Healthy Workout for the Mind Part 2
In my Healthy Workout for the Mind Part 1, I covered how the conscious and subconscious parts of the mind work together to cause not only the way you feel but also your state of health, immune system and levels of energy. In this healthy workout for the mind part two, I’ll cover how by changing your state of mind can have a profound effect upon your state of health.
I already outlined how having a negative outlook on life can cause negative feelings and emotions which have a direct effect on the way the subconscious mind runs your body as a whole. It can slow down your metabolic rate, affect your fat and body mass index, suppress your immune system and retard new cell production and growth. All this can lead to a less healthy body.
But this sorry state of affairs can be turned around quickly and easily.
All you need to do is change your mood. If you think that is easier said than done, think again. It is as easy as changing what your predominant thoughts are about. If you’re watching news stories all about how bad it is in certain parts of your country or in the world in general, or how frustrating your local bureaucracy is in fixing something that you believe can be fixed easily, or you’re reading a newspaper filled with doom and gloom stories, then your predominant thoughts are negative ones, filled with anger and frustration.
Why?
I mean why are you putting yourself through all that misery?
Is there anything you can do about any of it? Chances are there are not. So why get yourself all upset about things you can do nothing about?
What you’re doing is making yourself miserable, unhappy, angry, frustrated etc filling your thoughts with negative things and charging your emotions with negative feelings. All you will get from this is ill health and a degradation of your overall fitness and it could seriously shorten your life expectancy.
If you think that is far fetched, you are wrong. There is a lot of research into the effects of our emotions on our health that has been done over the last few decade and continues being carried out right now. Most of the conclusions are that continued negative emotions do depreciate overall health. If your health is negatively affected, then your life expectancy is reduced and susceptibility to illnesses increased.
All this is controlled by your emotions.
So to turn this on its head, having good emotions have the opposite effect on our health. Our metabolism improves, immune system improves, new cell creation and growth increases and our overall health and fitness edge becomes much better. When our overall health is better, we are less prone to contracting illnesses because our immune systems are much more efficient at fighting off infections, viral and bacterial attacks etc. Being less susceptible to illnesses naturally increases our life expectancy.
So how do you turn your emotions around from gloomy to happy?
Easy. Don’t watch the news on TV and don’t read newspapers for a start. They are full of predominantly gloomy stories because, surprise surprise, that’s what most people want to read about or watch! Good news doesn’t sell newspapers! Disasters and human tragedy increases sales exponentially. Its true!
That means most people prefer to learn about all the bad things that are going on in the world. And they are all damaging their health because of it. No its not nonsense, its fact.
To turn your own emotions around, all you have to do is think about something really nice, like a really happy memory you have, or a person you love, or a beautiful piece of music, or a particularly funny scene in a comedy movie you saw and keep that thought predominantly in your mind. I guarantee your emotional state will change for the better quickly and you’ll catch yourself smiling.
Do this on a regular basis and your predominant thoughts will lift out of the gloom into a much happier place. Your health, if deteriorated will begin to improve over time. This technique can be used to help you fight illnesses and even cancer can be sent into remission by a change in your emotional state.
If this is all too much for you to take in and believe, do some research for yourself. Look up cases of people beating illnesses without any medical reason and see just how many there are. Read about how people with terminal cancer went into remission causing their doctors, who may have given them obly a short time to live, to scratch their heads in disbelief.
Start to believe.
Belief is a powerful thing and goes hand in hand with faith. Whern you see the evidence before you, even though it may not be scientific, its there in spades for you to find and cannot be ignored.
A happy person generally lives longer and more healthily than a sad person.
Be a happy person!
Healthy Workout for the Mind Part 1
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,
My Health Today 