Ep 11a. Understanding the Mind-Body Connection: How Thoughts & Emotions Affect Physical Health & Vice Versa (Part 1 of 2)

Welcome to Content Series 1! Today, I'll delve into the fascinating topic of the Mindbody Connection. 

In Part 1, discover how mental states like worry, sadness, and anger manifest in physical symptoms. I'll explain the intertwined nature of our thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations and why recognizing this connection is crucial for overall well-being. Learn about the historical split of the mind and why this mindbody data is so important to pay attention to.

In Part 2, we dive deeper into how to find root causes of chronic pain and other symptoms using this concept. We'll explore how the introduction of fMRI technology in the 1990s shifted our understanding of Chronic pain, and we'll explore ways to reverse engineer your discomfort and decrease unwanted symptoms.
 
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 00:00   Introduction to the Mindbody Connection
 01:50   Defining the Mindbody Connection
 03:18   Historical Perspective on Mind-body Separation
 06:24   Modern Medicine and Symptom Relief
 08:37   Everyday Examples of Mindbody Interactions
 12:53   Scientific Studies and Awareness
 13:44   Recognizing and Addressing Sensations
 15:09   Personal Story and Conclusion
 17:03   Next Steps and Additional Resources
 
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 REFERENCES - 2 Studies that were mentioned:
 - Bayer, Timothy L., Paul E. Baer, Charles Early. "Situational and psychophysiological factors in psychologically induced pain", Pain 44,no.1 (1991): 45-50
 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030439599190145N
 - Nummenmaa, Lauri, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, Jari K Hietanen. "Bodily maps of emotions", Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2014 Jan 14;111(2):646-51
 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24379370/

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Education and techniques discussed in this Podcast originate from many sources, countless hours of research, training, and self-healing unless otherwise noted.

Music credit: MomotMusic, Kyrylo Momot
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Disclaimer: Information provided by Migraine Oasis & Karen Ash is for general informational & educational purposes only & is not a substitute for medical advice, psychotherapy, or counselling. Utilizing any of the education, strategies, or techniques in the podcast is done at your own risk. Consult with a physician before engaging in any suggested movements. If in immediate danger, call a local emergency number or go to the nearest emergency room.

