A Healthy Attitude Helps Health

Does your attitude affect your health? Does a positive, happy one keep you healthier? Or a negative, unhappy one hurt? The mind and body are snugly interwoven, explains Peggy Rynk.

It used to be thought that a person’s mind and immune system existed independently of the other. But research now shows us that they may act as a single unit. Feeling stressed, for example, can make you more susceptible to whatever virus is going around. On the other hand, when you feel joyous and lighthearted, your immune system has a better chance of protecting you.

It’s been shown that even pretending to feel something can affect you. In a study at the University of California, researchers found that actors could influence their immune systems simply by the emotions they portrayed.

It’s a good bet that expectation also plays an important role. If you expect to be healthy, you increase your chances of enjoying good health. If you expect to be ill, you increase your chances of that.

This doesn’t have to do just with whether you come down with a cold or a bug. Attitude influences whether you get—and even die from—more serious illnesses. Heart disease is a good example.

Anger is an emotion that’s directly related to illness. It has its place in life, and there are times when feeling angry is an appropriate response. But chronic anger or anger that’s out of proportion to the situation at hand is another matter. A study in Boston gave a questionnaire to 1300 men to measure their tendencies toward anger. The study concluded that those men who scored the highest were three times more likely to develop heart disease than the men who scored the lowest.

But this knowledge is not new. John Barefoot, a research professor at Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina, did a 25-year follow-up study of a group of medical students from the 1950s through to 1980. What he and his colleagues discovered was that the ones who were hostile initially were the ones who were more likely to have died by the time of the follow-up study.

What he calls hostility, he says, is “an attitude of cynical beliefs and lack of trust in other people. . . . If you believe people are mean-spirited and bad and untrustworthy, that leads to a negative world outlook.

“That was one of the first studies,” he adds, “but there have been several other studies, larger studies, that have also confirmed that.”

In a study conducted at the University of Chicago on the effect of attitude on health, 200 telecommunication executives were observed as their companies were downsized. The health of the executives who saw change as an opportunity for growth fared much better than those who saw it as a threat. Fewer than a third of the executives who had a positive attitude contracted a serious illness during or soon after the downsizing. But executives who saw downsizing as a personal threat had more than a 90 per cent likelihood of becoming severely ill.
Feeling stressed is something everyone can relate to. What’s stressful, though, is an individual matter. A situation that stresses one person may feel exhilarating to someone else and go entirely unnoticed by another.

Boredom has negative effects on your health, also, because of its lack of challenge and mental stimulation. Fatalism has a negative effect too. According to an article published recently in the Washington Post, researchers “stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn’t hold such fatalistic views.

“The high risk of death, in other words, had nothing to do with the usual heart disease culprits—age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight,” the article states. “Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.”

If we convince ourselves that we’re going to develop a particular illness or that we’re going to die, we increase our chances of doing exactly that. The article further points out that surgeons are wary of patients who are convinced they’re going to die, because almost 100 per cent of them actually do.

It may seem that your health is at the mercy of your feelings, but the fact is that you have greater control over them than you might suppose—and there are definite ways you can exercise that control. One is to spend as much time as possible around positive, happy people. Another is to spend as little time as possible around negative, anxious or angry people.

Support groups can make an enormous difference in your life too. And there are a variety of such groups dealing with various problems and illnesses. In a study at Stanford University, researchers found that cancer patients who were in support groups stayed in remission longer and lived longer.

When you feel overwhelmed by anxiety, anger, depression or lack of interest in what’s going on around you, it helps to know that you can talk to someone who will listen, someone who may be able to point you in a better direction—a friend, a member of the clergy, or a doctor or therapist. Sometimes what you need most is simply to know that you’ve been heard, that someone cares, and that you are not alone with your problems.

Religious faith has an enormous effect on your attitude. It can make you more generous and openhearted toward others and toward yourself, too. It helps to look for what’s good and uplifting so that you focus more on the positive.

Regular exercise works wonders. It defuses stress and strengthens your cardiovascular and immune systems while it makes you feel better about yourself.

Prayer, meditation or simply relaxing while listening to soothing music helps. So does pursuing a hobby—gardening, painting or cooking, for example. Hobbies give you something else to concentrate on, something to enjoy that shows positive results. And that gives your spirit a much-needed respite.

It’s important to develop an attitude of optimism. Even when a situation or circumstance looks bleak, sad or painful, there will be at least some small thing in the situation that can offer hope or something to smile about. By practising looking for what’s uplifting, you will find it more often.

And then there is humour—one of the most important weapons in a person’s attitude arsenal. Humour impacts your health in a number of ways, says Steven M Sultanoff, a clinical psychologist in Irvine, California, and past president of the Association of Applied and Therapeutic Humour. “Humour stimulates laughter. And we know that physiological stimulation through laughter leads to a number of health benefits. It appears to reduce stress; it tends to boost immunoglobulin A (an antibody that fights upper respiratory disease); and it tends to boost killer T-cells, which are antibodies that fight infection.

“Through laughter we get a physiological stimulation. Humour also stimulates us through what I call mirth, which is an emotional experience,” Sultanoff adds. There’s an enormous amount of research showing that people who have chronically distressing emotions, such as anger, depression or anxiety, suffer a negative health impact from them. “The research, particularly on heart disease, is very dramatic,” Sultanoff says. “People who are chronically angry and hostile are four to five times more likely to have a heart attack than people who are not.

“There’s dramatic research that shows that the distressing emotions lead to bad health, and the experience of humour replaces distressing emotions. So, for example, you may have had a time in your life when you were really angry with someone, and they did something to make you laugh. In that moment you said, ‘Don’t make me laugh. I want to be angry.’ The experience of humour displaces the distressing emotion.”

Humour also has a positive effect on health in the way that it affects your attitude. “Humour changes attitude through what I call wit,” Sultanoff continues. “There’s a particular element of perspective that’s provided by humour that relieves us of a potential health distress. So instead of seeing everything as negative, all of a sudden you see it in perspective.”
Something worth cultivating is the ability to see humour in even small, everyday things. One of Sultanoff’s favourite examples is a sign on the freeway on the way into San Diego. “It says ‘Cruise Ships Use Airport Exit.’ So how many cruise ships do you think there are on the freeway?” he asks.” And why would they use the airport exit?”
Sultanoff concludes, “Another important thing people can do is to learn one humorous thing—a story in their life, or a joke or anything funny—that they can share with others. There is something in the sharing of humour that rekindles one’s own experience. The complement to that is to have a humour buddy—someone who can share something funny with you every day or so.”

Considering how important humour and laughter are to the state of health, they are both worth cultivating. So are faith, love, friendship and pleasure in the small things of everyday life. All of these are within our reach. And all pay big health dividends.

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