Download: Think Yourself Healthy 1. Lower your stress levels.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Think Yourself Healthy

You are born with self-corrective potential for health. An ill body occurs when the harmonious balance of mind and body is upset. But you can think yourself healthy; how you think and what you feel influences your physical health. The reverse is also true: if you have a physical symptom for very long, it will change the way you think and feel about everything else. Because your mind and body are inseparable, you must treat your entire self, not just the disease. This chapter will help you discover the infinite potential for self-healing that lies within you. 1. Lower your stress levels. Nervous strain and emotional tension are stressors. Stress-produced adrenaline turns off the thymus gland, a key component of the immune system. The body reacts by shutting down activity in the digestive tract. Blood shifts from the abdominal organs to those essential to muscular exertion and activity, and increased heart muscle contractions occur. Extra red blood cells are discharged from the spleen into the circulation to carry more oxygen to the muscles. Deeper breathing and dilation of the lungs’ bronchial tubes occur and blood sugar flows out of the liver to answer the body’s increased energy demands. Prolonged stress reactions like these can lead to complete exhaustion of the autonomic nervous system, lowering your immune response to disease. Effective stress-reduction techniques, such as meditation, biofeedback, progressive relaxation, positive thinking, and self-hypnosis will help you deal with stress. Read Chapter Two which offers valuable tips and techniques on ways to reduce stress. 2. Be more cheerful and optimistic about life. How a situation is perceived is more important than the actuality of that situation. When an individual interprets a situation and forms an assumption, that assumption continues to operate without his conscious knowledge. Examine your attitudes, both mental and emotional. Emotional factors interfering with mind-body interaction are fear, anger and guilt. All other negative feelings are directly related to these. Fear and anger evolved from basic survival instincts, while guilt is a product of our society—the results of judgments and evaluations based on social customs, expectations and values. Learn to detach from these negative emotions and allow them to flow through you without affecting you. Be more cheerful and optimistic about life. Studies show that optimists tend to be less bothered by physical symptoms than pessimists because optimists cope more effectively with problems and experience fewer stress-related symptoms., 3. Examine your self-image. Self-image plays an important part in the state of your health. An injured or low self- image can allow you to accept a state of bodily imbalance as normal. Since you are the creator of your own self-image and are the only one capable of changing it, you must ask for and receive your own permission to change, every step of the way. Release the negative emotions of anger, fear and guilt. Forgive yourself and others in order to release the past. Learn to love yourself, and express gratitude and thankfulness for that health in advance, for it will soon become your reality. 4. Don’t discuss your ailments at great length. Discussing your ailments at great length is boring as well as being very negative programming to your subconscious mind. Although it’s important to safeguard your health and protect your body, don’t become fanatical about it. Avoid reading books about disease all the time—the knowledge of everything that can go wrong can make you view even the most trivial symptom as a life-threatening disease. It’s fine to educate yourself and be well-informed, but it seems that people who constantly read books about disease believe they have the symptoms of every ailment described in the book. Instead, read books about health when you’re interested in improving your physical well-being. 5. Get the proper amount of sleep. Lack of sleep undermines your entire nervous system, making you more susceptible to emotional stress and strain, and a variety of contagious and infectious conditions. Peaceful sleep is vital to allow your mind to continue the healing process. Don’t neglect or ignore your health. Take the same good care of your body as you do expensive electronic or other equipment. Your body is a more valuable investment than anything you own. 6. Keep a healthy perspective. How you react to bad news, such as disasters and catastrophes presented on TV news broadcasts and in the newspaper can lead to feelings of helplessness, lack of control and futility. The end result is a lowered immune system response. How do you handle it? Try not to personalize the events; ask yourself whether you have any control over the situation. If the answer is “no,” recognize that it is a random coincidental event that has nothing to do with you. Be reasonably vigilant and accept that a certain amount of risk is part of being alive. Put the events in perspective by challenging irrational beliefs. Try