The Mindful Body

0:01 Hello everyone and welcome to ideas for a better life. I am Eugenio Valla, ruiz, reader, hard- working and lover of personal development. Today I want to share with you the main ideas of the book Mindfull Body, written by psychologist Ellen Langer. Before starting, as always, remind yourself that you have at your disposal a compilation of the most relevant ideas and tips on personal development. In my four books you already know them free, healthy and happy, thirty- one days to improve your life, minimalism for normal people and seven steps for a purposeful life. You have them all on Amazon and I leave you the link to all of them, to the four in the episode notes and let' s see what the Enlanger tells us in his mindfull body book. This book deals with how our mental state can directly influence our physical health. Even today, the idea that mind and body are separate entities is deeply rooted in Western thought. And this idea not only tells us the book that it is wrong, but that many research suggests that it is frankly

1:36 harmful. But since it is very difficult to understand and explain how a diffuse immaterial thing called thought comes to impact another material thing, which we call the body, the mainstream has inclined to think that these two things are separate and not necessarily so. I know this is changing. I know doctors increasingly understand this idea and I think it is changing because more and more studies, more and more tests indicate that mind and body are a whole. Then, the author of the book details us one by one decades of studies that provide very clear evidence that our thoughts, our beliefs, our perceptions, influence and, in addition, greatly influence our body, our physical state. I, in reading the book, have selected the studies that have seemed most significant to me, but you will be able to find many more if you read the book, of course, but let us go. I have selected the most significant ones and I hope you like them and I hope they bring everything to you.

2:58 Start this idea of mind and users with research by scientist Asia Rolls that indicates that immune responses begin in our brain. By inducing abdominal inflammation in mice, Rolls observed that brain- specific neurons were activated. Well, other researchers were able to reproduce this inflammation by directly activating these neurons. What this tells us is what this tells us or what it demonstrates is the ability of certain mental processes to trigger physiological reactions that are real, that exist, that can be proved, that can be seen, that can be touched. However, positive thinking can improve our physical health, which has been discussed so many times, because the author of the book wanted to check it out and wanted to check it out by doing a study. His object was to see if the immersion of older men in an environment that reminded them of their youth could even improve their health. So he took the participants and divided them into two groups, Group A and Group B. The first group, Group A, made a retreat, a journey designed to reproduce life as it was twenty years or

4:30 twenty years ago, and this included watching TV shows of that time, reading news and newspapers of that time, and so on. He also encouraged them to speak only in the present, as if everything they were experiencing was happening right now. At the present time, that was group A. Then there was a group B. This second group lived the same retreat, the same journey, but they had to talk about their experiences in the past, not in the present as the group they remember, but in the past. Well, surprisingly, both groups showed several improvements in health markers, but the first group, the one that lived in the counterclockwise direction, showed significant improvements in vision, flexibility and even cognitive function. Impressive. Then there was another similar experiment that took place in Italy approximately ten years after this original experiment and also surprisingly, or less, the results were repeated. But psychologists Alia Crum and Octavia Zar took this research a step further. In their own study, they

6:06 interviewed more than sixty- zero people over the age of twenty- one and asked about their perceived level of physical activity compared to that of their peers. I' m sure you can already guess what happened. Indeed, the results showed a significant relationship between the perception of individuals of their physical activity and their mortality rates. Those considered less active than others had a higher risk of dying during the study period, regardless of their actual levels of physical activity. I mean, if you think you' re doing physical activity, you' re less likely to die than anyone who thinks it' s below the physical activity their peers do. But this phenomenon is not limited only to physical activity.

7:08 Another study showed that it is the perception of stress and not stress itself that affects our health. People who believe that stress is harmful, those who claim to have extremely high levels of stress, have a shorter life expectancy than those who do not consider it harmful, regardless of their actual stress levels, that is, if you think you are stressed out, that will affect your health. If you' re stressed out, you don' t think about it, you can probably get away with it. But the influence of perception also extends to other aspects of health. For example, to the dream researchers of Harvard Medical School tells us the book that studied this issue in depth. They did an experiment in which they manipulated the participants' watches for what? For them to show wrong sleep hours. Participants who thought they had slept eight hours, despite having slept only four or five hours, obtained better results in cognitive tests than when they were aware of having slept only five hours. Unbelievable, but this doesn' t end here. Those who slept eight hours but believed that they had slept five, got worse results than when they thought they had slept eight, regardless of when they had slept, this shows that perception of

8:41 sleep duration has a much greater impact on alert levels, on cognitive levels than the actual amount of sleep a person has. Therefore, to God manias goodbye manias if I have slept little or if I have not slept enough and the book gives us many more heris emplos. Participants in another study were asked to undergo a stress test on a treadmill and were then randomly assigned to two groups, as they had previously done to those who were going on a temporary retreat. Then Group A, the first of the groups, was told that the evidence had shown that they were carriers of a gene that made them prone to fatigue and this information in some was obviously real and in others it was not.

