Mindset, which encompasses our knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, has an enormous impact on every aspect of our health, so Success Training is about the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes that will maximize the benefit from this program. 

All right. So in this session, we are gonna talk about the connection between the mind and the body, or more specifically how our mental life, so the stuff bouncing around inside our heads influences the health of our body. And there's an enormous amount of research now showing just how powerful that influence is. And yet it's commonly under-appreciated and overlooked, which is exactly why it's the place we're starting. And when we talk about the mind, we're talking about all the things going on inside our heads, including our thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge. And as you know, all of these things are abstractions. We can't touch them. We can't touch our thoughts, our beliefs, our attitudes, our knowledge. And so the question is if our mind isn't made up of stuff, how is it possible for it to influence other stuff like the stuff in our body?

It's easy to appreciate how a skin allergy affects the health of our skin, for example, or how pollutants in the air could pack the health of our lungs. It's all about stuff, interacting with other stuff. So it's very natural and understandable to be skeptical of claims of how our mind could impact the function of physical organs, like our heart lungs, skin, and so forth. It's reasonable to be skeptical because it can seem like it requires belief in some kind of magic. And in a minute, we'll answer the question about how it's possible for the mind to influence the body while not having to believe in any kind of special magic. But first we're gonna talk about some fascinating studies on the connection between the mind and the health of the body. And we'll start with an early landmark study on object. So during world war II, an anesthesiologist named Dr.

Henry Beecher published a landmark study on pain perception in the journal of the American medical association. And Beecher was trying to determine whether the severity of an injury was the primary determinant of the level of pain experienced, or if other factors were involved that also played a role in the experience of pain at the time, the conventional wisdom was that the extent of an injury was the main cause of the amount of the amount of pain experienced. So the study involved 300 men, half of them had recently been injured in battle. And the other had recently undergone a major surgery of some kind in a civilian hospital. So the men in each group had recently suffered wounds of similar severity. And again, Beecher was interested in knowing whether the situation or circumstances where the wounds happened, influenced how painful they were. And so to figure that he asked each of the subjects in the study, whether or not they wanted any pain medication and then recorded their responses along with how much time had passed since they've been wounded.

Now, if the conventional wisdom was true, again, both groups should report equal levels of pain and request pain medication in equal equal proportions. Because again, at the time the study was done the mid 20th century, it was thought that it was only the severity of the injury that mattered when it came to the amount of pain it caused. So a broken ankle is a broken ankle, a poke in the eyes, a poke in the, and in other words, there should be a direct one-to-one relationship between a bodily injury and the pain it caused. So what was the actual result? Well, conventional wisdom turned out to be very wrong. It turned out that the context or circumstances in which the injury occurred made a huge difference. So whereas 83% of the surgical patients asked for pain medication, only 32% of the soldiers did. So not only did the circumstances matter, they appeared to matter even more than the severity of the injury.

And the subjects with surgical wounds were more than twice as likely to report moderate to severe pain than the objects with a battle wound. And this, despite the fact that if anything, the battle wounds were actually more extensive. So based on these findings, Becher concluded that the extent of an injury was not the main factor in determining the amount of pain experienced. In his words, quote, when the evidence is examined as a whole, it carries strong indication that the reaction phase or processing phase is very often of more importance in suffering than is the original sensation. So put another way, Becher concluded that it was the story that people told themselves about their pain, which he refers to as the processing phase, which contributed more to their experience of pain than the act injury itself. So for a soldier, a battle wound is often viewed favorably as it usually means they're going to be sent home from the battlefield and get a break from the quote, overpowering anxiety and fear of death.

That's experienced there. On the other hand for a surgical patient, a, a surgical wound is viewed negatively and is wrapped up with, with all of the anxieties about their health and wellbeing. In the end, these results are a powerful illustration of how much our mental life or the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter to our health and wellbeing. Again, it's important to point out that these results were a surprise to the scientific community at the time fact, many were skeptical of them, and it took a lot more research over the next several decades to convince those skeptics. And so Beato study showed that our mind profoundly influences our experience of pain. We, since learned that the mind profoundly influences the health and function of every bodily system, for example, our thoughts influence our immune system. So during the period of final exams, which is usually a time of acute psychological stress medical students were found to have fewer natural killer cells, which are cells responsible for fighting tumors and fighting viral infections and chronic psychological stress has been shown to negatively impact all aspects of our immune function, rendering us more vulnerable to infections of every kind, again, nothing but the thoughts in our heads can render us immunocompromised.

