No, you aren’t a hypochondriac, but what if we told you that all illness is psychosomatic – that’s right, your cold, your back pain, and even things like cancer take root in your body psychologically and emotionally, setting up patterns, or a vibration, if you will, that cause your cells either to be whole or damaged and sick? Would it surprise you?
Your psychosomatic patterns are either boosting your health or causing chronic health conditions. Through research in positive psychology and neuroscience, as well as ancient teachings that reach back into India and Greece, we can understand psychosomatic illness more completely.
First, there is somatic illness and psychosomatic illness. Let’s look at these two definitions because they are important distinctions in how disease is viewed, and therefore what remedies are taken to address it.
A somatic illness is caused by your biology or the health of your tissues and cells. Most people would say that somatic illness is the idea that your genes and hereditary factors are the strongest in affecting your health. This is the most common way that Western medicine views illness – your “soma” meaning “of the cells,” determines if you will be healthy and fit or sick and easily run down.
This puts the responsibility for your health outside of you, both in the cause and in the remedy. If you have a somatic disease is thought to be caused by your parents and grandparents, and there is nothing you can do about it except take a pill or get a surgery.
This viewpoint of healing is extremely limited. A psychosomatic disease understands the empathic body, at least as far as it addresses how powerful our thoughts and brainwave patterns are in setting the stage within us for health or disease. Our thought patterns are so powerful that they can either heal or harm us, and this can be seen directly in the placebo effect. A mere sugar pill often cures a disease faster and more efficiently than a drug because people simply believe that it will cure them. In other words, your psychology affects your health. [1]
For example, the physiology of stress puts us into survival mode. When we are chronically stressed – when this makes up our psychology, our immune system won’t work as it should.
Our bodies start saving the repair and rejuvenate energy that would be used in a healthy, unstressed body, to just help us survive.
Our digestion changes, slowing down so that we can also just stay alive in the face of perceived danger. Our bodies also cannot assimilate nutrients from the healthy foods we do eat when we are chronically stressed. [2]
Everything about who our bodies function – from the way we sleep to the way we feel mood wise changes if our psychosomatic pattern is one of chronic stress.
Though getting the flu is not a direct result of your psychology, having a depleted immune system, poor energy levels, depleted and diseased cells, and bad digestion all allowed you to get the flu more easily because your body is susceptible to more foreign pathogens when you have a psychosomatic pattern which causes such a physical state (consistent negative thinking that causes additional, enduring stress).
Conversely, if we have a high stress-tolerance, developed through meditation, yoga, proper nutrition, spending time in nature, and living a balanced life full of flow, purpose or meaning, and positive relationship with others (incidentally the three pillars of happiness as defined by the science of positive psychology) then “magically” our physical state changes.
Our thoughts, our heart-brain coherence, [3] our digestion, [4] our immune system gets boosted. We recover from illness faster or we simply don’t get sick at all.
We get regular exercise because we aren’t run down by stress, boosting our health even more. Even our worldview changes – we become more empathic, more engaged, and more eager to experience life on its own terms. [5]
Even our breathing changes, which signals how our neurons fire, which hormones will be released (such as cortisol, a stress hormone that further impedes the immune system and can cause us to stress eat or serotonin, GABA, and dopamine which are all “happy” hormones that help us deal with stress, boost our immune system, and help to regulate our hunger signals and food cravings.) [6]
The biologist, Dr. Bruce Lipton has talked at length how our thoughts create our reality and while some dismiss this epigenetic discovery as superfluous science, it is actually talked about extensively in the fields neuroscience, positive psychology, and complementary medicine. In fact, almost all complementary medicine helps to alter our emotions and thoughts, so that the body can then restore itself quite naturally. [7]
If you want to create a positive psychosomatic pattern, then you must take full responsibility for your thoughts. You must take full responsibility for lowering your stress, and deal with uncomfortable emotions that lay just below the conscious mind which contribute to levels of chronic stress.
Start by:
- Meditating for at least ten minutes every day
- Eating high quality, non-GMO, organic, plant based foods
- Getting regular moderate exercise (30 minutes minimum daily)
- Drink plenty of purified water
- Spend time in nature
- Laugh as often as possible
- Do regular, intermittent fasting
- Use the techniques described in The Power of the Elevation of Consciousness
[1] Heron, J. (2001). The placebo effect and a participatory world view. Understanding the Placebo Effect in Complementary Medicine, 189-212. doi:10.1016/b978-0-443-06031-1.50015-0
[2] Psychosomatic Illness: Heal the Root of the Issue with Ivan Staroversky. (2012, September 14). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/PaJAIkyZGLg
[3] Deschodt-Arsac, V., Lalanne, R., Spiluttini, B., Bertin, C., & Arsac, L. M. (2018). Effects of heart rate variability biofeedback training in athletes exposed to stress of university examinations. PLOS ONE, 13(7), e0201388. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0201388
[4] Wingate, D. (1986). Stress and common gastrointestinal disorders: a comprehensive approach. Gut, 27(6), 748-748. doi:10.1136/gut.27.6.748
[5] Positivity. (2004). Positivity, 8(4), 1-4. doi:10.1007/s11117-004-2385-0
[6] Benjamin, S. (1977). Is asthma a psychosomatic illness?—I. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 21(6), 463-469. doi:10.1016/0022-3999(77)90069-1
[7] Dr. Bruce Lipton. https://www.brucelipton.com/resource/article/epigenetics.