Transcript

0:51

Welcome to series one. What we're going to be talking about today is the mind body connection. Have you ever wondered how you can get a stomach ache after a lot of worrying? Your digestive track in your body has actually been affected by your mental worry and thoughts. It's strange, right? Or have you ever had a situation where you have had sad thoughts and the tear ducts in your eyes actually open and a substance comes out of your eyes, tears. What happens when, if you get really angry and you just feel flushed and maybe your chest gets tight. All these things are the mind body connection at work. We're going to be talking in two parts today. The first part I want to just explain what this mind body connection is, the definition, how it's showing up in your life each day, why it matters to your overall well being, how our mind and body somehow got separated in modern times, and ultimately how to recognize the sensations that are coming up and what to do with that data, because it's really important data that you can work with in order to reverse sensations that are not so pleasant, like chronic pain and other symptoms. In part two, we'll get more into how it ties back to chronic pain, migraine, all other symptoms that you may have. We'll talk about how this could be a root cause actually of your symptoms and what to do to ultimately reverse engineer what's going on currently to help you either eliminate or greatly reduce your pain and symptoms. By the way, if we haven't met yet, I'm Karen Ash. I am the founder of Migraine Oasis brand, and I help people to learn about this mind body connection, the root causes of their symptoms, and to help people with the latest neuroscience get out of chronic pain and symptoms. Let's first go into what this mind body connection is. And essentially, at the just very basic definition, it means that our thoughts, our emotions, and our physical sensations are all very interconnected. They're tied together, they're interchangeable, they're constantly in communication with each other, and there's no separation between the mind and the body. Mind and the body are one system working together at all times and essentially make up this human being that we are. Our emotions and mental state can actually change the physiology of our body. That's major. And vice versa. The things that are going on in our body can actually change the mental state that we're in. So if it's chronic pain that we're in, that's obviously going to change our mental state. We're going to be upset. We might be frustrated. All these different things happen in the mind then. It's all connected and more than connected, it's interconnected. It's just intimately interwoven, both of them. You can't separate them. And on a side note , you'll see me writing mindbody as one word. I know that's not grammatically correct, actually, I do know that, but it actually is this sense of, I want to mush it together because it is all one. And that is, I'm consciously doing that. So if that drives you crazy, sorry, but that is why I don't hyphenate the word mindbody. Modern medicine has tended to split out our mind from our body. And this concept might sound abstract to you right now, but I'm going to get into a lot of examples. You may be very clear that when you get embarrassed, you blush, or when you have worry, your stomach hurts. This is clear, but we don't really tend to think about it all that much or how it's impacting us or how we can actually reverse this. I think that's happening for a couple different reasons. One, we're in a modern lifestyle that is just so busy and we're constantly distracted. So we're really not listening to our bodies all that much. And if we are, and if we feel something, we just don't know what to do about it. So that's one piece of the puzzle. The second part is, this is being reinforced through the medical system that really separates the mind and the body and not really looking at our true well -being in this holistic manner. It's very fragmented. From the very beginning of times, we've had a very, holistic approach, actually. If you think back 5, 000 years of traditional Chinese medicine and this energy force or this yin and the yang energy and the qi running through our bodies, everything is interconnected, or Ayurveda from India, or indigenous people of all kinds, all nations have been very in -tune with the environment that were in for our well being. Using nature and animals and all these different things to keep us, holistically well. This changed dramatically with the turn of the century of late 1800s, beginning of 1900s, where Sigmund Freud had come up with psychoanalysis. Now there's been plenty of other psychiatrists that have done great work. This is the one I'm pinpointing because a lot of people know of him and he did really make a big difference. When Freud came up with this psychoanalysis, this split out the mind from the body. So if you then had any issues with your mental state, you would go to a psychiatrist and it would be talk therapy. Whereas if you had a problem with the body, you would go to your physician. And that split out further from specialists. You would go to a neurologist if you had the migraine. If something was wrong with the eyes, go to an ophthalmologist. If there was something with your kidneys, maybe a urologist or a nephrologist. There was all these different Physicians that you go to. And now in modern times, we have many different either physicians, therapists, alternative medicine that all have a piece of the puzzle. We're the only ones with the full picture, but we're not really sometimes empowered to or feel empowered that we are in the driver's seat of our health and well-being. We've kind of outsourced that a little bit to all these different fractions of doctors. But we have to remember, they only know a piece of the puzzle. So this kind of goes back to the fact of when we go back to the mind body connection, when we go back to the roots of all this, it is a more holistic approach. And that's what I'm trying to get across to you as well. One of the other things that's going on is that we are so busy and if we think, Oh, I'm stressed out and this is a symptom of being stressed, we don't really know what to do. What does that actually mean? If we have an ache or a pain, we're just very quick to take a pain pill or an ibuprofen. If something comes up and we have an upset stomach, we're quick to take the medication to alleviate that. Or say we have a tight muscle, we take a muscle relaxant or we put on some lotion this muscle relaxant type of thing. So we're very quick to want symptom relief and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, there's a lot of data that is going on underneath the surface that has a root cause of why some of these things are happening. If we were just listening to this mind body connection. If our symptom relief doesn't work at home, then we're going to the doctor to try to get a stronger medication or something that will help to alleviate the problem. Their main task is to give you symptom relief. And that is really what modern medicine is currently about getting to the root cause underneath everything is typically either not known how to do because there's a lot of things right now going on with us that nobody can explain. Nobody can explain why migraine happens there's so many different varying beliefs of why a migraine would even happen or why does pain become chronic when the body actually heals itself so it's not actually the broken ankle anymore but why does it still hurt a year later, that doesn't make sense. Physically, it doesn't make sense. There's all these different issues going on right now. And a lot of the doctors don't know about certain things like nociplastic or neuroplastic pain and symptoms. That's going to be another whole series on that. And so without understanding how your mind and your thoughts and your emotions are connected to what's physically showing up in the body. This is one way we can start to advocate for ourselves and start to understand, Oh, okay, this may be underlying. Let me take a look at this. You can actually change symptoms. And I'll go into more on how I've done that. Let's now get into a couple examples of what's going on from the time that you get out of bed until the time that you go to sleep, even in your sleep, you are having mind body connections. sensations, whatever you want to call them. So the alarm goes off and maybe your jaw clenches because you know that alarm signifies that you have to get up and go to a job that you don't