By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

 

Although most people still view being sick in terms of germs, catching a cold, and getting a flu shot, the question of who gets sick and who stays well is far more complex. Everyone is exposed to thousands of microbes a day, and some of these are disease-causing pathogens. But we have immunity to a wide range of pathogens, and although sickness is fended off by the cells of the immune system, staying well involves the whole person.

There is a medical concept known as “control by the host,” which focuses on how much of staying well is an internal process that calls upon both mind and body. The invisible roots of lifelong wellness turn out to be surprising. For example, researchers at the University of Texas Medical School looked at mortality rates among a group of men and women who had received open heart surgery, including heart bypass and replacement of the aortic valve. If you take the routine medical approach, the reason someone dies six months after open heart surgery while someone else doesn’t must come down to a physical difference. But the team headed by Dr. Thomas Oxman took an unorthodox approach. They asked these patients two questions about their social situation: Do you participate regularly in organized social groups? Do you draw strength and comfort from your religion or spiritual faith?

These are simple yes or no questions, and when assessing the answers, the researchers excluded the typical risk factors for dying after heart surgery, including age, severity of the disease, and severity of a previous heart attack. With these factors zeroed out, the findings were startling:

A person who answered Yes to both questions had less than a 5 percent chance of being dead six months after their surgery.

A person who answered No to both questions had between a 20 percent and 25 percent chance of being dead six months after the surgery.

Overall, being socially supported and taking comfort from your faith makes you seven times more likely to survive major heart surgery than someone who has neither of those things in their life. This outcome is almost certainly the only sevenfold difference in any risk for heart mortality, even bad cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, and a genetic history of heart attacks in the family. While asking somebody if they belong to social groups like a club or church is an objective measure, the question about religious or spiritual faith is entirely about how the persons feels.

In our new book, The Healing Self, Harvard Medical School professor Rudy Tanzi and I explore a new path to lifelong wellness that supercharges a person’s immunity.  We expand immunity to include mental and emotional states, which are now known to be absolutely critical.

For example, we all experience a sense of well-being from being loved, and even though the feeling is subjective, there are important implications for overall immunity. Is it really possible that your cells can feel loved, too? Before reacting to what seems like a ridiculous assertion, consider the following study:

Yale researchers looked at 119 men and 40 women who received the most accurate test for detecting blockages in the coronary arteries, known as coronary angiography. (It’s an anxiety-provoking procedure for many people, although relatively noninvasive. Typically a narrow catheter inserted in the forearm is threaded into the arteries of the heart. A dye is injected that will show up the interior of the artery using a CT or MRI scan. In this way the size of the vessel’s opening or blockage can be seen directly.) Patients who told the researchers that they felt loved and emotionally supported generally exhibited less blockage in their coronary arteries, the main cause of heart attacks and strokes.

There are other risk factors that predict the presence of heart disease, such as diet, exercise, smoking, and family history, but even when these were taken out of the equation, the feeling of being loved and emotionally supported was a predictor of who would have more or less arterial blockage. A study of 131 women in Sweden came to the same conclusion. But perhaps the most striking research was based on asking a single question. A team at Case Western Reserve University surveyed 10,000 married men with no history of angina pectoris, the typical chest pain associated with heart disease (although heart attacks can occur without this previous symptom).

As expected, the men who scored highest on the familiar risk factors for heart disease, such as high cholesterol, hypertension, and older age, were more than twenty times more likely to develop angina over the next five years. Then the researchers asked a simple question: “Does your wife show you her love?” The men who answered Yes were less likely to develop angina even when they had high scores on known risk factors. The reverse was also true. A man with high risk factors who said his wife didn’t show him her love was almost twice as likely to develop angina.

The lesson to learn is that wellness is a holistic state embracing mind and body. The one is just as critical as the other, because thanks to the mind-body connection, there is a constant exchange of information between body and mind, thoughts and cells. This fact can be the basis for a higher state of wellness that lasts a lifetime.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, and Super Genes. His latest book is The Healing Self co-authored with Deepak Chopra. He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Not getting enough sleep bothers many people, but it can’t be addressed alone. As a society, we’ve created a situation with sleep that works against the biorhythms governing the whole bodymind system. The sleep cycle is our most important biorhythm, yet it fits into the larger scheme of rest and activity that operates throughout the day. If you sit all day and get no significant exercise, you can wind up “too tired to go to sleep,” because the rhythm of sleep is connected with what you do during your waking hours. Research has shown how interlocked our need for rest and activity actually is. To keep your biorhythms synchronized, four elements must be present:

            Standing: Simple as it sounds, the human physiology depends on gravity. Seminal research in the 1930s showed that college athletes, when confined to bed for two weeks, lost months’ worth of muscle tone in their training. Standing up for only a few minutes a day keeps muscle tone intact. It also appears to aid in recovery from surgery, which is why patients are no longer advised to get constant bed rest in the hospital but encouraged instead to stand up and walk if they are able.

            Walking: Although exercise delivers more benefit the harder and more frequently you exercise, the baseline for activity is walking. Research has shown that the widest gap in levels of physical activity, medically speaking, occurs between those who take zero exercise and those who get up off the sofa and do something, no matter how meager. Walking is now a regular practice in recovery from serious illnesses and surgery.

            Rest: After heavy physical exertion, rest is necessary to replenish your muscles and restore internal balance—most people have no difficulty with this because they feel exhausted after heavy work or exercise. But the need for mental rest has only recently been taken seriously. If you equate mental rest with lethargy and dullness, that image is misleading. People who practice meditation, which among other things rests the mind, emerge with sharper alertness. Meditation doesn’t dull the mind or put the brain to sleep—there is actually increased brain activity (in alpha waves, for example, which are associated with creativity), resulting in a state previously unknown to neuroscience: restful alertness.

