Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

Years ago now, I was struck down by a mysterious illness. I was tired all the time but couldn’t sleep, eating more but losing weight, couldn’t concentrate, and found loud noises and bright lights painful.

I was living in Australia at the time, which had a generous free health system, so I was extensively tested for everything from Ross River virus to brain tumours. According to all those tests, I was perfectly healthy.

I remember visiting a specialist physician, a highly qualified older man who was very thorough in getting me physically tested but extremely old-school about any non-physical factors to illness. I remember at our last appointment that he concluded that it was “just psychosomatic”, in a way which implied, “so there’s nothing we can actually do, I wash my hands of the problem.” He managed not to convey “just pull yourself together”, but it may well have been in his thoughts.

photo credit: happysnappr

Now, for numerous reasons too tedious and painful to go into, I was very, very stressed at the time. Nobody had ever told me that stress could make me ill. The doctors I saw didn’t ask me about it. It was only when I heard a talk on stress (oddly enough, from the doctor who’d referred me to the old-school physician) and borrowed a book on it – William Wilkie’s excellent Understanding Stress Breakdown – that I made the connection between my emotions and my physical illness.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa’s teacher goes off sick because she thinks she has Lyme disease. When she returns, she explains that her illness was “psychosomatic”. One child asks “Does that mean she’s crazy?” Another explains, “No, it means she was making it up.”

Which is good humour, but bad healthcare – yet there are still a lot of old-style medically-trained people like that prominent physician I encountered who dismiss psychosomatic illness as somehow “not real” and who don’t have – and aren’t interested in having – tools to deal with it. I read a telling story in (I think) Martin L. Rossman’s Guided Imagery for Self-Healing of a conversation between a doctor and patient. The patient was complaining of stomach problems, and the doctor, having examined and tested him thoroughly, told him that they were “all in his head”. The patient leaned forward and said very seriously, “No, doctor, they’re in my stomach.”

photo credit: ElektraCute

And he was absolutely right. Because, as I hinted in How mind-body healing works, there is such a profound connection between the mind and the body that they form a single system. In fact, it’s not inaccurate to say that your mind extends throughout your body.

What I mean by that is that the various communication systems to and from the brain extend throughout the body, and that mind – whatever “mind” is – inhabits the whole of them. The nervous system is a single physical system which reaches all parts of the body, for example. We’re used to localizing our mind in our brain, as if the other parts of the nervous system were just distant adjuncts, but this is in a way quite arbitrary. There’s no fundamental change that occurs when a nerve fibre enters or leaves the skull. It’s all one system.

In the same way, the chemical communication systems of the brain, mainly coordinated through the hypothalamus, extend throughout the body via the blood, lymph and cerebrospinal fluid. Again, there’s no magical thing that happens when these chemicals enter or leave the confines of the skull. They don’t become a different thing just because they’re not inside your head any more. They’re continuous with the brain and the mind.

The digestive system, in particular, is almost like a primitive nervous system. It maintains a complicated homeostasis – a balance in a constantly changing situation – by sophisticated feedback mechanisms, most of them chemical, some of which are known to link into the brain. It is also host to a significant number of nerves. No surprise, then, that hypnosis – which acts on the brain – can significantly help with irritable bowel syndrome, a “psychosomatic illness” – which simply means, an imbalance in the mind-body system.

It’s time to ditch the idea that “psychosomatic” means “all in your head” or “imaginary” or “not real”, and it’s definitely time to ditch the idea that it means “we can’t do anything to help”. Later in this series, I’ll explore how many researchers are showing that indeed there are things, very effective and in some cases very simple things, that we can do to restore the balance of our mind-body systems. Make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already.

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