really like. You're like, Oh, or you're just not ready to get up and it just clenches your jaw or maybe tenses your shoulder a little bit. It's subtle. It can be very, very subtle, these things. Maybe there's a little ache in your back as you get out of bed for the same reason. Okay, maybe you didn't sleep well, but maybe it's because you know what you're having to get up and go do, and you don't really want to go do that. So maybe it's the mind body connection of the thought that comes into your head and instantaneously there is a physical sensation. More simplified versions are you get embarrassed during the day and your cheeks flush or you're getting ready to go into a meeting and you're nervous about it and your shoulders get tight. You get bad news and you feel a clench in your stomach. You're contemplating some information and you frown. You're thinking, but the frown comes, a physical. Maybe you get a warm feeling in your chest when someone gives you a compliment or somebody hugs you or you come home and your child shows you something that they've done at school that day. It's the butterflies in your stomach when you get nervous, and if that nervousness prolongs and you have a lot of worrying thoughts, then the stomach aches, then maybe the diarrhea start to progress and it's the headaches that maybe come about when you're really stressed out and you have a lot on your plate or there's something that you don't want to do a family event or a work trip that you really don't want to go to and it's just creating symptoms within the body that come out and eventually can become chronic and we'll go into that in the second part of the series. There are a hundred things going on all day long every day. These just subtle little things that are happening each time either something's said, you think something, an emotion comes out, there's all these physical sensations that are going on within the body. and vice versa. You get a little pain in your knee and right away the thought goes to, Oh no, what did I do? What happened? Maybe you're in the gym and you feel a little shoulder pain when you lift a weight. Right away the brain is thinking, Uh oh, you know, did I damage something? So it works in both ways. We even have common phrases in our vocabulary for this. If you say something like, I'm so heartbroken over that. Think about that. Your thoughts on something feel physically like you're heartbroken over something. If you lose a loved one, your chest and your heart feel broken. Another one is, Oh, he makes me so sick. He makes me sick to my stomach. You've heard that one before, or he's a pain in my ass, neck. There's a lot of different ways you could say that one. You're giving me a headache. What does that mean? Somebody is doing something that's upsetting you and causing you a headache, or it might not actually be a physical headache, but there's vocabulary in our day to day speech that is reflective of this mind body connection. You could say, I'm so tired of this. Something is physically just exhausting you because of what you're going through, what you're mentally going through, what you're physically going through, but it's exhausting the body and the mind. She got cold feet. You've heard of this one, probably, or I'm so nervous, I have butterflies or I'm excited, I have butterflies. Some other ones are, Oh, I got a shiver down my spine on that. Something was creepy or something, or, Oh, I got goosebumps.. I have a gut feeling about that, or I have a good vibe about that. There's so many ways that we express this, even in our day to day talk. I don't think you probably need scientific proof over this because I think it just makes sense. People generally understand the concept and it makes sense. But there are two studies that I want to talk about briefly and I'll have them linked in the show notes. One is that actual thoughts can produce pain. If you think you're going to be in pain, they've done studies where physical pain results only through thoughts. It's unbelievable. The other one is a heat map of emotions that they've done a study on, and it was pretty universal across cultures that where the emotion was showing up in the body. So they could actually map out where anger showed up in the body or where happiness and joy. And again, that's a thought and emotion that is coming up within the body. As I said at the beginning, this data has a lot of value for us. We can actually use this data , these sensations, if we are looking for them. Step one would be this awareness. Now you're maybe a little bit more aware than you were before, I think what the key of this is, is that you have to slow yourself down a bit. So there's a little tweak in my hip or the tight chest or whatever's going on. And you don't really notice it if, like I was talking about before, we're so busy in this life that, you're just. running by and it's just like, Oh yeah, okay, whatever. It doesn't matter. But I'm telling you, it does matter because there's data behind this, that if you can understand, and this is step two, if you can understand, okay, I just got this tinge in my knee. Hmm. Okay. There's nothing wrong with my knee. I didn't physically do anything to my knee. Um, What could that be? And you start to look back on what were the thoughts that I was just having right now? What were the emotions that were going on right now? Did I get an email that upset me? Did somebody say something that affected me? Did I feel unseen, unheard, uh, unworthy in some way? Did I feel anger? Did I feel misunderstood, judged, all these different things, these emotion and thoughts. What was going on at the time that you feel this? This comes up with migraines. This comes up with back pain. This is when you get a stomach tinge. What is it actually that's going on around that time? And once you're able to uncover that, you can start to see the patterns. Once you start to see the patterns, you can start doing something about that. I've got a story that I'll go into in the next section , when I had cured myself of chronic migraine, I was feeling pretty good and I was getting ready to go to Florida to see my parents I really didn't want to make the trip for a million different reasons. Right before this trip, I was getting excruciating back pain. And the second trip happened by the third trip it didn't happen anymore because I was onto the pattern. I understood why it was coming. I understood what my emotions were and what was going on to cause it. And was able to actually reverse engineer it. And that's what I'm here to try to tell you about. In the next section, what we're going to talk about is once you do have sensations that maybe are not pleasant, how to reduce them and even potentially eliminate them through this mind body connection and working with this data that you are mining like gold because it's telling you it's your body talking to you. It's the messages that your body is giving you that something's not right with the way you feel. Something is off with you authentically. We start building this knowledge, this data library of the body's communication with us. When we are triggered by something or something is going against our values, we're feeling unhappy about something or, dismissed about something. So it's all this information that's coming up that we can then work with to, learn about ourselves first of all, the triggers are great to understand what's going on with us. And then working backwards to alleviate the problem at the source so that it doesn't happen anymore. So that you can change the thoughts, change the feelings, change the emotions, or neutralize them in some way so that this is not a physical sensation that comes, if that makes a little bit more sense. So I'll see you in part two. If you are interested in finding out more about how this goes into more on symptoms and chronic pain. If you're ready to stop now, I'm so glad that you've joined. If you want more information on the mind body connection in general, I've got a lot over at migraine oasis on Instagram, and it's all categorized in series one. So look for this teal color on series one and you'll find information there. Please like, follow, do all the things to help the algorithm for me to get this information out to more people. If you found this helpful and comment, engaged in discussion wherever you can with me, also got a Facebook group. If you do have migraine or chronic pain and symptoms, you can go over there. It's called Migraine Oasis Private Group and we can chat in that aspect as well. So thanks so much. And let's get into part two.