Feeling Good Is Good for You: How Pleasure Can Boost Your Immune System and Lengthen Your Life

The media love to report how sex, laughter, and other simple pleasures are good for you. And you love to hear it. But is inciting pleasure a legitimate medical prescription for boosting a person's immunity? Can you literally fight off infection with a smile?

Researchers Carl Charnetski and Francis Brennan say yes, and in Feeling Good Is Good for You they present a convincing amount of evidence to support this comforting claim. Drawing on the results from hundreds of studies, including their own extensively publicized findings, the authors explain the science behind the connection between pleasure and the immune system, and suggest fun ways to receive its full benefits.

Feeling Good is Good for You addresses one of the most fundamental questions in medicine: How can we better teach our bodies to protect us from disease? A virtual explosion of information has emerged in recent years about the wide range of factors that can influence health. But some of the most promising research focuses on the role the mind plays in influencing the body. As this book reveals, the power that positive thought, joy, and emotional well-being have over the body's immune system is not only measurable but influential.

Pleasure not only feels good, it does good things to our bodies. It promotes good health and helps protect us against disease. Anyone can boost their immunity by accepting the Immunity-Pleasure Connection. When the payoff is pure pleasure, what's not to like?

Carl J. Charnetski, Ph.D., is a full professor and former chair of the psychology department at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He is a practicing licensed psychologist and is board certified by the American Academy of Pain Management. Dr. Charnetski holds staff privileges at three hospitals and is president and vice president of the boards of directors of two major behavioral health organizations in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He has conducted research in psychoneuroimmunology, the focus of this book, for nearly 20 years.

Francis X. Brennan, Ph.D., is a graduate of St. Joseph's University and the State University of New York at Cortland. He received his Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is currently associate director of the Neurobehavioral Research Laboratory at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in East Orange, New Jersey. He is the principal investigator on a project examining the relationship between cytokines and unexplained illness for the Center of the Study of War-Related Illness in East Orange. He and his wife, Tina, reside in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.