Items related to Heal Yourself!: How to Harness Placebo Power
Doctors think they heal with drugs. But only living cells can heal. When something is out of balance, your cells move to correct it because bodies want to be well. HEAL YOURSELF! HOW TO HARNESS PLACEBO POWER shows how to tap into this mysterious process to get well and stay well by harnessing your body's natural healing power—the power of placebo.
These amazing effects are not just "in the mind." They can be observed and measured in the body's physiology. When patients believe in the treatment, ulcers heal, warts disappear, cancer goes into remission, swelling reduces—cells actually look different under the microscope. When your doctor believes in the treatment, the impact is even more powerful —not in every case, of course. But in enough that science now accepts that something is going on!
HEAL YOURSELF! explains how researchers believe that the stress response creates an environment that promotes physiological breakdown, while the relaxation Response creates a healing environment. HEAL YOURSELF! offers specific things you can do, and do today, to turn on your body's innate healing mechanisms, including meditation, prayer, laughter, listening to music and rocking, Qi Gong, gratitude and forgiveness, and more.
These amazing effects are not just "in the mind." They can be observed and measured in the body's physiology. When patients believe in the treatment, ulcers heal, warts disappear, cancer goes into remission, swelling reduces—cells actually look different under the microscope. When your doctor believes in the treatment, the impact is even more powerful —not in every case, of course. But in enough that science now accepts that something is going on!
HEAL YOURSELF! explains how researchers believe that the stress response creates an environment that promotes physiological breakdown, while the relaxation Response creates a healing environment. HEAL YOURSELF! offers specific things you can do, and do today, to turn on your body's innate healing mechanisms, including meditation, prayer, laughter, listening to music and rocking, Qi Gong, gratitude and forgiveness, and more.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Beverly A. Potter, Ph.D.,is an author of numerous self-help books on self motivating, maverick career strategies, mediating conflict, health issues including Overcoming Job Burnout and The Worrywarts Companion. Docpotter earned her doctorate in counseling psychology from Stanford University and her masters in vocational rehabilitation counseling from San Francisco State University. Her offices are in Oakland, CA.
Mark J. Estren, Ph.D., is a nationally known science and medical journalist. A contributor to The Washington Post, he lives in Ft Myers, FL.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Mark J. Estren, Ph.D., is a nationally known science and medical journalist. A contributor to The Washington Post, he lives in Ft Myers, FL.
From Chapter 18: Build Support
You are a social being we all are. Just as the trillions of cells in our bodies operate individually and collectively to form the hive organism that each of us is, so the billions of people on Earth function as individuals but are also part of the collective of humanity. To some people, this is a religious, spiritual or New Age revelation: we are all connected. To some, it is a moral imperative, as in John Donne’s famous words in Meditation 17:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
For our health, for our ability to harness the placebo effect to stay well or return to wellness, what matters in social interconnectedness is that we surround ourselves with people who will add to our health rather than detract from it. We understand this intuitively when we speak of, say, a toxic” co-worker as someone to be avoided, or a perpetual complainer as bringing everyone down.”
One of the things we can do consciously to send messages into our non-conscious mind about the importance of maintaining and reinforcing health is to surround ourselves with people who have similar goals.
We humans are tribal animals. Our brains are not fully developed at birth they, and our bodies, need protection to develop and grow, and this interdependence continues throughout life. Herd animals and animals that live in packs are similar: they need each other to survive and thrive. Whales isolated from their pods tend to die young; wolves isolated from their pack lone wolves are ostracized, left to fend for themselves and usually do not survive for long.
Health Benefits of Friends
Having close friends and family has far-reaching benefits for your health. A strong social support network can be critical to help you through the stress of tough times, whether you’ve had a bad day at work or a year filled with loss or chronic illness. Since your supportive family, friends, and co-workers are such an important part of your life, it’s never too soon to cultivate these important relationships.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that having a network of supportive relationships contributes to psychological well-being. When you have a social support network, you benefit in the following ways:
Sense of belonging. Spending time with people helps ward off loneliness. Whether it’s other dog lovers, fishing buddies or neighbors, knowing you’re not alone can go a long way toward coping with stress.
