Your relationship with your body is a reflection of your relationship with your emotions- Sahara Rose.
These words immediately direct us toward the topic I want to discuss with you all through my blog. Yes, the mind-body connection. This connection is pivotal and is important even when it comes to the health of the individual. The recognition is immense today when it comes to mental and physical health, especially in the contemporary healthcare ecosystem.
How does it work? If we think that things in the universe work in isolation then we are fundamentally flawed with our understanding of the process. The mind has a profound effect on our physical body and vice versa. The correlation is often complex to understand but it's not rocket science. It’s a simple equation. Depression for example can cause headaches, digestive problems, and fatigue. Anxiety can cause palpitations and also stomach upset. Physical pains can lead to sleep deprivation or insomnia which can cause impaired cognitive and emotional functions and in return can lead to depression. Chronic ailments such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma, cancer, etc. can have an impact on the mind and manifest in many mental ailments.
A healthy mind can help to maintain a healthy body, similarly, a healthy body can also help to keep the mind healthy. It is simply a flow of energy that manages the equilibrium between the two entities. The balance is very critical and when there is an imbalance it can create chaos in both the planes. At times our mental state, thoughts, and moods may feel separate from our physical self but they are happening as an activity and as part of a physical organ in our body, i.e. the brain. The menstrual cycle of the women is a perfect example to understand the complex connections. The brain, the hormones, the emotions, and moods during various phases of the menstrual cycle are so very evident of the connection even in the physiological sense let alone the pathological sense we spoke about above.
As part of our extended efforts at Praan, we are working at OMNI Hospital in Hyderabad along with another of our programs, Tridot. The need to integrate mental health as part of addressing physical health has been understood and practiced in the very space. We have introduced music therapy as a vehicle to channel the flow of energy between the mind and the body. Music has a profound impact on us both on the mental plane and the physical plane. Music for instance has a great impact on reducing stress levels. When played around a stressful situation, music reduces stress hormone production and enhances the production of happy hormones. These happy hormones help reduce blood pressure and improve the heartrate, breathing, and many other vital parameters that get deranged otherwise. It thus helps produce an equilibrium and balances the energy flow.
Why is it then so difficult to understand and implement measures that focus on the mind-body connection? It all starts with our prejudice in understanding the concept and has more to do with the stigma attached to associating anything with mental health. The other problem is the ‘conditioning’. We are fed with the concept of the ‘germ theory’ where we associate every physical ailment with a pathogen or a causative agent. When I have diarrhea, I would think that I must have eaten contaminated food or drank contaminated water. Never I would think that I had diarrhea before my presentation which could be because of my nervousness and anxiety. The modern medicine would call it an ‘unknown’ cause if they are unable to find a pathogen associated with the disease. I am not getting into the debate of right or wrong, I am simply highlighting the fact that at times we fail to understand the mind-body connection to many eventualities in our lives.
Coming to the discussion around correcting the flow of energy and deploying various therapeutic remedies that can help establish the connection and strike the balance and the equilibrium. Yoga for instance is an amazing ancient Indian Science that uses the physical body to improve the mental state and also the mental plane to improve the physical state. Music is one such modality as we discussed above, and it has amazing results when deployed in clinical setups. But all this primarily would need awareness that physical health can be impacted because of mental health and vice versa. One can reach out and seek various professional therapies that help us to improve our mind-body connection. The approach is more holistic and has an amazing impact on the recovery of the patients than a standalone approach.
I would like to end my blog in the words of
Dr. David Agus, “There’s no question that the mind-body connection is real, even if we can't quantify it. Hope is one of the greatest weapons we have to fight disease.”