to diminish your reaction to what you read or hear by one-half. Read the newspaper in the morning instead of the evening and don’t listen to news or watch it on television before you go to bed. 7. Become aware of your breathing. Practice deep rhythmical breathing once a day for several minutes to bring fresh oxygen into your body. It eliminates carbon dioxide and other waste products while, strengthening and renewing your entire body. Become aware of your breathing. Notice the frequency and depth of your breathing. Gradually increase the depth of your breathing as you slow the rate. Do this to the point where you are breathing in what you feel is the most relaxing and calming pattern for you. Focus mentally on relaxing with each breath. With each inhalation, breathe with greater calmness and peace. Let go of all tension in your body. See yourself inhaling energy, calmness and relaxation. Exhale tension. Feel yourself blowing away the pressures and stresses of the day with every out breath. Breathe in calmness. Breathe out stress and tension. Maintain this focused breathing for at least ten breaths. 8. Meditate. Relax and rest at least a half hour a day. An ideal time is immediately after your deep breathing exercises. A quiet environment is essential; eliminate distractions and unnecessary noise. Make yourself comfortable and progressively relax your body. Half an hour of quiet relaxation or meditation performed regularly gives your body a chance to recuperate and keeps the immune system strong. 9. Exercise! Proper exercise, done in moderation, is a cornerstone of health. Avoid very aggressive or competitive exercise, which is stressful and can injure the body. Walking one or two miles a day can help your lungs, heart and circulation. Exercises such as yoga, t’ai chi, running and aerobic dancing provide beneficial exercises for the body, mind and spirit! 10. Be less critical of others. Resentment breeds illness. By resenting others, dwelling on perceived injuries and hanging onto anger, you’ll be the one who gets sick, not them. Fear, depression, anger and negative emotions are strong immune system depressors. Don’t get upset and excited over every little thing that happens, especially when it does not affect you or is no concern of yours. Release the negative feeling and let it flow out of you; feel yourself becoming happier and more content. 11. Laugh. Laughter can be the best medicine. It blocks feelings of apprehension and panic that can accompany serious illness, and positively affects your health by helping you maintain a balanced perspective. Positive physical effects include lowered blood pressure, better muscle tension, improved digestion and elevated mood. Laughing makes things seem less frightening and overwhelming. So have fun, watch funny movies or read funny books. Do things that make you laugh. 12. Drink clean water, and lots of it. Good drinking water is important to good health. Because most tap water comes from streams, rivers and reservoirs, it frequently contains pollutants and agricultural wastes, such as fertilizer and insecticide residue. Harmful bacteria may also be present in tap water, as well as nitrites. As many as sixty chemicals may be added to the water by, water-treatment facilities, including chlorine, fluorine, lime, copper sulfate, aluminum sulfate and sulfur dioxide. Additionally, water may be “hard,” which means it contains mineral salts, some of which can be injurious to health even though they occur naturally. The best way to avoid the many chemicals and indigestible minerals found in water, including bottled spring water, is to drink distilled water. This is water that has been boiled, converted to steam, then re-condensed. In this process, everything that is not pure hydrogen is removed. The result is pure water. In the human body, it acts as a solvent to help clean out the arteries, lungs, liver and kidneys. Let your body obtain its minerals from organic fruits and vegetables, not from your water. 13. Nutritionally balance your lifestyle. Good health begins with good nutrition. Food is basic to vitality and health. Reread Chapter Four on ways to make your diet a healthier one. Achieve a balance between the acid and alkaline components in your body. This balance is known as the pH of your body. The pH factor indicates whether a tissue or fluid is alkaline or acid. An imbalance towards acidity can lead to serious health problems. An alkaline diet aids the immune system. The diet recommended by the American Cancer Society is an alkaline diet. Alkaline foods are vegetables, fruits and their juices. Acid foods are starches, sugars, most meats and fats. Dairy products are neither or both. Be aware of your eating patterns. Why and when you eat are as important as what you eat. When eating habits get tied up with boredom, depression, loneliness, anger or feelings of worthlessness, the regulatory mechanisms of the body that deal with the absorption of food are thrown out of balance. Many books are available on good nutrition; learn what your body needs to maintain life and health. 