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Can you really think your way to better health?
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I just clicked over to cnn.com to check out the latest breaking health stories, and one article immediately caught my eye—“How some women never get sick.” I quickly skimmed over the piece, and it was the last tip that really made me stop for a moment and smile to myself: Stay positive. The first line after the subhead reads: “At the first sign of sickness, Jenny Spring, 29, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, practices another tactic linked to good health: ‘I tell myself that I refuse to be sick.’”
I have admit: Jenny and I think the same way. It doesn’t happen very often, but as soon as I feel those sickly symptoms coming on (for me it’s a stuffed nose, a scratchy throat, and little aches and pains), my mind goes into overdrive. “I don’t have time to be sick!” I’ll think to myself, and I’ll go about my day doing my best to ignore the symptoms…Okay, truth be told: I will take some practical precautions. For example, I’ll load up on green tea (I’ll go into this wonderful drink in a future posting), take a few extra Vitamin C, and will curl up on the couch with a blanket a little earlier than usual.
But overall I refuse to revolve my day around the fact that I’m feeling under-the-weather. And forget it, I won’t even consider looking at my calendar and contemplating which events I should cancel. That’s because I have no intention of canceling anything.
So does my strategy work? Usually it does. The people in my life refer to me as the person who “never” gets sick, and during those times I do come down with something, my phone will ring at all hours with worried friends and family asking, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Which brings me back to Jenny’s statement: “I tell myself that I refuse to be sick.” According to one study mentioned in the article, participants who had positive outlooks actually produced more antibodies in response to vaccines. A separate study showed that people who made an effort to think positively stimulated a section of the brain, which in turn produced an increased amount of flu antibodies.
The bottom line: While you may not be able to ward off the germs that surround you on the outside, you just may have the brain power to fight these germs from harming you on the inside.
And on that note, I have to think away these sniffles.
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