Super Brain (26 page)

It’s now generally accepted that psychological factors contribute to the risk of developing heart disease. The list of factors includes

Depression

Anxiety

Personality traits

Type A behavior

Hostility

Social isolation

Chronic stress

Acute stress

Your heart participates in mental distress and can react with clogged arteries—an amazing finding compared with what was medically acceptable several decades ago. Instead of focusing merely
on disease prevention, health experts began to speak of something more positive, far-reaching, and holistic: well-being. The brain became the centerpiece of a chemical symphony orchestra with hundreds of billions of cells joining in, and when they were in total harmony, the result was increased well-being; meanwhile chemical disharmony led to higher risk for disease, early aging, depression, and decreased immune function, as well as all the lifestyle disorders—the list keeps growing beyond heart attacks and strokes to include obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and probably many if not most cancers.

We want to follow the implications of this new trend as far as they will take us. We fully endorse Siegel’s concept of a healthy mind leading to a healthy brain. A mind that reaches for higher consciousness brings even more benefits, especially in terms of happiness. When you use the guidelines for inner and outer work, you are providing your brain with the right nutrients.

Yet happiness will still be elusive. Nutrients do not create meaning. They don’t define a vision or set a long-range goal. Those are your tasks as a reality maker. You have another frontier to cross before you reach the most desirable thing of all, a personal paradise that no one can ever take away from you.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
SELF-HEALING

By now, as was not the case two decades ago, the mind-body connection has been proved over and over. It is an established fact, and yet moving to the next step—using the mind to heal the body—remains elusive and controversial. No single practice ensures results—we have no mind-body equivalent to a magic bullet. Even though spontaneous remissions have been observed in almost every form of cancer, and even though some of the deadliest malignancies like melanoma have the highest rates of spontaneous cures, the phenomenon is rare (estimated by some surveys at fewer than twenty-five cases per year in the United States, although there is widespread doubt over any such measurement).

Self-healing has nothing to do with seeking a miracle cure or trying to be that one patient in ten thousand who recovers, to their doctor’s amazement. Healing is as natural as breathing, and therefore the key to healing is a lifestyle that optimizes what the body is already doing.

A HEALING LIFESTYLE

Practice the recommended amount of moderate healthy exercise.

Keep your weight down.

Reduce your stress.

Attend to psychological issues like depression and anxiety.

Get adequate sleep.

Don’t worry about vitamin and mineral supplements if your diet is healthily balanced (unless you have a condition like anemia or osteoporosis, where a doctor may advise a specific supplement).

Avoid toxic substances like alcohol and nicotine.

Reduce animal fats in your diet.

Strengthen the mind-body connection.

These guidelines all sound familiar, but that doesn’t reduce their effectiveness. The best healing is prevention; there is no getting around it. But the last item on the list—strengthening the mind-body connection—may be the most powerful, and for most people it’s new territory. We’ve covered the mind platter of daily activity that benefits the brain. Here we’d like to enter the more elusive matter of healing through the mind-body connection.

Being Your Own Placebo

The most studied technique of mind-body healing has been the placebo effect.
Placebo
is Latin for “I shall please.” It’s a good way of describing how the placebo effect works. A doctor offers a patient a powerful drug, with the assurance that it will relieve the patient’s symptoms, and the patient, as promised, gets relief. But in reality the doctor has prescribed a harmless, inert sugar pill. (The effect isn’t limited to drugs, which is important to remember: anything you believe in can act as a placebo.) Where did the patient’s relief come from? It came from the mind telling the body to get well. To do that, the mind must first be convinced that healing is about to occur.

The big problem with the placebo effect, which is known to operate in 30 percent of cases on average, is that the first step is deception. The doctor misleads the patient, which has proven to be a
serious ethical roadblock. No ethical physician would regularly deny the best care to a patient, offering instead innocuous substitutes, even though in some cases (such as mild to moderate depression) studies show that drugs are likely to be no more effective than a placebo. This means, by the way, that many drugs share the unpredictability of the placebo effect. The notion that pharmaceuticals act the same way for all patients is a myth. The placebo effect, contrary to widespread suspicion, is a “real” cure. Pain is diminished; symptoms are alleviated.

Now let’s ask the most important question: Can you be your own placebo without using deception? If you give yourself a sugar pill, you know in advance that it offers no relief. Is that the end of it? By no means. Self-healing through the placebo effect depends upon freeing your mind from doubts—without deceiving yourself. People need to know more about the mind-body connection, not less.

Being your own placebo is the same as freeing up the healing system through messages from the brain. All healing is, in the end, self-healing. Physicians aid the body’s intricate healing system (which coordinates immune cells, inflammation, hormones, genes, and much else), but actual healing takes place in an unknown way.

When it comes to the mind-body connection, healing should involve the following basic conditions:

The mind is contributing to getting well.

The mind doesn’t contribute to getting sick.

The body is in constant communication with the mind.

This communication benefits both the physical and mental aspects of being well.

Once the person receives treatment that he trusts, he lets go and allows the healing response to proceed naturally.

When the placebo effect works, all five aspects are involved. The patient’s mind cooperates with the treatment and trusts it. The body
is aware of this trust. There is open communication, and as a result, cells throughout the body participate in a healing response. The healing system as a whole is incredibly complex and all but impossible to explain as a whole. We only know how parts of it operate, such as antibodies and the immune response to infection.