14. Take vitamin C. With a little natural help, our bodies can heal themselves. Vitamins fortify and enhance our body’s own protective mechanisms. Vitamin C is the single most important vitamin to your immune system because it is the anti-stress vitamin. It stimulates the adrenal glands and increases the production of cortisone, a hormone, in the body. Well-known journalist Norman Cousins was able to overcome two life-threatening diseases by using megadoses of vitamin C, taken with lots of laughter. Incorporate this vitally important vitamin into your healing regimen. 15. Get out into the sun. Along with food, air and water, sunlight is an important factor in good health. It is literally a nutrient to the body, allowing it to grow properly with a minimum of disease. The best known biological effect of sunlight is the production of vitamin D in the skin. This vitamin, which is really a hormone, is essential for normal intestinal absorption of calcium and phosphorus from the diet, and for normal mineralization of bone. It is important for full development of your immune system’s defenses against disease and hence beneficial to general health. Sunlight helps the pineal gland to relieve depression, and activates other important biochemical events in our bodies such as the timing of our biological clocks and, circadian rhythms, immune system responsiveness, sexual growth and development, regulation of stress and fatigue, control of viral and cold infections, and dampening of functional disorders of the nervous system. Exposure to the full range of solar radiation, including the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum, are necessary to obtain these beneficial effects. Of course, it is important for one to use sunblock if planning to be in the sun. But the healing properties of a regular dose of sunshine—a walk in the park, a bike ride, a swim—far outweigh the negative. 16. Listen to music. Use music therapy to improve your health. The process of hearing sounds involves many parts of your body: the ear, the neural connection to the brain and the reactions of the nervous system to sounds. Music therapy is the use of music to bring about changes in emotional or physical health. A theory called “depth provocation” explains that music detours the ego and intellectual controls and directly contacts the emotional centers. Music opens avenues of nonverbal emotional communication. Instrumental music, because it is nonverbal, moves directly through the auditory cortex to the center of emotional responses, stimulating the flow of stored memory material across the brain so that right and left hemispheres of the brain work together. Calming, quieting music produces pain-relieving peptides that bind to specific receptors in the brain. Use soothing, relaxing music with relaxation and visualization to explore imagery while in an altered state of consciousness. New age music and some classical music is appropriate for this therapy, but rock and highly dissonant jazz are not. 17. When you feel sad, go ahead and cry. You may lower your risk of developing serious disease by not suppressing your feeling. Tears are by-products of our body’s waste-removal system. Tears shed in grief or sorrow carry off stress-related chemicals. People who condition themselves not to cry are more susceptible to such stress-related diseases as ulcers, hardened arteries and heart attacks. 18. Cultivate loving relationships. We are all born with the need to love and be loved. Bring lots of tender loving care into your life. Forming close personal ties to friends, family and community may be the most important thing you can do to safeguard your health. 19. Use self-hypnosis. Daily use of self-hypnosis mind programming will support your goal of thinking yourself healthy. The final chapter tells you how.

Think Yourself Healthy Summary

1. Lower your stress levels. 2. Be more cheerful and optimistic about life. 3. Examine your self-image., 4. Don’t discuss your ailments at great length. 5. Get the proper amount of sleep. 6. Keep a healthy perspective. 7. Become aware of your breathing. 8. Meditate. 9. Exercise! 10. Be less critical of others. 11. Laugh. 12. Drink clean water, and lots of it. 13. Nutritionally balance your lifestyle. 14. Take vitamin C. 15. Get out into the sun. 16. Listen to music. 17. When you feel sad, go ahead and cry. 18. Cultivate loving relationships. • Affirmations • The final chapter explains how to use the following affirmations as self-talk and how to include them in a self-hypnosis format for daily mind programming. “Radiant health is now my reality.” “Every day, I am healthier and healthier.” “I now use the unlimited power of my mind to become healthy.” “I know how to relax completely and release tension from my body and mind.” “My positive, loving attitude keeps me healthy.” “Every day in every way, I love and care about my body and myself more and more.” “My body knows exactly what it needs to stay healthy.” “I visualize perfect health.” “I maintain a state of calmness and tranquility.” “I let negativity flow through me without affecting me.” “My positive attitude keeps me healthy.”]

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