Listen To Your Body

“THE BODY is all-wise, pay attention to it when it speaks,” my mentor would constantly tell me when I was often falling ill.

Relationships can be stressful. Work and the people around you can cause you stress—as was experienced recently by a dear friend who had been afflicted with one form of lung infection after another in the last three weeks.

His doctor told him that the number of infections he’d been having was highly unusual.

I knew that my friend had been terribly unhappy at his job for months now; he had been at odds with his boss. He couldn’t quit because he needed the money, but without a healthcare plan, his resources were being drained by medical bills.

I told him that perhaps his body was speaking loud and clear—his lungs could no longer tolerate breathing in the negative energy at work. It was a light bulb moment.

‘Toxic’

Another young girl I knew was in a rigorous nursing course. She wanted to be a nurse but felt so alone in the program.

“The people in my course are just so toxic and competitive!”

She said that while in the hospital, recuperating from unexplained back pains, she had been bombarded with text messages by insensitive classmates about work that was due that week. The poor girl was still hooked to an intravenous drip while surfing for answers on her iPad using her other hand.

When I visited her that day, I shook my head and asked her, “And you guys want to be health-care providers?” Slowly she began to see the irony of her situation.

According to healthline.com, Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) was the term coined by Dr. Robert Adler (1975), director of the division of behavioral and psychosocial medicine at New York’s University of Rochester, to explain the link between what we think (our state of mind) and our health and our ability to heal ourselves.

PNI is a relatively recent branch of science that enforces beliefs that physicians have held for many centuries, perhaps well before the ancient Greeks. The premise is that a patient’s mental state influences diseases and healing. Specifically, PNI studies the connection between the brain and the immune system.

Many PNI studies have focused on how stress, hostility and depression impact the immune system. Many conditions such as heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, ulcerative disease, delayed wound healing and premature aging, are related to stress and negative emotions.

The mind is certainly a powerful thing and emotions can wreak havoc on one’s psyche and body. Thus, the unexplained migraine headaches and backaches, the palpitations or asthma attacks that are found to have no physiological reasons, are often indicators that there is something amiss deep within and the body is speaking, sometimes softly at first.

When several attempts to get the message across remain unheeded, the body finally caves in and a trip to the emergency room or a hospital confinement is warranted.

The website lifepositive.com cites a study that found out that “susceptibility to influenza, for instance, is higher in families that are rigid and chaotic than in balanced families. Psychologists have found that people could be trained to improve their resistance to disease by recognizing the mind-body link in disease and learning how to deal more effectively with emotionally challenging events. In such cases, what is important is the extent to which you can bring change in yourself by recognizing and altering the patterns of behavior that characterize you.”

Meditation, prayer help

Meditation, yoga, prayer or quiet time, exercise and journaling have all been found to be helpful in managing stress and in keeping the immune system healthy. Stress is a given, and some degree or amount of it is healthy.

It becomes problematic or harmful when it becomes a constant in one’s life—either through people, situations or relationships.

Learning to set your boundaries, tuning out the negative energy and for lack of a better description, building a “force field” to keep the emotional vampires who suck the lifeblood out of you are ways to keep yourself sane and healthy.

The bottom line is that you’ve got to be peaceful and happy to stay healthy. Throw the stress out the window or take yourself out of the negative situation. Stress is often the result of wanting to control things or being fixated on a particular outcome.

If you can’t, find a way to manage the toxic energy, be self-aware, know your limits, do what you must and surrender the rest. Work on what brings you bliss, and the healthy part will simply be a natural by-product of choosing joy each and every day.

Published in "Roots and Wings" in the Lifestyle section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 
6 February 2011