Healthy Workout for the Mind Part 1

August 20, 2008 at 5:16 pm (health) (conscious, conscious mind, good health, health, healthy body, healthy mind, state of mind, subconscious, subconscious mind, unconscious, unconscious mind)

Following right on from my introductory post at My Health Today, where I introduced what this site would be all about, I’m going to get things started by laying some groundwork to this whole getting healthy and staying healthy kick. When dealing with the need to lose weigh and get healthy at the same time, it is often regarded as essential to exercise for weight loss and to a point this is of course true. Its also true that you can lose weight at work, or more particularly diet to fight the flab and reduce your weight to gain fitness and better health.

The first thing that needs to be in the right state before anything else is going to mean a thing is the most important part of anyone’s body and that lives inside your skull. Your brain. Or more importantly, what that brain contains, which is the essesnce of you – your mind.

Your mind being in the right state is tantamount to your body following suit and getting into a good state of health. When you have your mind working for you, you can do wonders with what you have to work with.

So lets look at the important function your mind plays in your general overall health.

Firstly, your mind controls your body in every way, aspect, part and function. Your brain is the starting place for the bundle of nerves that is housed in your backbone and from where they permeate every part of your body. Your nerves are what relay all your outward senses back to your brain where you can process them. That’s all handled by your mind.

Now psychologists have known for a long time that your mind can be neatly divided into two parts. the conscious and the unconscious (or subconscious). The conscious part of your mind is what it says it is. Its the part of the mind that deals with all your waking thoughts, emotions and actions. Your conscious mind is powerful in that it has the ability to make decisions based upon what it gets from its surroundings, or stimuli. Its weakness is in that it can only process a few things at a time. You can’t be working out a mathematical problem at the same time as trying to fit a jigsaw puzzle together and learning the words to a song.

Try it if you don’t believe me. You’ll only be able to give 100% of your concentration to one or maybe two things at the same time. You conscious mind is responsible for your waking decisions and thought processes.

Your unconscious mind, on the other hand is also powerful in that it can process millions of things at the same time without you having to consciously think about any of them. Your subconscious regulates your breathing, makes your heart beat, digests your food, regulates your body temperature, knows when any one of the millions of cells in your body dies and creates a new one to replace it millions of times every day and so on and so forth. The weakness of your subconscious mind is that it cannot make decisions or solve problems. It just does what its programmed to do – keep your body running.

Now, your subconscious functions can be affected by your conscious thoughts. Fact.

When you are feeling down, unhappy or downright miserable, these are conscious emotions that have a direct effect of your subconscious functions in that in this emotional state, your immune system is weakened, your regenerative processes are slowed and importantly, your overall level of health is lowered. If this mental state continues for any length of time, you will become prone to catching virus infections like colds, any wounds you have take linger to heal and your general health deteriorates.

All this is determined not by outside forces, but purely by your state of mind!

In my next post, I’ll be looking at how changing your emotional state can have a positive effect upon your general health. Until then,

Terry Didcott
My Health Today