“new age” idea to a respectable scientific hypothesis.
Today David Spiegel is associate director of the Department of
Psychiatry at Stanford University, and one of the best-known
academic psychiatrists.
When asked to explain his unusual findings, he said:
“Feelings you can’t express become an internal obstacle. They
use up resources we don’t completely understand. Expressing
and accepting them stops using these resources to keep them
out of awareness. How that translates in how the body fights
illness is still a mystery but I’ve come to believe it does, and we
are beginning to understand the mechanisms.”14Since then, other studies have tested this same hypothesis. Four had
results comparable to Stanford’s. Six observed no effect.
Why happiness impacts more than ‘just’ your mental health...
We now know that stress causes hormones to be released to
activate your body’s “emergency” response (such as the
inflammatory response), which can facilitate the growth and
spread of tumors.
What’s more... at the same time, stress slows down any functions
that can possibly be “put on hold” — like digestion, tissue repair, and
immune system maintenance. Stress causes the body to put aside all
those needs while it deals with the “crisis.” And that’s what chronic
stress is: a feeling of continually being in crisis, under attack, pushed
to the wall.
During the past 20 years, a cutting edge new medical field has begun
studying the specific link between psychological factors and your
immune system function. It’s called psychoneuroimmunology. It
connects the dots between psychology, neurology, and immunology.