The Mind-Body Loop
Indestructible starts from the foundation that there is constant interplay between body and mind, and true thriving depends on us acknowledging this.
Welcome to the first issue of Indestructible. Thank you for joining, it means the world to me to have you with us.
“To understand is to know what to do” – Wittgenstein
We have acknowledged for some decades now that the brain (or mind) and the body are intimately and mutually connected. Where we have sometimes struggled is knowing how to quantify and describe the relationship accurately and how to apply that to make our own lives better; in other words, knowing what to do.
Clearly, we need both our body and our mind to be working well to feel good and to perform effectively. The body is the vehicle for your ability to function. Yet, at the same time, the mind houses the decision and motivation to function.
Selhub (2007): “In mind-body medicine, the mind and body are not seen as separately functioning entities, but as one functioning unit. The mind and emotions are viewed as influencing the body, as the body, in turn, influences the mind and emotions” (p. 4).
Various studies all indicate a bidirectional effect driven by both top-down and bottom-up factors. Top-down here meaning those which initiate in mental processes in the cerebral cortex, and bottom-up mechanisms are those which begin with sensory receptors. But this itself creates perhaps too stark of a division and over-simplifies the relationships.
Constant interplay between our body and minds is not difficult to notice. We know that when we are stressed our heart pounds, it’s hard to think of something funny to say while we’re in pain, our cheeks flush when someone praises us lavishly, and “nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like unrequited love” (Charles M. Schulz). But in reality, if we watch ourselves objectively, we often behave as though there is no link at all. We stay up late to finish a report or revise for a test, sacrificing valuable sleep which could help us solve these problems more easily, and we indulge in negative thoughts as though our body won’t hear us.
Principle One: How you treat your body affects your mind
Decades of research show that the way we treat our body has an impact on how brain performs. There are various mechanisms through which this operates, such as blood flow, neurochemicals, and habitual connections formed between brain regions.
When we don’t sleep well for example, the brain sends less blood to the prefrontal cortex. This makes it harder for our deliberate system (Daniel Kahneman’s “Slow” thinking) to respond. This means we struggle to be creative, respond constructively to uncertainty, and remain calm. Sleep is also when we embed new memories and encode new learning. Not sleeping is like ending the day by closing your computer without saving your work for the day.
Charles Czeisler, a Harvard professor of sleep medicine: “We now know that a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.1%” Essentially, if you consistently begin your day sleep-deprived, you’re trying to work drunk.
Exercise is another physical activity which has a similarly profound effect on mood and cognition. John Ratey, also at Harvard Medical School, has been a strong advocate for this understanding, such as in his book “Spark”. The Mayo Clinic went through 1,600 papers on exercise and found exercise had a definite positive effect on memory, learning, performance and motivation. A 2014 study at Stanford found that just by doing something as simple as walking, creative output was increased by 60% while walking and the effect continued for the next 10 minutes after they stopped.
Again, exercise works through sparking our frontal cortex which activates our Executive Function Network, and this helps us to optimize our thinking and learning. Exercise also promotes the growth of our 100 billion brain cells and speeds up our ability to make new ones. The explanation for this is that our large brains evolved to help us be the best movers possible. As we added more brain parts during our hunter-gatherer period, these eventually were co-opted for thinking, so that now when we move we are turning on our thinking brain.
Because exercise enhances all the functions of the deliberate brain :memory, self-control, problem solving, as well as mood and motivation, Ratey calls it “a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac”.
So, clearly, quality sleep and exercise have the potential to have a substantial effect on both our mood and our cognitive abilities. We often think of our disposition and our intellect as being relatively stable features of who we are. But seeing how radically they can be tampered with by our physical habits loosens this grip somewhat, opening up the field of potential for improvement. I’m looking forward to diving into sleep and exercise thoroughly in later issues (see post on “Topics”).
Principle Two: What is happening in your mind affects your body
In the United States a placebo injection for pain is more effective than a placebo tablet, yet in Europe the opposite is true. We also now know that placing our attention on the breath can create physical changes in the structure of the brain, and that meditation impacts around 2000 of our genes. Optimists live longer than pessimists. The Mayo Clinic found over a 30-year study that optimists had around a 50 per cent lower risk of early death than pessimists. A 2004 study of Dutch men published in Archives of General Psychiatry found a ‘protective relationship between optimism and all-cause mortality in old age”. Those with high levels of optimism had a 45% lower risk of death from any cause and 77% lower risk of death from heart disease. Similar results were found in a 60-year study of Catholic nuns.
An emotion can alter blood flow, it can increase or decrease heart rate, it can even turn the production of specific hormones up or down. Simply, certain hormones accompany feelings of stress, and oxytocin accompanies warm feelings of love and connection. These both cause physical effects throughout the cardiovascular system. Oxytocin reduces blood pressure and has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. It also plays a role in digestion, wound healing, and even in the conversion of stem cells into heart muscle cells.
Placing your attention anywhere on your body activates the corresponding region of the brain. Imagining walking, for example, activates regions of the brain governing the muscles used for walking. Researchers at Graz University in Austria showed that a tetraplegic patient could ‘walk from thought’, by controlling an avatar in a virtual reality environment, simply through the process of imagining himself walking. Other research has seen people turn a light switch on and off, type an email, and even fly a plane, simply by imagining specific movements of their bodies while a computer carries out instructions corresponding to the regions of the brain that are activated. This is because the brain processes imagination as real. If you imagine moving a muscle, your brain processes that as movement. Alvaro Pascual Leone, a neurology professor at Harvard, had volunteers play a simple sequence of piano notes or imagine playing the notes. Comparing brain scans of both groups after five daily sessions of real or imaginary playing, he found that the brains of both groups of volunteers had changed in the same way and to the same extent. We can even play better golf or tennis by imagining ourselves doing the movements expertly. People who have had a stroke have been found to recover faster by visualizing themselves moving their impaired limbs.