How can we bring about these five conditions consciously? At the very least, we shouldn’t be fighting them with fear, doubt, skepticism, hopelessness, and despair. Those states convey their own chemical messages to the body. When you believe that a sugar pill is going to cure you, those healing messages will begin to have an effect. But we cannot say that the 30 percent who benefit from the placebo effect are doing something right while the remaining 70 percent aren’t. Everyone’s medical history is different; the healing system remains too murky to be accurately measured. Deep negative feelings, if they are blocking the placebo effect (by no means a certainty), are complex and frequently unconscious, so the difference here isn’t simple.

The greatest promise lies in the fact that a mental intention of “I shall please” is known to work. Being your own placebo requires applying the same conditions as in a classic placebo response:

1. You trust what is happening.

2. You deal with doubt and fear.

3. You don’t send conflicting messages that get tangled with each other.

4. You have opened the channels of mind-body communication.

5. You let go of your intention and allow the healing system to do its work.

When a symptom is minor, such as a cut finger or a bruise, everyone finds it easy to let go and stop interfering. The mind doesn’t intrude with doubts and fears. But in serious illness, doubts and fears play a marked role, which is why a practice like meditation or going
to group counseling has been shown to help. Sharing your anxiety with others in the same predicament is one way to begin to clear it.

It’s also helpful to follow your healthiest instincts. Many of us deal with illness through misleading processes like wishful thinking and denial. Our fears lead us into blind alleys of false hope. In such cases, the mind isn’t really alert to what the body is saying, and vice versa. The atmosphere is clouded. To trust what your body is telling you requires experience. You need a certain amount of mind-body training, and that takes time. It’s well documented, for example, that a positive lifestyle, which includes exercise, diet, and meditation, reduces heart disease. The combination allows the body to reduce the plaque that blocks coronary arteries. But the improvement doesn’t happen overnight. It requires patience, diligence, and time.

This is the opposite of receiving a diagnosis of cancer, panicking, and running desperately after any possible cure. Becoming an instant convert to prayer or meditation under the duress of disease is almost always futile. Fear becomes worse when you are seriously ill, yet dealing with anxiety is far more effective if you attend to it years before you ever get sick. The mind-body connection has to be strengthened before trouble arrives.

The very important task of becoming aware of your body doesn’t have to be boring. You mostly need mind and body to make friends again, to go back to their natural alliance. One way to do so is to sit quietly with your eyes closed and simply feel the body.

Let any sensation come to the surface. Don’t react to the sensation, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Just relax and be aware of it. Notice where the sensation is coming from. You won’t have only one sensation or feeling. You will find that your awareness goes from place to place, one moment noticing your foot or your stomach, your chest or your neck.

This simple exercise is a mind-body reconnection. Too many people are in the habit of paying attention to only the most gross signals from their bodies, such as acute pain, stiffness, nausea, and
other hard-to-ignore discomforts. What you want to do is to increase your sensitivity and your trust at the same time. Your body knows at a subtle level where disease and discomfort are. It sends signals at every moment, and such signals are not to be feared.

Even if you consciously ignore what is happening in your cells, just below your awareness unconscious information is being exchanged. When the federal government recently decided that annual mammograms are not necessary for younger women, one consideration was that 22 percent of small breast tumors resolved themselves, disappearing spontaneously. So an automatic reaction of fear, even in the face of possible cancer, is unrealistic at the level of the healing system. Your immune system eliminates thousands of abnormal cells every day. Everyone has tumor-suppressing genes, although how they can be triggered is as yet unknown.

The future of self-healing will unfold from the proven fact that every cell in the body knows, through chemical messengers, what every other cell is doing. Bringing your conscious mind into the loop adds to this communication. Advanced yogis can alter their involuntary responses at will, such as lowering their heart rate and breathing to very low levels, or increasing skin temperature in a very precise way. You and I have the same abilities, although we don’t consciously use them. You can follow an exercise to make a spot on the palm of your hand grow warmer, and it will happen, even though you never used that ability before.

We can venture that the placebo effect falls into the same category. It’s a voluntary response that we could use if only we learned how to. The healing system seems to be involuntary. You don’t have to think in order to heal a cut or a bruise. But the fact that some patients can make their own pain go away when given a sugar pill implies, very strongly, that intention makes a difference in healing. We aren’t talking about positive thinking, which is often too superficial and masks underlying negativity. Instead, we are encouraging a lifestyle that bonds a deeper mind-body connection.

Note: The brain’s connection to the placebo effect is crucial but has only recently been studied in depth. Because a book is a public discussion read by all kinds of people with all kinds of health issues, let us be clear. We are not advising anyone to stop conventional medical treatment or to reject medical help. The placebo effect remains mysterious, and this section is simply exploring that mystery, not giving you a how-to for miracle self-cures.

PART 3
MYSTERY
AND
PROMISE

THE
ANTI-AGING BRAIN

T
o unlock any new promise that super brain holds, we must first solve an old mystery. No mystery is older—or greater—than aging. Until very recently, only magical elixirs, potions, or the fountain of youth were possible escapes from the ravages of age. Resorting to magic shows how baffled the mind was. Growing old is universal, with reprieve for no one, and yet medically speaking, no one ever dies of old age. Death occurs when at least one key system of the body breaks down, and then the rest of the body goes with it. The respiratory system is almost always involved; the immediate cause of death for most of us will be that we have stopped breathing. But a person can just as effectively die of heart or kidney failure. Meanwhile, virtually all of the genetic material in the body may be viable at the moment when the key system fails.