The power of your mind
The author is both a traveller on his own cancer journey and a medical scientist with a keen interest in the relationship between our self, our mind, our body and our health.
The mind is still one of nature’s great secrets – it controls everything we perceive, from sight to pain, along with the unconscious functioning of much of our body. Science is beginning to unlock some of these secrets, and with each discovery we are piecing together its potential. It is in understanding the relationship between our mind and body that we are uncovering the “power of the mind” over our body and health. This is not to say that the mind is the solution to all our health problems, but research is revealing that it does have a significant influence over our health and, in some cases, may be the difference between life and death.
Your mind
Before we can delve into the role that the mind plays in health, we must first define what is meant by “your mind”. Your mind is broadly divided into the conscious and subconscious. Your subconscious is simply everything that goes on in your mind that you are unaware of. It ranges from all your sensory input to the unconscious modulation of your organs like your immune system, heart and gut. It is this control over the body that is essential for influencing health. It is also the autopilot that does repetitive tasks the same way you first learnt. For example, when driving home we often get there without thinking - the subconscious mind drives us along the well known route.
In contrast, your conscious mind is everything that you are aware of. It includes the sensory information in your subconscious that you pay attention to. For example, when reading this article your attention is on the words, not on the feeling of shoes on your feet; thus you are aware of the words and not your feet (until now). Your conscious mind also includes your ego and self identity. Repetitive conscious thoughts also train the subconscious. So, to learn to drive a car, you had to continually consciously practice (thereby training the subconscious) until it became almost automatic.
Your mind, both conscious and subconscious, is dependent on the communication between brain cells called neurons. As a result, the mind needs the brain to function. Destroying the brain destroys the mind. Damage to certain parts of the brain will lead to predictable damage to our mind. For example, damage to an area called the fusiform facial gyrus can lead a person to still see and describe the features of a familiar face, but no longer recognise who the face belongs to.
Importantly, the relationship between the mind and the brain works both ways. The mind also directly influences and changes your brain. The more your mind activates (by thinking) a certain part of the brain, the more the brain changes in response to make it easier to use that part of the brain.
In regards to your health, this becomes important as repetitive conscious thoughts teach or instruct the subconscious, which in turn instructs the body through the nervous system. This was demonstrated when researchers at the Lerner Research Institute, USA measured the finger muscle strength of three groups of young healthy volunteers [1]. The first group did nothing; they were the controls or comparison group. The second group were made to mentally practice lifting their finger (15min/day x 5 days week) for 12 weeks. The third group physically practiced lifting their finger for the same time period. Compared to the first group, the physical group increased their finger muscle strength by 53%, but fascinatingly, the mental group also increased their strength by 35%. Therefore, repetitive conscious thoughts are able to have a physiological effect on our body.
Now what happens if these thoughts are either beneficial or detrimental to our health? We get what is known as the placebo effect and the nocebo effect.
The Placebo and Nocebo Effect
The power of the mind to affect health has been known to the medical community for a long time and goes under the guise of “placebo effect” and the “nocebo effect”. The placebo effect is any beneficial change to a person’s health as a result of their belief in a treatment, irrespective of the efficiency of that treatment. Yet ironically, it is often seen as a nuisance, particularly in clinical trials, rather than a powerful tool. Despite this, it has been observed in many areas of medicine - from mental health, where it was recently estimated that the effect of a large majority of anti-depressants is mainly due to positive patient beliefs about treatment [2], to relief of arthritic pain in the knee where a sham surgery resulted in similar levels of pain relief as the real surgery [3]. This is not to say that belief will cure all. Instead it seems that a significant placebo response is generally observed in about 35% of all patients. However, the placebo effect clearly demonstrates the ability of our mind to improve our health and therefore should be an important part to our tool kit to health.
A tool can be used for good or evil. Our mind is a tool and is no exception to this rule. Negative beliefs can be detrimental to our health, in what is termed the “nocebo effect”. There have been several well documented cases to the power of the nocebo. The majority of these cases involve a person in a position of perceived power, such as a medical doctor or spiritual leader, giving a negative message to a patient who then incorporates it into their belief and live out message. One such case was recorded in a cardiac ward at a large catholic hospital in USA, where a cardiologist observed that one of his patients had taken a turn for the worse and was about to die. A priest was called to administer last rites, but by mistake he went to stable patient next to the dying man. With an impressive air of authority he gave the last rites to the wrong man, who promptly died within 15min. The dying man survived for another 4 days [4].
Those in authority are not solely responsible for our health, as it is our own belief in their prognosis that gives power to the placebo/nocebo. Indeed, research has shown that we have the same ability to cause a placebo or nocebo response with our own health. Chemotherapy has a dreadful reputation and will often make patients feel violently nauseous. However, it seems that those who expected to be sick before starting treatment experienced the worst nausea during treatment[5]. Furthermore, nausea often starts before the treatment is given; a clear sign of nocebo.
In all these situations of placebo and nocebo the only cause was a change in belief, a change in both our unconscious and conscious minds. Indeed, the stronger your belief the greater the effect.
