of gratitude journaling could improve ventricular function.

Your heart pumps better and faster if you're grateful. That's such a great phase, the immunology of joy.

Yeah, so some people, Cohen from Carnegie Mellon has done such beautiful work looking at resistance to respiratory viruses and the effects of hugs. And did this elegantly controlled study where they measured social interactions, the amount of touching that goes on in a person's life, and then actually inoculated all the people in the study with a cold virus and then measured their antibody responses and clinical things. And hugging was an important and significantly clinical a variable. Even though the Hug people were more exposed to viruses, you know, they were protected. Let me back up and give you just a magic minute on triggering the immune system. So, you know, we have this immune system here. It's designed to defend us from all types of dangerous signals. We traditionally think of that as external signals such as, you know, infections, and it certainly does all that. There is another set of danger signals that we are just now starting to understand, and you brought up the term psychoneuroimmunology. Mouthful. It is, it is, and it's your psyche, your nervous system, and your immune system. Processing that is our brain by and large. and the brain can send signals to the body that promote inflammation. Inflammation is good when you cut your finger, it's bad when you have it for 10 years. So the immune system is triggered by stress to generate accelerated inflammation, which contributes to all these immune-mediated inflammatory diseases that we're talking about. contributes to acceleration of aging, and that includes aging of the immune system. There's a woman named Candace Pert who studied neuroimmunology.

There's a whole field of psychoneuroimmunology at the NIH, National Institute of Health, and she found that the immune system was listening to our thoughts. She calls this molecules of emotion. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, it's such an incredible area. Fulvio D'Acquista from London who does experimental work on the immunology of joy, he actually has animal models. Mice, take mice and let them live in his little home, take another set of mice and put them in a dirty cage and they get all upset and you take the other set of mice and you put them in the Ritz Carlton house and you pet them, their immune systems shift. So we don't know how to quantify this but it certainly fits with our model that in those behaviors of diet, exercise, sleep and stress, we want to move our affect in a more positive manner I see this every single day that, you know, sometimes we see immunologic diseases that we just can't, we can't do anything about with targeted therapy. And we have to deal with it, you know, biobehaviorally. There are 50 million people that have immunologic diseases. And, you know, we want them to understand that their immune system is not totally you know, out of control. They can do a lot about it.

The mind-body connection is incredibly powerful, and emotional health is a cornerstone in achieving optimal well-being. Making time to cultivate joy in your life is a vital part of finding true, lasting wellness. Practicing gratitude can reduce mental conditions like depression and anxiety and flood your brain with feel-good chemicals like serotonin. Gratitude has also been found to improve psychological health by reducing toxic emotions like envy and regret. Dr. Hyman suggests keeping a journal by your bed to reflect on what you are grateful for before going to sleep. Whether it's writing down a few things every day, silently acknowledging them on your commute, or taking a moment at the dinner table to say something you are thankful for out loud, these acts will open up your mind and body to feel their best. We all want to wake up feeling good every day, and we all know that health is not solely focused around one specific thing like diet or exercise. It's a combination of many lifestyle choices with the backbone residing in our attitude and devotion to doing the work. Incorporating supportive daily practices into your wellness routine will better enable you to remain grounded in joy and steady through the ups and downs of life. I hope you enjoyed this mini episode of a Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for tuning in.

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