Increased sense of self-worth. Having people who call you a friend reinforces the idea that you’re a good person to be around. You are valued.
Feeling of security. Your social network gives you access to information, advice, guidance and other types of assistance. It’s comforting to know that you have people you can turn to in a time of need.
People who give off positive vibes” where health is concerned tend to make you feel positive, too while spending time around people with a negative outlook pushes you in the opposite direction. So to persuade” your bodies to stay healthy and heal yourself if something does happen to disturb our homeostasis, it makes sense to surround yourself with people whose outlook on life and health is as positive as yours.
From Chapter 19: Pray
One reason the medical establishment is uncomfortable with the placebo effect is that it works best when people believe it will work and that gets into the thorny issue of belief itself, and thus of religion. This is not an area in which doctors are comfortable or one into which they wish to intrude. But an understanding of religion or, more broadly, spirituality is important to help engage the health-tropic nature of your body’s cells.
Illness is not a punishment from God, but if you are ill and looking for ways to help your body heal itself and if you are devout then you may look to God for help in recovery. The appeal to something outside ourselves is an excellent focusing mechanism and can be a very effective way of helping our bodies get better and stay well. There is even evidence that prayer can benefit people who are not themselves praying. That is, if you and others pray for the recovery of someone else, that increases that person’s chance of getting well. No, there is no absolute scientific proof of this, and skeptics will come up with reasons that it cannot be so, but in some studies, group prayer does seem to have helped to heal people who are distant from those doing the praying.
Prayer is a way of marshaling the body’s innate wellness ability. Whether you believe that you reach out through prayer and touch God, or are touched by God, or that angels visit you and enfold you in their wings, or that something else something unique to you takes place, what matters is that prayer provides a focus point on something beyond your body and, if you are ill, beyond the illness. Many people talk about faith healing” with a sneer, and that is the same sneer they reserve for the placebo effect of which faith healing is one aspect.
But the placebo effect is real, and so, for some people under some circumstances, is faith healing. All of us have the power to optimize the body’s chances of maintaining and recovering wellness on its own by changing our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings from negative to positive which means, to the best of our ability, getting rid of hatred, resentment and anger, and choosing instead to fill our minds with relaxation, love and spiritual connection. This is what prayer does.
And sometimes prayer takes on aspects of the relaxation response, a form of mind/body connection in which we separate ourselves from everyday cares and pressures and allow them to flow through us harmlessly while we get in touch with our inner selves and withdraw temporarily from the world so we can re-center and heal. If this sounds exactly like prayer to you, that makes sense, since in many ways it does resemble what happens when we pray.
Indeed, certain prayers call for almost exactly the same sort of inward not outward focus. The Catholic Rosary is a prime example. The Congregation for Divine Worship’s directory of popular piety and the liturgy emphasizes the meditative aspects of the Rosary, calling it a contemplative prayer that requires tranquility of rhythm or even a mental lingering which encourages the faithful to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life.” And the structure of the Rosary itself makes contemplation all the easier. The sequence of prayers is the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary ten times, and the Glory Be to the Father sometimes followed by the Fatima Prayer. Each sequence is known as a decade, and five decades are prayed after starting with the Apostle’s Creed and five initial prayers.
The Rosary involves repetition, which works much the same way that repetition of a word or sound does in eliciting the relaxation response. And there is a repetitious tactile element to the Rosary as well, with those who pray the Rosary holding each bead and repeating what is, in effect, a mantra. Catholicism requires that prating the Rosary be done in a very specific way, using very specific words, and to non-Catholics or nonbelievers in general, this may seem like a series of restrictions and strictures. But it has a purpose: to focus the mind and bring it into a state of inwardness and contemplation.
