Friday's BOLD LAW is " Your cells eavesdrop on your thoughts " ..Train your cells to be healthy thru gratitude...from KW Coach George Gillas

Subject idea: Psychosomatic? What if you can psych your soma into gratitude and health?

The paradigm that mind and body are separate is shifting. In Aristotle’s time, medicine treated the person along with the symptoms. Modern Western medicine changed that view to believe that what happened in the realm of body (soma) was the purview of physicians while the mind (psych) was the responsibility of psychologists and psychiatrists. Rather than just meaning “mind-body”, psychosomatic gained a reputation as an undesirable state, and held that meaning for many years. Now, more and more physicians agree the mind has a direct impact on the body.

Clemson University reports that medical research estimates as much as 90% of illness and disease is stress related. In the same study, Clemson quotes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, GA as saying, “Eighty-three percent of all deaths for adults between the age of 21 and 65 are related to lifestyle.” Unmanaged stress is increasingly a characteristic of many Americans today.

Science is now legitimizing beliefs held for ages – that the mind and body are one. There is a constant exchange of information in endless feedback loops between what is happening with soma/body and psycho/mind.

When you are happy, so is your immune system. And when you are depressed, your immune system is down also. Have you noticed that people get sick more often when they are down or depressed? Have you noticed that when you are feeling great emotionally, others around you may be sick – and you are not?

Is it the flu virus which makes us sick or is it a depressed, over-stressed immune system which is too weak to fight off the infection which causes the disease state? The science of psycho-neuro-immunology (PNI) is working to research, document, and explain the mysterious connection of mind-body, and how it affects our health.

Psychology Today, Nov-Dec, 2001 reported research by Sheldon Cohen, Ph.D. of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Cohen specializes in how stress affects human health. He and his colleagues surveyed 256 volunteers about stress factors in their lives then infected them with a cold virus. Findings showed that people who suffered long-term stress were twice as likely to come down with a cold. “The longer the stressful event has gone on, the greater the effect it seems to have,” Cohen said.

The article in Psychology Today also reports that researchers in Germany have shown that even short-term stress, such as final exams for college students, can reduce the amount of Immunoglobulin A (sIgA), an immune system chemical that acts as the body’s first line of defense.

What would happen if you consciously worked to create a state that is healthy and supportive of your immune system? How? Easy really… Be in gratitude. Be grateful. This is the season, isn’t it? Find little things like a great cup of coffee… a smile from a child… a beautiful sunny day in the winter… a gentle touch from a loved one… a great glass of wine… It doesn’t have to be something big. Gratitude is gratitude, and the more things that are small and nearly incidental that you can find to be grateful for… the bigger things will come into focus for you.

Build your gratitude muscles starting now because, I think you’ll agree; when you are immersed in gratitude, there is no room, no bandwidth for any negative emotions to be simultaneously present.

Contributed by KCN leader Don Aldrich & KW MAPS NLP Coach George Gillas