The immune system is also sensitive to the contents of the mind. Focusing on stressful situations can depress the immune system, while focusing on uplifting thoughts can elevate it. The ‘Mother Teresa Effect’, for example, describes research where volunteers watched a video of Mother Teresa carrying out acts of charity and kindness. Levels of an immune system antibody in their saliva increased. Some research has even found that patients visualizing their immune systems working have increased their immune function.
Integration
So what is the invisible thread that links mind and body? Esther Sternberg works on the link between the central nervous system and the immune system, looking at how immune molecules made in the blood can trigger brain function that profoundly affects our emotions. She writes “By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases…The same parts of the brain that control the stress response … play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives… Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease. Thus, many of the nerve pathways and molecules underlying both psychological responses and inflammatory disease are the same, making predisposition to one set of illnesses likely to go along with predisposition to the other.”
She argues that our usual questions that separate causation between mind and body into a linear cause and effect, such as “do depressing thoughts cause an illness of the body”, are mis-formulated. We should ask “which of the many components that work together to create emotions also affect that other constellation of biological events, immune responses, which come together to fight or to cause disease…we need to ask what the molecules and nerve pathways are that cause depressing thoughts. And then we need to ask whether these affect the cells and molecules that cause disease.” Essentially, she posits a molecular basis for feeling bad.
One 2013 study focused on where people experience different emotions in the body. This research created the first “map” that illustrated the links between our emotions and our bodily sensations.
In the study, a team of Finnish researchers induced different emotions in 701 participants and then asked them to color in a body map of where they felt increasing or decreasing activity (Nummenmaa et al., 2013).
Participants in the study were from both Western European countries and well as East Asian countries. Despite cultural differences, the researchers found strong similarities in responses. Yellow indicates the highest level of activity, followed by red. Black is neutral, while blue and light blue indicate lowered and very low activity, respectively.
The researchers explained their findings: “Most basic emotions were associated with sensations of elevated activity in the upper chest area, likely corresponding to changes in breathing and heart rate. Similarly, sensations in the head area were shared across all emotions, reflecting probably both physiological changes in the facial area […] as well as the felt changes in the contents of mind triggered by the emotional events.”
It's interesting to speculate about what is happening in each instance. It’s noticeable that happiness is the one emotion that fills the whole body with activity. This might indicate a sense of physical readiness that comes with a happy state, and heightened communication between the body and the brain. When we are happy we can experience ourselves as a part of the world around us and all it has to offer. It suggests to me that when we are happy we are in a state of wholeness and integration; and when we are in this state we are happy. Depression stimulates no activation in any part of the body and lowers activation in the extremities. In a state of depression, it is difficult to connect with both the active self and the outside world.
The Loop
In all this, the boundaries between mind and body begin to blur. One consequence of acknowledging the relationship between body and mind as a loop, or even as a single entity with different aspects, is that we recognize that wherever we intervene, the effects will be felt throughout the whole system. The loop is continuous, unending, and each instance is the cause of countless adjacent instances which ripple throughout our body and mind. This experience taken as a whole is what we think of as our self. In Buddhist philosophy, there is a meditation that embarks on a search for the self and comes back empty-handed. There are four possibilities given:
My self = my body
My self = my mind
My self = the collection of my body and mind
My self = separate from my body and mind
The first two possibilities are ruled out by recognizing that the self possesses the body and the mind, so it cannot *be* them, and the third is ruled out as a corollary: the collection of two non-selves cannot become a self. The fourth possibility is conceptually unsustainable; our body and mind could not leave the room and our self remain. Finally, the meditation concludes that the self exists as mere name, imputed on the appearance of body and/or mind. This is how we can impute “I” on both a happy mind and an angry mind, and on both a toddler and a teenager, and say in all instances it is still “me”. Self is only a label.
The reason I bring this up is because I find it a useful concept to stop grasping so tightly at whatever body and mind is appearing right now, and recognizing that it is changing all the time, opening up the possibility for me to intervene, or just accept and flow. The more I learn about the mind-body loop, the clearer it seems to be that to live well, we need an integrated approach. As the mind and body are integrated, rather than one side simply responding to the other, then a deeper body-mind connection is key for overall health.
It is somewhat paradoxical that while the mind-body connection is natural, engaging with it deliberately takes effort and can feel awkward at first. This is partly due to the fact that most of us spend a lot of time living in our heads. So we may not recognize the information going back and forth between mind and body. But it is absolutely possible to improve this connection with practice (see post on exercises).
The Opportunity
There is a huge opportunity to be grabbed here. It is not always comfortable to hold this mirror up and acknowledge our own power and efficacy here, but ultimately it is liberating. Indestructible is about noticing that healing and thriving come from integration within. This core of health and happiness is already within us, but often obscured, sometimes heavily. Understanding our mind-body loop and exercising our faculty of choice over our habits, both mental and physical, can cause radical transformation. Life (physical, social, and environmental) is moving very quickly, and often in ways that do not support healthy integration of body and mind. But the good news is, we don’t usually need outside intervention, we just need to put ourselves in touch with the truth and potential that is already there.
Explore further:
Books and videos to dive deeper
Exercises to strengthen mind-body connection
Future topics to look forward to
Upcoming Q&A
Please send any questions to natalierachel@fastmail.com or via Twitter @NatalieRachelR and I will be answering them on video in the next couple of weeks.
Thank you for reading, take care and have a wonderful weekend.