When the prayer is said repetitively in your mind, worries are blocked out. In fact, the praying of each decade is accompanied by meditation on one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, which recall the life of Jesus there are currently twenty of them. So the idea is to use the repetitiveness of Rosary prayers to produce a sense of meditativeness that can be focused on Jesus. This is directly analogous to using repetitive sounds or phrases in order to produce a meditative state that can produce inward focus designed to maintain or improve health.
The reason prayer, meditation, the relaxation response and other forms of focus help elicit the placebo effect is that placebo activation is not a matter of the conscious mind. You cannot think yourself well,” because the process does not use the conscious mind. Cells know how to heal themselves, but must be given the opportunity. The brain may use only 40 watts of electricity, but it does a huge amount with a small helping of power, and this is electric power intertwined with chemical signals that tell cells what to do and help the cells figure out what is going on around them so they can support or counter it.
From Chapter 20: Laugh Often
Practice Laughing
As we have seen, when you smile you send a message to your emotional brain that there must be something funny happening. This primes the pump, so to speak. Remember the old saying, smile and the whole world smiles with you”? When you smile you raise your spirits and those of people around you. When you smile you worry less. Things don’t seem as catastrophic. To a certain degree, you can actually generate positive feelings simply by the act of smiling.
Smile Exercise
Assume a comfortable sitting position. Count to three and, on three, take a deep breath, quickly stand up and smile the biggest smile that you can smile. Make sure that your teeth show. Sit back down and repeat the exercise several times. The fun of this exercise can be increased by doing it regularly with your family or co-workers at the office. When you feel tension coming on, take a deep breath, stand up, and smile broadly several times.
Develop a Joy List
A disciplined joy in living is a humor skill that allows those who possess it to draw strength from circumstances that would defeat other people. You can choose the way you look at things. You can look at the glass of water and complain that it is half empty. Or you can choose to look at things as challenges and opportunities. You can rejoice that the glass is still half full.
The key here is disciplined joy in living. Discipline has many meanings, among which is to bring to order and obedience by training and control. It won’t happen spontaneously; you must train your mind. The joy list is a helpful tool - a list of activities and situations that bring you joy.
Tragically many people can think of only a few joyful things. Their lives have become so serious, dominated by responsibilities and worries, that they’ve lost their sense of joy.
A Joy List is a great tool to help rediscover your joy. Use the notebook to compile a list of joyful things. Joy is an emotion of delight and happiness caused by something good or satisfying. It is a source of pleasure. Note in your pad anything that makes you smile, laugh or feel good. Joyous activities might include taking your dog to the local dog park for an off-leash run with dog friends, browsing dusty books in an antiquarian bookstore, going to a drive-in movie with your spouse, calling a friend on the phone, or surfing the Internet and finding a new, exciting Web site. Possibilities are endless.
Joyous activities are moments of delight that leave you feeling good, feeling alive. Especially important are the small things, the brief moments of joy. The refreshing feeling of a breeze on your cheek on a hot summer day, the aroma of your favorite pot roast cooking for dinner are small things that add to your Joy List. Then schedule joyful activities onto your calendar especially on weekends.
Remember that you can choose to feel happy and joyful or you can choose to sit around.
You are a social being we all are. Just as the trillions of cells in our bodies operate individually and collectively to form the hive organism that each of us is, so the billions of people on Earth function as individuals but are also part of the collective of humanity. To some people, this is a religious, spiritual or New Age revelation: we are all connected. To some, it is a moral imperative, as in John Donne’s famous words in Meditation 17:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
For our health, for our ability to harness the placebo effect to stay well or return to wellness, what matters in social interconnectedness is that we surround ourselves with people who will add to our health rather than detract from it. We understand this intuitively when we speak of, say, a toxic” co-worker as someone to be avoided, or a perpetual complainer as bringing everyone down.”
One of the things we can do consciously to send messages into our non-conscious mind about the importance of maintaining and reinforcing health is to surround ourselves with people who have similar goals.