Our thoughts are also influence our heart and brain. So prolonged feelings of loneliness and social isolation were found to increase the risk of heart disease and stroke by the same amount as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, our thoughts influence our surgical outcomes subjects who underwent fake arthroscopic knee surgeries. So a fake means an incision is placed while a subject is under anesthesia, but no actual surgery is performed. They experience the same amount of pain relief. After two years, as those who had the actual knee surgery, the mind influences our skin and our allergic response. 13 people who were extremely allergic to poison Ivy were rubbed on one arm with a harmless leaf that they were told was poison Ivy. And on the other arm with poison Ivy that they were told was a harmless leaf. All 13 broke out in a rash to the harmless leaf while only two reacted to the actual poison.

Ivy, our thoughts influence how long we live. People who think they are in good health live about 10 years longer than those who think they are in bad health. Even when their health is objectively the same, our thoughts influence the amount of hair on our head. 42% of men taking a placebo treatment for balding maintained or showed an increase in the amount of hair on their heads. Our thought are more powerful than pain pills in studies on pain relief, the placebo pill accounts for more of the pain relief in study subjects than the actual drug. So similar to Becher study, the mind influences the perception of pain more than a drug. And we could go on and on here, but hopefully you've got the idea, which is that the research shows that our thoughts and our mind influences everything. In fact, the reason drugs of every kind have to prove that they're superior to placebos is because the placebo effect occurs in every organ system.

Since our mind can influence every part of the body all the way down to our and our DNA. So we have loads of evidence here that the influence of the mind on the health of the body is both powerful and widespread. But how, how is this not some kind of magic? Well, as you may know, the primary function of our brain is to maintain homeostasis, which simply means making sure that the conditions inside the body remain stable so that all of our organs are able to carry out their life sustaining functions. So in other words, the brain is the master control center of the body. And so in order to carry out that responsibility, the brain can influence every part of the body through nerve signals, as well as through the secretion of hormones. And it's through these systems, the sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight system, the parasympathetic nervous system, our rest and digest system, as well as the endocrine system, which is the system for secreting hormones, through all of those things, the brain's able to communicate and powerfully influence every single organ.

And now our mental life, all the stuff that's balancing around inside our head is produced by nerve impulses in our brain. And again, our brain is connected to everything. So this is why the thoughts in our head can influence the workings of every part of our body. Even though they don't feel at thoughts are generated by physical stuff. And if this weren't true, if our thoughts didn't influence the workings of the body, or if our thoughts couldn't influence physical stuff, then you'd never experience your heart racing and your Palm sweating before giving a speech and grooms wouldn't faint at their weddings and children. Wouldn't get stomach aches before the first day of school. Again, all of these are examples of major bodily responses that are caused by nothing more than the thoughts in our heads. The fact is the state of our mind is always influencing the state of our body, which means that understanding and leveraging that influence is one of the most impactful things that we can do for our own health.

Furthermore, if we neglect it, it can easily undermine our efforts to improve or sustain health typically in ways that we're completely unaware of. And as a review, there are two primary ways in which the mind influences our health. The first way is that our expectations influence the effectiveness of our actions for better or for worse. For example, expecting a pill to cause weight loss will make you more likely to lose weight. This is the placebo effect where the expectation of a positive outcome makes it more likely to occur. Now, obviously that's a phenomenon we can use through our advantage, expect good things, then more good things will happen. And then there's also the nocebo effect where expecting a negative outcome makes that outcome more likely to occur. Like as we talked about expecting a plant to cause a rash makes it more likely to cause a rash or expecting a drug to cause a certain side effect makes that side effect more likely to occur.

And then is a phenomenon that can, and often does undermine our health though. Again, we're usually wholly unaware of it. And then the second major way in which the mind influences our health is through the ability of our thoughts to turn on our stress response. Chronic psychological stress is a major factor in poor health and in the development chronic diseases in today's world, yet by and large it's, self-generated, it's the thoughts in our head causing this chronic low level activation of our fight or flight system, which is a great system to turn on when there's a life-threatening emergency, but reeks havoc when it's turned on all the time in situations where we don't need it. One helpful way to think about the role of our mind is the mindset equation, which states that the impact of anything on our health is a combination of what actually happens to us.

Plus the story we tell ourselves about it. So mindset not influences your decisions about what to do or what actions to take. It also influences the impact of those actions. Ultimately our mind and our mindset can be either our greatest ally or our greatest enemy in prolonging health span. We can't help, but tell stories about the things that happen to us. It's how we're wired. It's how we make sense of the world. But the great thing is we get to choose the stories we tell and since knowledge and beliefs matter so much in the next section, we'll discuss the importance of our knowledge and beliefs about health itself.