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Healthy mind, healthy body

By Sarah Clark

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It sounds obvious, but it's actually quite amazing how much your state of mind can affect your physical health. There have been books written on the mind-emotion-body connection, on thinking positively and beating illness through the power of the mind. Louise Hay, for example, has written an entire series of books, starting with the classic self help book, "You can heal your life" based around her stories about how she believes that using positive thinking and visualisation techniques helped her defeat cancer.

Even though that kind of claim is unproven, some people believe that by working on your state of mind, you can improve your health too. It's easily seen in the case of negative emotions such as stress, that our mind affects our body.

Stress

The most obvious way in which negative thoughts can affect our bodies is through stress. When we suffer from stress, to begin with we're activating a fight or flight mechanism that was designed to give us a surge of extra energy to help us run away from a predator. We don't have many sabre-toothed tigers to run away from in the UK in the 21st century, but our bodies haven't evolved past that, and we still produce the same stress hormones.

When you're stressed, your heart rate also speeds up, increasing the blood flow to your brain and muscles by up to 400 percent .Your digestive system stops working, in order to conserve energy that could be needed elsewhere. At the same time, your muscle tension increases, and you start to breathe more rapidly, to bring more oxygen to your muscles, ready for action.

The negative effects of stress

Being stressed feels unpleasant, so it's quite obvious that if the effects build up over a long period of time, they will have an effect on our physical as well as our mental wellbeing. Some people have suggested that stress can lead to cancer, although there's not much reliable evidence for this.

Some of the documented effects of stress include:

• Fatigue, digestive problems, headaches, and back pain.
• Lowered resistance to infection, by reducing the number of blood cells that help fight infection, leaving you more open to getting colds and other bugs.
• Increased blood pressure and risk of stroke, in some people
• Increased risk of heart attack in some people
• A likelihood of unhealthy lifestyle choices such as smoking, drinking excessively, drug abuse, and overeating.

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