I am wondering, as I often do these days, how we still manage to give any credence to the notion that the mind and body operate independently of each other. Yet this belief is still endemic in the medical world and implicit in the great majority of interactions and exchanges that take place in Western health care systems.
It doesn’t take much by way of introspection to notice the bodily manifestations of emotions. The acceleration of heart rate and shallow breathing that often accompany anxiety or the fall in blood pressure and feeling of collapse that happen when we feel overwhelmed. Many of us have specific physical symptoms – aching shoulders or lower back pain, irritable bowel or migraine that signify stress.
This is hardly surprising given that every emotion, both negative and positive, is experienced through the release of neuropeptides and other neuroendocrine molecules that have widespread physiological effects. If these emotional states are transitory the body can bounce back and all is well. But if we live most of the time, as many of us do, in one or more of these negative states, the effects on the cardiovascular, immune, digestive and musculoskeletal systems start to have more serious health consequences. General practitioners recognise that up to 90% of consultations are stress related. But they still reach for their prescription pads – for the anti-hypertensives or statins or whatever their protocols propose – because they sense that the root cause of the problem is in their patients’ environment and don’t feel well equipped to tackle this.
Study after study has shown that the most potent aspect of the environment, when it comes to stress, is relational. Relationships are both bidirectional and profoundly affected by stress. It is a great deal harder to be sympathetic, patient and kind to someone who is stressed if you yourself are stressed. And stress is infectious – so your stress stresses me. Even social inequalities in all their manifestations of poverty, racism and other aspects of social disdain, are at heart relational. They are a manifestation of the respect (or lack of it) one group of people hold for another group of people.
The solution has to involve getting better informed about stress, about ways to influence our emotional states, and to spend more time in the myriad of delightful positive states, which incidentally are experienced though body-based neuroendocrine phenomena that also happen to be health enhancing. This is at the heart of the wellbeing agenda and has led the positive psychologists to encourage people to spend more time doing things that make them feel good, to savour good moments, to practice gratitude.
In passing, it is worth noting that Microsoft Word’s thesaurus equates ‘wellbeing’ primarily with happiness, pleasure, gladness, joy, delight. Whereas it equates the word ‘wellness’, with which it is often used interchangeably, with health, fitness, strength, vigour. So the emphasis in wellness on physical activity and diet are also well established aspects of the positive health agenda. But this subtle distinction between ‘wellness’ and ‘wellbeing’ suggests that belief in the mind-body split is even infecting the positive health agenda. This is unhelpful because holism is at the heart of wellbeing and wellness. A wellbeing mindset takes into account all the information coming from the body and mind and does not give one precedence over the other. So part of the solution is to pay more attention to this information by, for example, developing greater emotional literacy.
It also involves learning to tap into the information being relayed from the body to the mind moment to moment throughout the day. Another part of the solution is to pay more attention to what is going on in the body. Bodies often get ignored until they hurt or get ill when we get cross with them for letting us down. But bodies have much intelligence to offer us that we ignore. This is why ‘embodiment’ is becoming a ‘thing’ and courses in embodiment are popular. Those of us who are exploring embodiment have started to discover that the information the body provides is more subtle, pervasive and valuable than that provided by cognitive intelligence. Its value, it turns out, extends way beyond individual health, to the wellbeing of others, to the natural world and to the interconnectedness of all things. More on this next time.
