Educated, slender, and attractive, Julie seems to have it all. She has a PhD, an interesting career, and good friends. So everything's great, right?
Not exactly. Julie also has diabetes. And while she loves her job, she feels anxious about running a business. She often gets angry at herself, and snaps at others for small mistakes. Even scarier, despite careful monitoring of her blood sugar, she finds herself in a coma once or twice a month. What's going on?
It turns out that despite Julie generally healthy habits, her anxiety prevents her from paying attention to the cues her body gives her when her blood sugar is too low.
On her doctor's advice, Julie tries Mindfulness Based Stress-Reduction (MBSR) classes along with her regular diabetes care program. The MBSR practices help Sylvia slow down and actually pay attention to her body.
Julie begins to notice when her blood sugar is dropping, so she can eat to prevent herself from going into a diabetic coma. She also finds it easier to control her diabetes with insulin, probably because reducing her anxiety helps reduce her stress hormones. Her anger, a product of her stress, also fades away. Julie's story is a great example of what we call the mind-body connection. This means that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes can positively or negatively affect our biological functioning. In other words, our minds can affect how healthy our bodies are!
On the other hand, what we do with our physical body (what we eat, how much we exercise, even our posture) can impact our mental state (again positively or negatively). This results in a complex interrelationship between our minds and bodies. What are body-mind therapies?
Related to mind-body therapies are therapies that use the body to affect the mind, such as yoga, tai chi, qigong, and some types of dance (these are sometimes called body-mind therapies). Ultimately mind-body and body-mind therapies are interrelated: the body affects the mind, which in turn impacts the body (and the mind.) important to note that "mind" is not synonymous with brain. Instead, in our definition, the mind consists of mental states such as thoughts, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and images. The brain is the hardware that allows us to experience these mental states.
Mental states can be fully conscious or unconscious. We can have emotional reactions to situations without being aware of why we are reacting. Each mental state has a physiology associated with it—a positive or negative effect felt in the physical body. For example, the mental state of anxiety causes you to produce stress hormones.
Many mind-body therapies focus on becoming more conscious of mental states and using this increased awareness to guide our mental states in a better, less destructive direction.