9:35 And the second group, Group B, was told absolutely nothing, either that they were prone or that they were not. They weren' t told anything. Then, a week later, all the participants in this study went back to the stress test, went back to the medical center, got back on the treadmill, and the results of the study once again reveal the power of beliefs over genetic predisposition. The individuals who were made to believe that they were carriers of that gene associated with fatigue showed less resistance, a reduced lung function, a less efficient metabolic exchange rate, which is what indicates your ability to eject carbon dioxide from the body and that independently, they displaced that gene or. If not clear to you, you will ask what is happening here, because once again, the beliefs that the individuals participating in the study on their own abilities had led to real physical results. Again, so, as you see, all the tests, all the studies that are narrating the book point to a unity between mind and body. Instead of being separate, instead

11:09 of being independent entities, our physical health is radically affected by what is happening in our head and not only tells us medical studies, scientific studies. Another way the book delves into this idea is also by analyzing what has been called and sure you know the placebo effect. You know that the placebo effect or a placebo is basically a harmless treatment, a neutral treatment, a treatment that neither cures nor harms. So, for example, when used in research, usually what is done is that a group receives the actual medication and a second group receives the placebo. What' s this for? For this is done to check if the actual medicine exceeds the false treatment. Well, patients often experience higher cure rates when they believe in the efficacy of a placebo, regardless of its form. And he also gives us examples of studies in this section of the book. He tells us of a study that shows that many patients stopped vomiting after taking a compound that does exactly the opposite induce vomiting, but they were told that this compound would relieve their symptoms fixed in the power that

12:43 ours has. Mind, you' re taking something that makes you throw up. They tell you it' s to stop puking and stop puking. But there are more examples. He gives us the example of people with viral sore throat who get better when they take antibiotics. And, as we all know, antibiotics are ineffective against viruses in principle. More examples also tell us in the talk of studies that show that the stimulating effects of caffeine only manifest when people are aware that they have consumed it, that is, if they give you caffeine without you knowing in coffee, it will probably not take your sleep away or alter you, and the placebo effect works even when there are invasive procedures. Simulated surgeries have proven to be effective in some cases and the book also gives us several examples. A very famous cardiologist named Leonard Cov, who presented a study on an operation basically that a surgical intervention, which is carried out to relieve the chest pain suffered by some patients, tells us in the 1950s that his research showed that patients who had undergone a false operation of this kind declared the same level of pain relief as those who had undergone the actual

14:16 surgery. And these researches have been reproduced in all kinds of contexts, with all kinds of diseases, with all kinds of patients, different ages, different regions of the world, different medical teams. I mean, the conclusion seems to be quite clear. I can think of another example, asthma patients. There are many studies of asthma patients who experience relief, although the inhaler they carry does not contain any active drugs, that is, that the inhaler acts as medicine rather than the internal compound itself. In some cases, more simulated ultrasound procedures that relieve pain in people who have had their teeth removed or who manage to reduce intestinal inflammation in people with colitis, for example. And going a little further, the book also tells us about an economist by name so ariel law, which shows that the effectiveness of placebos is even reinforced by their price. In short, when we pay more for a drug, even if it' s placebo. We are more likely to believe that it will work

15:46 and in many cases it is a self- fulfilling prophecy. It works. We' ve paid for it' s expensive must be good. It works is yet another proof that the potential for recovery lies at least partly in our own perceptions, rather than in active principles, which is the thesis of the book. So you know, the traditional view of health has been based for a long time on the assumption that the mind and body are separated. But the collection of evidence from scientific studies presented to us in this book, the truth is that they paint a quite different picture. The mind and body are united. What happens in our mind affects what happens in our body in other words, perception significantly affects our physical well- being. Therefore, the conclusion here is that we can influence our health by changing our thoughts. We can live a better life by simply changing the way we think. This is very important. It' s going to help you live a better life without a doubt starting with your thoughts. If you liked this episode, please give me a like subscribe to the channel or visit three www ideas to live better.

17:19 Dot com there you can download for free a copy of my latest book, Seven steps for a life with purpose, and also remember that you have the link to all my books, where you will be able to know much more about this topic and other topics in the notes of the episode a little bit lower and without more saying goodbye. Thank you very much, as always and until the next