It’s NOT all in your mind!
By Karen Crosby (Partly taken from her book The Power of The Positive)
We are all familiar with the scorn and the disbelief that other people can subject us to when it comes to trying to convey the very complicated condition of Fibromyalgia.
If I had a £1 for every time someone openly said to me “its all in your mind” over the past thirty years I would be a millionaire!
However, to gain further understanding we must look at the links between the body and the mind!
The brain and the body are clearly strongly connected with a mixture of hormones, chemicals, and neural pathways using neurotransmitters, and it is how signals get transported between the two to control our functioning like pain sensations, digestion, breathing, movement, feeling and thinking.
If we think of it logically, if we have a hormone imbalance like monthly cycles of women, pregnancy, and medical conditions caused by lack of certain hormones like insulin (diabetes type 1 and 2), these can cause us all kinds of emotional problems like depression, anxiety, anger, crying, etc. In fact cortisol, which is a stress hormone can cause us all kinds of problems when it is switched on for too long owing to long-term stressful events.
Would it to surprise you to find out that the flip side to this is that our thoughts, feelings, attitude and our life beliefs can affect our body functioning positively and negatively, and so our minds really can affect how healthy we are in the body?
One eureka moment I have thought of here, is that if others negate our fibromyalgia as being all in the mind, then their attitude alone can affect us emotionally and therefore make us worse with symptoms!! Food for thought to pass on to disbelievers!
What we do with the physical body and how much we keep it healthy like a good diet and exercise plan, how we maintain our posture and how we treat ourselves in general, also can affect our mental state positively or negatively.
We also need to clarify what the word “mind” means. It does not mean our brain, but our mental states; like emotions and thoughts that define our individuality and is the main definition of “mind”.
Mental states are either conscious (being angry at unfairness), or unconscious (reactions to situations without being aware of why we reacted like that). Each mental state is connected to different physical reactions in the body, like anxiety causing the stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
The way I relate to this is a conversation I had with my sister when we discussed where we feel it in the body if we are really upset, and we both said we feel it in the chest!
As a Yoga teacher, My students and I meditate on how we are feeling using the breath to let go of anything negative in the mind, and any pain or uncomfortable feelings in the body, this is a great way to calm down completely, I also do this with Reiki clients whom are stressed.
Here are some sayings along the same lines we tend to use: -
“Butterflies in the stomach” strangely enough this can be nervousness before an exam, or excitement for a forthcoming event!
“I didn’t have the heart” to do whatever you were going to do but knew it was not the right thing to do, this is the body and mind link saving you from some mistakes.
It is not new to the world to be aware of the mind body connection, indeed until about 300 years ago medicine throughout the world treat the mind and body as a whole, especially in eastern medicines like acupuncture, which has been around for thousands of years.
However, in the 17th century, the Western world began to see the body and the mind as separate, and that the body was looked upon like a machine with different parts with no connection to the mind, and this became the foundation for modern medicine and surgery.
In the 20th century, thankfully, this view began to slowly change over time and research began in earnest to study the mind body connection and the complex links between the two. This is how mind-body practices like Yoga, mindfulness and other types of meditations began to be seen as beneficial, great for me since I teach these philosophies, and they are a way of life for me.
Here is an extract from my book on the subject:
Research is being conducted more and more into the links between the body and the mind and how this relates to our lives.
The body is very sensitive to the emotions in any given situation, but does not only react to what the mind is thinking, but feeds back emotional information to the brain, which in turn adds to our fears and anxieties.
In 1980, psychologists Gary Wells and Richard Petty conducted a pioneering experiment to show the impact of the body on the mind.
Subjects were asked to test sound quality on sets of headphones by listening to music and speed of it played over them.
They were asked to move their heads whilst listening, some nodding, some shaking from side to side and some keeping still.
The group who were nodding (the “yes” gesture of our body) rated the headphones the highest than the shaking heads (the “no” gesture of the body).
This kind of experiment has often been repeated over the years with the same results!
When we are faced with problems in our lives, stressful jobs, illness, relationship breakups and so on, it is natural to try and ignore what is happening by using distractions like alcohol, focussing on other parts of our lives very strongly, like our hobbies, or taking time off. What happens here is simply denial, as we try to “paper over the cracks”.
This may be because we hate to admit we feel vulnerable and even helpless because of fear of what others think of us, fear of what may happen in the future, being out of control of the situation, or simply fear of being alone.
Whatever the reasons we reach a fork on the road where we can either carry on pretending we are fine, or accept that life throws things at us to give us challenge. When this happens something extraordinary can happen!
We can suddenly see that we have options, we can step back and see things more clearly, and we can – most importantly – stop fearing what may happen!
Top Tips for staying calm when something stressful happens
1. Take some slow deep breaths in and out of the nostrils making the breath as slow as possible (do not force out through the mouth as this does not help). Immediate calm can happen if you do this.
2. Try to not get angry and look at the situation as though from outside, this is not easy and takes some practice.
3. Speak calmly and objectively to whomever is there, and involved (for example a minor a car accident).
4. Accept what has happened and look logically at what needs to be done to put things right, like getting the children picked up from school by a trusted family member or friend, taking details of the other party and staying friendly.
5. Walk away for a moment and county to ten slowly incorporating the slow breathing above.
All this may help you see that the body can work with the mind very effectively, and I use this every day to help cope with Fibro symptoms!
Happy pain-free month!