How your emotions affect your health – that’s the mind-body connection. The relationship between the mind and the body has been an important subject in psychology and alternative medicine.
It acknowledges that our mental and physical well-being are connected. Stress on the mind triggers adverse reactions in the body, and vice versa. And the best part is that you have some control over how things react around you. To understand mind-connection better, and learn how you can use this concept to your advantage, here are a couple of things you probably already didn’t know.
1. Your Body Responds to Your Thoughts
Your body indeed responds to the way you feel, act and think. This is in practice what’s referred to as the mind-body connection. Whenever you feel upset, anxious, or stressed, your body is trying to tell you that something is not right. For instance, blood pressure and stomach ulcers might develop after a highly stressful event, such as the loss of a loved one. When your emotional health is out of balance, you may suffer from sexual problems, sweating, stiff neck, palpitations (racing heart), general aches, extreme tiredness, back pain, change in appetite, constipation, chest pain, weight loss, etc. Poor emotional health also weakens your body’s immune system, so you’ll be more susceptible to colds and other infections.
2. You Can Make Yourself Well
According to studies, you can make yourself better just as much as you can ruin your health. How you handle stress directly correlates to how you can deal with a serious illness, including cancer. Have it mind that chronic stress weighs your body down in a very bad way. So the better you’re able to cope with stress and manage to stay calm, the higher the chances that you’ll be able to reduce physical stress as well as eliminate chances of catching a disease.
3. Food Affects Your Body & Health
Food is important to the mind-body connection. As goes the popular truism, you are what you eat. Every single liquid or morsel that goes in through your mouth has some form of effect on your brain. Your nutritional intake has both negative and positive ramifications on how you feel. When levels of a chemical substance called serotine are high, you become happier. And when they are low, you tend to become depressed.
Too much carbs and sugar decrease levels of serotonin in your body, which in turn leads to bad moods, and sometimes even culminates in obesity. To be able to balance serotonin, it helps to eat protein, especially before you take in carbs.
4. Regular Sleep is Important
Other than food and exercise, sleep is also highly important to the mind-body connection. It has a massive role in maintaining a healthy dose of serotonin in the body. The primary action of serotonin is to sedate, thus is closely related to how energy is expended. Without enough sleep, your brain is negatively impacted, which messes up its response to serotonin. So in other words, it helps to cultivate a consistent sleeping pattern.
You can improve your emotional health by expressing your feelings in appropriate ways, living a balanced life, developing your resilience, calming your mind and body, and taking care of yourself better. This way, you can contribute greatly to a good mental and thus physical health.