I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of mindset and intention in health. I know it is controversial, but in reality what we think is directly reflected in our nervous system. Thinking is an action of the nervous system, and without a nervous system you can’t think.
The nervous system, in turn, is the control system for the entire body, affecting hormones, metabolism, homeostasis (self regulation and repair), the immune system, the heart, blood vessels, and so on, and so on. All of that adds up to health — your health. It’s a cascade starting with the act of thinking.
There’s an interesting study, done at Harvard by Dr. Ellen Langer, showing what happens when you think differently, without changing what you do:
Researchers recruited 84 hotel housekeepers. Half of the housekeepers were given a training course about health and exercise, which emphasized the fact that the housekeepers were performing exercise during the course of doing their job. They were told how many calories they burned doing their routine, on-the-job tasks. (i.e. vacuuming for 15 minutes burns 50 calories, changing bed linens burns 40 calories, scrubbing a bathroom burns 60 calories, etc.) The second group was given general information on health and exercise, informed that the exercise is healthy, but were not given specific information about how their job might involve exercise.
Four weeks after the training course, the group of housekeepers who got the specific information emphasizing that the job of housekeeping was exercise showed significant changes in their health. They lost weight, had lower body fat percentage, and had lower blood pressure.
None of the housekeepers did any additional exercise or dieting. The only thing they did was think differently about what they do normally.
That’s the power of intention. That’s the power that thoughts can have over your body.
In case you want to read the study, you can find it here: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3196007/Langer_ExcersisePlaceboEffect.pdf?sequence=1
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