We humans are tribal animals. Our brains are not fully developed at birth they, and our bodies, need protection to develop and grow, and this interdependence continues throughout life. Herd animals and animals that live in packs are similar: they need each other to survive and thrive. Whales isolated from their pods tend to die young; wolves isolated from their pack lone wolves are ostracized, left to fend for themselves and usually do not survive for long.
Health Benefits of Friends
Having close friends and family has far-reaching benefits for your health. A strong social support network can be critical to help you through the stress of tough times, whether you’ve had a bad day at work or a year filled with loss or chronic illness. Since your supportive family, friends, and co-workers are such an important part of your life, it’s never too soon to cultivate these important relationships.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that having a network of supportive relationships contributes to psychological well-being. When you have a social support network, you benefit in the following ways:
Sense of belonging. Spending time with people helps ward off loneliness. Whether it’s other dog lovers, fishing buddies or neighbors, knowing you’re not alone can go a long way toward coping with stress.
Increased sense of self-worth. Having people who call you a friend reinforces the idea that you’re a good person to be around. You are valued.
Feeling of security. Your social network gives you access to information, advice, guidance and other types of assistance. It’s comforting to know that you have people you can turn to in a time of need.
People who give off positive vibes” where health is concerned tend to make you feel positive, too while spending time around people with a negative outlook pushes you in the opposite direction. So to persuade” your bodies to stay healthy and heal yourself if something does happen to disturb our homeostasis, it makes sense to surround yourself with people whose outlook on life and health is as positive as yours.
From Chapter 19: Pray
One reason the medical establishment is uncomfortable with the placebo effect is that it works best when people believe it will work and that gets into the thorny issue of belief itself, and thus of religion. This is not an area in which doctors are comfortable or one into which they wish to intrude. But an understanding of religion or, more broadly, spirituality is important to help engage the health-tropic nature of your body’s cells.
Illness is not a punishment from God, but if you are ill and looking for ways to help your body heal itself and if you are devout then you may look to God for help in recovery. The appeal to something outside ourselves is an excellent focusing mechanism and can be a very effective way of helping our bodies get better and stay well. There is even evidence that prayer can benefit people who are not themselves praying. That is, if you and others pray for the recovery of someone else, that increases that person’s chance of getting well. No, there is no absolute scientific proof of this, and skeptics will come up with reasons that it cannot be so, but in some studies, group prayer does seem to have helped to heal people who are distant from those doing the praying.
Prayer is a way of marshaling the body’s innate wellness ability. Whether you believe that you reach out through prayer and touch God, or are touched by God, or that angels visit you and enfold you in their wings, or that something else something unique to you takes place, what matters is that prayer provides a focus point on something beyond your body and, if you are ill, beyond the illness. Many people talk about faith healing” with a sneer, and that is the same sneer they reserve for the placebo effect of which faith healing is one aspect.
But the placebo effect is real, and so, for some people under some circumstances, is faith healing. All of us have the power to optimize the body’s chances of maintaining and recovering wellness on its own by changing our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings from negative to positive which means, to the best of our ability, getting rid of hatred, resentment and anger, and choosing instead to fill our minds with relaxation, love and spiritual connection. This is what prayer does.
And sometimes prayer takes on aspects of the relaxation response, a form of mind/body connection in which we separate ourselves from everyday cares and pressures and allow them to flow through us harmlessly while we get in touch with our inner selves and withdraw temporarily from the world so we can re-center and heal. If this sounds exactly like prayer to you, that makes sense, since in many ways it does resemble what happens when we pray.
Indeed, certain prayers call for almost exactly the same sort of inward not outward focus. The Catholic Rosary is a prime example. The Congregation for Divine Worship’s directory of popular piety and the liturgy emphasizes the meditative aspects of the Rosary, calling it a contemplative prayer that requires tranquility of rhythm or even a mental lingering which encourages the faithful to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life.” And the structure of the Rosary itself makes contemplation all the easier. The sequence of prayers is the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary ten times, and the Glory Be to the Father sometimes followed by the Fatima Prayer. Each sequence is known as a decade, and five decades are prayed after starting with the Apostle’s Creed and five initial prayers.
