Jun 2 • Viki Thondley

What is Mind-Body Medicine?

Mind–body Medicine uses the power of thoughts and emotions to influence physical and neurological health, and it's proven to improve mental health outcomes.
Mind-body medicine is an evidence-informed approach to health and wellbeing that recognises the powerful connection between our thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and physical health.

Rather than viewing the mind and body as separate systems, mind-body medicine explores how they continuously influence one another and how this relationship can impact both health and disease.

Hippocrates once wrote:

“The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.”

This is mind-body medicine in a nutshell.

Mind–body medicine examines the relationship between thoughts and emotions and physical and neurological health.

Through a range of practical interventions and lifestyle-based strategies, mind-body medicine aims to support the body's natural capacity for healing, improve resilience, and enhance overall wellbeing.

These approaches are widely regarded as safe, accessible, and effective for supporting symptom management across a broad range of health conditions. They are increasingly integrated into healthcare and wellness settings because they offer significant mental and physical health benefits, are relatively low-cost, and empower individuals to take an active role in their own healing journey.

I’m excited when I read new studies proving the effectiveness of mind-body medicine and relaxation techniques. They give me hope that more medical professionals and health practitioners might seek to understand the benefits of simple self-empowered therapies like meditation, mindfulness, breathing and relaxation exercises.

One such study was conducted between 2006 and 2014 at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) that scientifically proved relaxation-response techniques such as meditation, yoga and prayer could reduce the need for health care services by 43 percent!

The study, based at MGH’s Institute for Technology Assessment and the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) for Mind Body Medicine, found that individuals in the relaxation-response program used fewer health care services in the year after their participation than in the preceding year.

The program combined elicitation of the relaxation response with social support, cognitive-skills training, and positive psychology designed to build resiliency.

Studies like this one have a huge potential to reduce not only the extreme pressure on the healthcare system but also improve the personal wellbeing of each individual who can learn and self-apply these simple techniques into their daily lives.

The research also showed that inducing the relaxation response — a physiologic state of deep rest — not only relieves stress and anxiety and improve sleep, but also affects physiologic factors such as blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen consumption.

The paper’s authors noted that stress-related illnesses, such as anxiety and depression, are the third-highest causes of health expenditures in the United States after heart disease and cancer (which also are affected by stress). Australia is fast catching up.

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The Relaxation Response

The relaxation response was first described more than 40 years ago by Harvard Medical School Professor Herbert Benson, author of the much loved, The Relaxation Response and The Wellness Book, amongst many others.

Gradually incorporating mind-body relaxation techniques to disrupt increasing sympathetic activation can effectively elicit the relaxation response, and bring a little calm and quiet to a chaotic day. You can retrain your brain and nervous system to effectively counter the effects of your dominant stress response and relieve the burden on your bodymind.

Even just 10 minutes of consistent quiet breathing, observation and reflection a day, can over time produce a greater ability to restore homeostasis, build resilience, and create a more peaceful and positive mindset.

Every aspect of who we are and what we create is a direct result of what we have thought and created in our minds. When I finally figured that out, I was able to take greater responsibility for what I was creating and experience, consciously and unconsciously, in my life.

Learning how my mind and body are connected has been an invaluable awakening of how: my thoughts and feelings influence me physically, my food impacts my mood, my stress weakens my health, and how all the intricately connected parts of me are communicating with each other every millisecond of the day to keep me safe and balanced.

If only our generation, and those before us, were taught this empowering knowledge in schools. So many of our friends, family and colleagues might be saved from stress-related illness and disease, anxiety, hypertension, heart disease and cancer.

It’s a major reason why I’m so passionate about helping my students understand their own mind and bodies to create transformation from the inside out by learning how to identify their stress triggers, implement small and simple practices, and build greater resilience.

Encouraging greater self-awareness, self-regulation, and personal responsibility for health, mind-body medicine helps people become active participants in the therapeutic process rather than passive recipients of care.

It's an empowering path to wellbeing.


Featured image by Unsplash


References:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4603901/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4718200/

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