Countdown Reason #43: An Exciting New Area of Scientific Research Has Been Taking Off – Yet Most of us Know Nothing About It!
As I started my quest for The Last Best Cure, I interviewed neuroscientists and pioneers in the brain-body field in hopes of learning everything I could about how we can search for joy despite a persistent history of pain, loss or illness. We know that stress, pain, fear and fatigue — whether they stem from emotional or physical challenges — break down our brain, bodies and cellular health: Parents who experience the death of a child are twice as likely to develop multiple sclerosis as parents who don’t experience such heartbreak.[i] Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that stress hormones hasten the progression of Alzheimer’s.[ii] Stressful emotions cause asthmatics to have more severe reactions to allergic irritants.[iii] Women who face what researchers call “marital strain,” and who fear voicing their opinions to their husbands, are four times likely to die compared to other married women.[iv] Anyone in an unhappy marriage is more likely to experience a heart attack.[v] And at Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, researchers have discovered that sudden emotional stress can cause “broken heart” syndrome, producing symptoms similar to a typical heart attack, including chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure – especially in women.[vi] Worry a lot, fifty years old, and female? You have a greater chance of experiencing severe hot flashes in menopause.[vii] States of emotional and physical stress do real and lasting damage. But as I set out to write The Last Best Cure one promising new area of research leapt out at me. It’s called “psychoneuroimmunology.” Psychoneuroimmunology is the study of how our mental and emotional state, the very way we think and act, causes shifts in how our immune system functions, affecting, in turn, our cellular health and activity, and even our DNA. Neurobiologists at the best research institutes across the world were finding stunning new ways to peer inside the body — and show how when we practice specific approaches that change our state of mind, we can activate robust healing responses in the brain, making us not only feel better, but triggering lasting biological changes in our physical bodies and cells. Suddenly, “mind-body research” had taken a quantum leap. Study after study shows that when we engage in practices that help to redirect our mental state away from anxiety, fear and pain, and toward contentment, joy, and well-being, our levels of inflammatory biomarkers and stress hormones – those linked to a range of diseases including fibromyalgia, digestive illnesses, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, depression, chronic pain and cancer – profoundly decrease. We feel and do better. We enhance our overall physical health and our ability to heal. If feeling more joy and well-being and feeling better physically are so deeply and inextricably linked, then we owe it to ourselves to seek out strategies to improve our emotional state, and thereby maximize our brain’s own healing response. I wanted to find out everything I could about how our mental and emotional state, the very way we think and act, could impact our ability to heal — and our overall physical health. Not just for myself, but for everyone who suffers from life challenges or chronic conditions — or who simply wants to retain their good health. Here’s what excites me so much: this is an entirely new way of looking at the mind-body connection. For years, we’ve known how potent the mind-body connection is – but we haven’t been able to peer into the body to see exactly how or why engaging in specific practices can activate healing aspects of the brain and help prevent or relieve suffering. Now we can. We really can. My quest to find The Last Best Cure has been all about finding out how to do just that — and sharing every strategy I test-drove with you. Sources: [i] Neurology. 2004 Mar 9;62(5):726-9. The risk of multiple sclerosis in bereaved parents: A nationwide cohort study in Denmark, Li J Danish Epidemiology Science Centre, Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, University of Aarhus, Denmark. jl@soci.au.dk [ii] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/uoc–ssh082906.php# http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16943563 [iii] Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2005 Sep 13;102(37):13319-24. Epub 2005 Sep 2. Neural circuitry underlying the interaction between emotion and asthma symptom exacerbation. Rosenkranz MA, [iv] Eaker, E.D., Sullivan, L.M., Kelly-Hayes, M., D’Agostino, R.B., Sr., and Benjamin, E.J. (2007). Marital status, marital strain and the risk of coronary heart disease or total mortality: The Framingham Offspring Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 69, 509-513. [v] De Vogli, R., Chandola, T., & Marmot, M. G. (2007). Negative Aspects of Close Relationships and Heart Disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 167, 1951-1957. [vi] J Cardiovasc Nurs. 2011 Mar 2. Distinguishing a Heart Attack From the “Broken Heart Syndrome” (Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy) Nussinovitch U, Goitein O, Nussinovitch N, Altman A. [vii] Monitor on Psychology, Menopause, the makeover By Tori DeAngelis, March 2010, Vol 41, No. 3. Print version: page 40. Psychologists are helping women sidestep the stereotypes associated with menopause and transform this developmental passage into a vital new phase of life. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/03/menopause.aspx
Countdown Reason # 44: I Went in Search of Answers Because of My Conversations With You
