What Is Mind-Body Medicine?

This is mind-body medicine in a nutshell.

Every aspect of who we are and what we create is a direct result of what we have thought and created in our minds.

When I finally figured that out, I was able to take responsibility for everything I was creating, consciously and unconsciously, in my life.

Learning how my mind and body are connected has been an invaluable awakening of how:

• my thoughts and feelings influence me physically,
• my food impacts my mood,
• my stress weakens my health, and
• how all the intricately connected parts of me are communicating with each other every millisecond of the day to keep me in a state of wellbeing and balance.

If only our generation, and those before us, were taught this empowering knowledge in schools, so many of our friends, family and colleagues would be saved from stress-related illness and disease anxiety, hypertension, heart disease and cancer.

It’s a major reason why I’m so passionate about helping my students understand their own mind and bodies to create transformation from the inside out in how they show up and handle their every day stress.

I’m excited when I read new studies proving the effectiveness of mind-body medicine and relaxation techniques. It gives me hope that more medical professionals and health practitioners might seek to understand the benefits of simple self-empowered therapies like meditation, mindfulness, breathing and relaxation exercises.

One such study was conducted between 2006 and 2014 at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) that scientifically proved relaxation-response techniques such as meditation, yoga and prayer could reduce the need for health care services by 43 percent!

The study, based at MGH’s Institute for Technology Assessment and the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) for Mind Body Medicine, found that individuals in the relaxation-response program used fewer health care services in the year after their participation than in the preceding year. The program combined elicitation of the relaxation response with social support, cognitive-skills training, and positive psychology designed to build resiliency.

Studies like this one have a huge potential to reduce not only the extreme pressure on the healthcare system, but also improve the personal wellbeing of each individual who can learn and apply these simple techniques into their daily lives.

Previous studies have shown that inducing the relaxation response — a physiologic state of deep rest — not only relieves stress and anxiety and improve sleep, but also affects physiologic factors such as blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen consumption.

The paper’s authors noted that stress-related illnesses, such as anxiety and depression, are the third-highest causes of health expenditures in the United States after heart disease and cancer (which also are affected by stress). Australia is fast catching up.

The relaxation response was first described more than 40 years ago by Harvard Medical School Professor Herbert Benson, author of the much loved The Relaxation Response and The Wellness Book, amongst many others.

By gradually incorporating mind-body relaxation techniques to elicit the relaxation response, you can retrain your brain and nervous system to effectively counter the effects of your dominant stress response and relieve the burden on your bodymind.

Even just 10 minutes of consistent quiet breathing, observation and reflection a day, can over time produce a greater ability to restore homeostasis, build resilience, and create a more peaceful and positive mind.

Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.