The Rosary involves repetition, which works much the same way that repetition of a word or sound does in eliciting the relaxation response. And there is a repetitious tactile element to the Rosary as well, with those who pray the Rosary holding each bead and repeating what is, in effect, a mantra. Catholicism requires that prating the Rosary be done in a very specific way, using very specific words, and to non-Catholics or nonbelievers in general, this may seem like a series of restrictions and strictures. But it has a purpose: to focus the mind and bring it into a state of inwardness and contemplation.
When the prayer is said repetitively in your mind, worries are blocked out. In fact, the praying of each decade is accompanied by meditation on one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, which recall the life of Jesus there are currently twenty of them. So the idea is to use the repetitiveness of Rosary prayers to produce a sense of meditativeness that can be focused on Jesus. This is directly analogous to using repetitive sounds or phrases in order to produce a meditative state that can produce inward focus designed to maintain or improve health.
The reason prayer, meditation, the relaxation response and other forms of focus help elicit the placebo effect is that placebo activation is not a matter of the conscious mind. You cannot think yourself well,” because the process does not use the conscious mind. Cells know how to heal themselves, but must be given the opportunity. The brain may use only 40 watts of electricity, but it does a huge amount with a small helping of power, and this is electric power intertwined with chemical signals that tell cells what to do and help the cells figure out what is going on around them so they can support or counter it.
From Chapter 20: Laugh Often
Practice Laughing
As we have seen, when you smile you send a message to your emotional brain that there must be something funny happening. This primes the pump, so to speak. Remember the old saying, smile and the whole world smiles with you”? When you smile you raise your spirits and those of people around you. When you smile you worry less. Things don’t seem as catastrophic. To a certain degree, you can actually generate positive feelings simply by the act of smiling.
Smile Exercise
Assume a comfortable sitting position. Count to three and, on three, take a deep breath, quickly stand up and smile the biggest smile that you can smile. Make sure that your teeth show. Sit back down and repeat the exercise several times. The fun of this exercise can be increased by doing it regularly with your family or co-workers at the office. When you feel tension coming on, take a deep breath, stand up, and smile broadly several times.
Develop a Joy List
A disciplined joy in living is a humor skill that allows those who possess it to draw strength from circumstances that would defeat other people. You can choose the way you look at things. You can look at the glass of water and complain that it is half empty. Or you can choose to look at things as challenges and opportunities. You can rejoice that the glass is still half full.
The key here is disciplined joy in living. Discipline has many meanings, among which is to bring to order and obedience by training and control. It won’t happen spontaneously; you must train your mind. The joy list is a helpful tool - a list of activities and situations that bring you joy.
Tragically many people can think of only a few joyful things. Their lives have become so serious, dominated by responsibilities and worries, that they’ve lost their sense of joy.
A Joy List is a great tool to help rediscover your joy. Use the notebook to compile a list of joyful things. Joy is an emotion of delight and happiness caused by something good or satisfying. It is a source of pleasure. Note in your pad anything that makes you smile, laugh or feel good. Joyous activities might include taking your dog to the local dog park for an off-leash run with dog friends, browsing dusty books in an antiquarian bookstore, going to a drive-in movie with your spouse, calling a friend on the phone, or surfing the Internet and finding a new, exciting Web site. Possibilities are endless.
Joyous activities are moments of delight that leave you feeling good, feeling alive. Especially important are the small things, the brief moments of joy. The refreshing feeling of a breeze on your cheek on a hot summer day, the aroma of your favorite pot roast cooking for dinner are small things that add to your Joy List. Then schedule joyful activities onto your calendar especially on weekends.
Remember that you can choose to feel happy and joyful or you can choose to sit around.
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