I’ve been listening to what you have to say. For years, as I’ve traveled around giving talks, and as I’ve corresponded with many of you by email, I’ve heard your message, loud and clear. Pain, fatigue and fear, so many of you have confided to me, are terribly distracting. They narrow our bandwidth to the point that joy can’t get in. Not long before I started writing The Last Best Cure I gave a lecture at a hospital conference on wellness, and afterwards a lovely, fortysomething woman confided to me that she was a recent breast cancer survivor. She was doing well, she said. “Well enough.” Then she put her hand on my arm and said, “Only it’s as if I’ve been standing at a window for too long, watching others savor a fullness – a joy — in living I’m afraid I’ll never know again.” Like so many with chronic health challenges, she appeared to be perfectly fine. But appearances can be deceiving. Statistics from the Census bureau tell us that 96 percent of us who manage a chronic health issue have an illness that has no surface manifestation—no cane, cast, bandages or obvious signs of pain. I signed her book and never saw her again. But her words stayed with me. Every time my “want to do” list — as a mom, a wife, a writer — exceeded my physical stamina, I realized that I, too, was pretending to be “well enough.” I, too, felt robbed of my sense of joy. I didn’t want to live that way. The Last Best Cure was born out of my own personal frustration to find more tools in the toolkit for healing and well-being – for myself and for you. So many of you have shared your stories with me of searching for joy and well-being despite chronic health challenges. I’ve been inspired by your determination and courage. Tomorrow I’ll tell you a little bit about the research that made me realize we could find our way back to joy again — savor a fullness, a joy in living — even in the face of chronic conditions.
Countdown Reason # 45: More Adults Suffer From Chronic Health Problems than Ever Before, Numbers are Rising, and More Women Suffer Than Men
It’s hard to believe that after my year-long journey exploring the newest neuroscience on how to activate the healing responses of the brain, The Last Best Cure will finally be in stores in 45 days! As pub date grows closer, I’ve been thinking a lot about how essential taking this journey is – for every one of us. And every day I’ll be posting another reason why we know that our brain is our last best cure — and why having this tool in our toolkit for healing matters for all of us. Countdown Reason # 45: “More Adults Suffer From Chronic Health Problems than Ever Before, Numbers are Rising, and More Women Suffer Than Men” Today I was looking over some of the research that inspired me to go on a quest to research and write The Last Best Cure. One study really got my attention. Today in the United States, 133 million Americans – one out of two adults — suffer from at least one chronic condition. These include back pain, irritable bowel and digestive disorders, arthritic conditions, migraines, thyroid disease, autoimmune diseases, depression and mood disorders, cancer, Lyme’s disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic pain. Experts predict that these numbers, which have been rising steadily by more than one percent a year, will rise 37% by 2030. And most of us are women. We’re more likely than men to suffer from migraines and lower pack pain, twice as likely to suffer from depression, irritable bowel disease and arthritis. And if you’ve been following my work over the past few years, you already know that women are three times more likely than men to suffer from autoimmune diseases including lupus, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disorders. Ninety percent of fibromyalgia sufferers are women. And women are more likely to suffer from a compilation of chronic conditions than are men. Lupus and migraines. Back pain and fibromyalgia and irritable bowel. Recently, I sat at a conference on women’s health issues, where we discussed chronic diseases with noted physicians in a variety of fields. “Walk into any of our waiting rooms and it’s full of women in their thirties, forties and fifties,” said the director of one clinic. “The American woman in her prime is our prime patient; she’s the walking wounded of our day.” Around the table, a dozen heads nodded yes. How could I not do something to try to help all of us — women and men — who might count ourselves among “the walking wounded of our day?” I’m so grateful to my own physician, Anastasia Rowland-Seymour, at Johns Hopkins, who asked me to go on this journey with her, to investigate the growing and fascinating science pointing to the fact that our brain is our last best cure. More on why I took this journey to find The Last Best Cure and what I discovered tomorrow.
The Last Best Cure
Welcome to my new website and blog. I’m excited to announce my upcoming book, The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, and My Life, to be released by Hudson Street Press on February 21st, 2013. Writing this book has been a labor of love. For the past two years I’ve been following neuroscientists and pioneers in the brain-body field to learn everything I can about how we can activate powerful healing responses in our brain to help move toward wellness. In many ways The Last Best Cure is the natural progression to my last book, The Autoimmune Epidemic; the next chapter in my ongoing search to help the many readers who’ve reached out to me over the years in the hopes of finding healing even in the face of chronic health and life challenges. If you’re reading this, that may well include you. Look around my website to find out more about my journey to find The Last Best Cure. Let me know what you think. And if you will, tell me, what do you think about the idea that our brain might be our last best cure? Have you been wondering about that too? I’d love to hear your stories, your questions, your fears, your hopes.
