The state of your mind has an enormous effect on your physical health, spiritual condition, and overall well-being.
The body, mind and spirit are indistinguishably united. If one of them is impacted, the other two are also impacted.
You may be very physically fit and spiritually strong, but if your mind is not right, then the body and spirit cannot compensate for it.
You will not be fully healthy, and you will not be able to heal.
The mind has the power to cause you to become physically sick, and it also has the power to prevent you from healing.
Examples of Sicknesses Caused by Negative Thoughts
Many of the common negative thoughts and emotions that can lead to sickness include animosity, jealousy, worry, anxiety, depression, guilt, remorse, and rage. Even simple everyday negativity, like always focusing on the bad aspect of anything or a general negative attitude can have an impact on health.
Physicians and researchers are tracing more and more sicknesses and physical disorders to a mental source.
- For example, multiple patients who have experienced excessive guilt from their sins have demonstrated diminishing energy and stamina.
- Other patients who have held grudges internally for an extended period of time experienced severe bodily pains.
- Some patients would develop skin rashes due to intense arguments with someone else.
- People even developed colds from stressing about an upcoming event, test, or other trial.
- Researchers who studied heart rhythms even found the rhythms changing simply due to the subject thinking about something positive or negative.
These examples are only a drop in the bucket compared to all of the research that has been done linking thoughts to good or bad health.
The Stress Response
One of the most obvious reasons that negativity promotes illness is the stress response. Negativity is typically associated with stress, and negative people lack efficient coping skills to deal with stress.
When the body is in a chronic state of stress, it releases stress hormones through the fight or flight response, which accounts for rapid heartbeat, raised blood pressure, erratic breathing and other physiological effects that cause harm to the human body.
Positive Versus Negative in Real Life
For example, two people are in a traffic jam on the freeway. The positive person realizes there is nothing they can do except wait it out, so they turn on the radio, lay their head back, and take the time to relax and breathe.
The negative person gets anxious, and stressed. They may start to beat their hand against the steering wheel, cuss at the other drivers, sweat, and get angrier by the minute all the while releasing harmful stress hormones into their body.
How the time is spent in that traffic jam is a markedly different experience for the two parties, and while the positive person will come home relaxed and feeling happy, the negative person will likely come home stressed out, wore out, not happy, and may find themselves physically ill.
Examining Your Own Life
If you experience the same health problems repeatedly, or similar problems on a regular basis, then you need to take a step back and adequately examine yourself.
Instead of looking for a “quick fix” in the form of medication, look for the root of your problem:
- Are you a consistently negative person?
- Do you have any emotional instability?
- Are you unable to control the negative thoughts that pop into your head?
- Are you a pessimist?
Ongoing negative thoughts that you choose not to address only brew into greater problems. You could even die from mental and emotional problems if it gets bad enough.
Conduct a self-examination to determine where the negative thoughts and/or emotions are coming from.
- Does it stem from within?
- Are they in response to another person or group of people?
Changing Your Attitude
Once you determine the source(s), you can figure out how to best address it.
Try meditating regularly to better understand your thoughts and your perceptions of the world.
Replace negative thoughts with positive opposites as they occur by saying something positive to counter them. Maintain a level of awareness throughout the day and adopt a positive outlook on yourself and on the things around you as much as possible.
There are also a lot of terrific self-help books and online videos that can help you become a more positive person.
Remember that your mind, body, and spirit are all connected, so your spiritual condition also needs to be worked on to help prevent sickness. There is no right or wrong path to spiritual growth.
Try discovering your “spiritual power” and then work on forming a relationship or connection with that higher power. Meditation and related group meetings are great ways to start the process. Spiritual development will take time, but it will have tremendously positive impacts on your health and is worth the effort.
Physiology explains why your mind and body respond so strongly to your emotions and thoughts: every component of your being, down to your neurons and cells, react to the state of your mentality.
Your mind, body, and spirit are connected in ways that are not all perceivable, but the evidence is very real. This indicates that negative thoughts have a very real effect on how often you get sick, and the degree of your illness.
Of course, bacteria, germs, and other factors have a role in your sickness at times, but your mind also has the power to generate sickness or to worsen an existing condition. Practice positive thinking to combat such problems and maintain a holistically healthy lifestyle.