            Sleep: Researchers still don’t know why we need to sleep at all, except that undeniably we do. The most recent theory is that sleep allows the brain to rid itself of built-up toxins during the day. These include, during the deepest stage of sleep, the removal of senile plaques that can cause Alzheimer’s disease. It is also during deep sleep that we consolidate what we have learned all day as short-term memories into long-term memories. Without these activities, our brain (as well as the rest of our body) can undergo damage done by lack of sleep and poor sleep.

The first thing everyone notices when they spend a sleepless night is feeling tired and groggy in the morning, sometimes throughout the day. This becomes a constant complaint for chronic insomniacs, yet even when someone says, “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” in fact, controlled studies reveal that intermittent episodes of sleep do occur, even though they may be fitful and shallow. If someone is forced to literally stay awake the entire night in a sleep clinic laboratory, serious deficits begin to show up, such as lack of motor coordination and attention—these are common causes of motor vehicle accidents. Chemical imbalances start to show up, particularly in the flow of hormones, which are precisely balanced according to our circadian (daily) clock. Not getting enough sleep can disturb your appetite because the balance of leptin and ghrelin, the two hormones that govern hunger and satiation, has been throw off.

Our other biorhythms haven’t risen to the same importance, because something like not standing enough doesn’t lead to immediate deficits the way sleep deprivation does. In our new book, The Healing Self, we dive deep into the linkage between standing walking, resting and sleeping.  Here’s a list we came up with for positive changes in your biorhythms, consisting of things to do and things to stop doing. 

Our advice is to adopt only one item from either list, let it settle into your routine, and then add another item. 

DO

Stand up and move around once an hour if you are working at the computer or at a desk job.

Walk 5 minutes for every hour you work.

Take the stairs instead of the elevator.

Park your car far away in the lot when you shop or go to work.

Be regular in your sleep routine.

Make your bedroom an optimal sleeping environment that’s as silent and dark as possible.

Walk for 20 to 30 minutes in the evening.

Take 10 minutes of quiet alone time, preferably in meditation, twice today.

Spend more time with a physically active friend or family member.

 

UNDO

Replace 10 minutes of sofa time in front of the TV with a walk instead.

Break the habit of waiting until the weekend to catch up on lost sleep.

If you drink alcohol, do it early in the evening—go to bed without alcohol in your bloodstream.

Replace the midmorning coffee-and-doughnut break with a walk.

Walk to one place close by that you usually drive to.

Examine your excuses for not being more active.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self  co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, Super Genes and The Healing Self.  He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

 

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

If an epidemic is defined as a disease that affects whole populations without having a medical cure, then the epidemic of modern life is stress. Itself not a disease, stress instead leads to a breakdown in the body’s internal balance, or homeostasis, and from that point onward, if the stress isn’t relieved, damage occurs from within. Ironically, most modern people in a developed country do not experience acute stress, the kind that triggers a full-blown fight-or-flight response. There is no battlefront, civil war, rampant violent crime, or struggle over food and water to contend with.

Our epidemic is silent and hidden, in the form of low-level chronic stress. The natural purpose of the body’s stress response is to trigger heightened alertness and energy for a short period, a matter of minutes or at most an hour, when fighting or fleeing is a matter of survival. When stress becomes chronic, a “normal” way of life that people believe they have adapted to, stress hormones become a drip-drip in the background of the physiology, and over time, three stages of damage begin to appear:

Psychological and neural damage, which begins with minor things like feeling mentally tired and under pressure from deadlines at work. When people say they are stressed out, they generally mean that they’ve run out of energy, which can mask mental states like being depressed, anxious, or even panicky.

The next stage is behavioral. Negative changes in behavior are likely to manifest in two major areas, work and relationships. Stressful jobs make us respond with all kinds of behaviors, from office gossip to going out for a drink after work. As stress mounts, the drinking can get heavier, the need for distraction more severe. Inevitably we take our feelings home after work, where friction easily follows.

Eventually chronic stress leads to physical damage. When the body can’t completely adapt to stress, bad effects follow without being predictable. Most people will suffer from physical fatigue. Stomachaches, bad digestion, and headaches are likely. So is reduced immune response, leading to more colds and worsened allergies. After that, the problems will tend to be associated with inflammation, whose effects can travel anywhere. One person may experience skin eruptions, another irritable bowel syndrome, yet another a heart attack or stroke. By this stage, the damage caused by stress has led to serious system breakdown.

In our latest book, The Healing Self, we go into great detail about how to personalize your own stress-reduction program. But for everyone, there need to be conscious coping mechanisms in the face of everyday stress. Let’s say you’re at the airport and find out that your flight has been canceled. The airline won’t bring another airplane into service but tells you that you must wait five hours until a flight arrives that can accommodate you. With no alternative except to comply with the airline’s mistreatment, passengers look passive as they sit and wait, but on the inside many people will react (perhaps you) with the following responses: worry, complaining, and pessimism. All are self-defeating.

Worry is self-induced anxiety. It solves nothing and blocks the possibility of dealing with things more positively.

Complaining increases tension and anger. As a display of hostility, it encourages other people to act hostile in return.

Pessimism induces the illusion that a situation is hopeless and fosters the belief that expecting a bad outcome is always realistic, when in fact it isn’t.

If you see yourself in any of these behaviors and attitudes, you are fooling yourself into believing that you are adapting to stress. As your body experiences it, however, you have become the stressor yourself. That’s because an external event (canceled flight) must go through an internal interpretation before it triggers the stress response. Unlike a crisis like losing your job, a flight delay belongs in the category of everyday chronic stresses. Which means that you have a choice to respond. Worry, complaining, and pessimism are unconscious responses. People who are stuck in them have become the victims of old reactions that became glued in place because the person didn’t reevaluate them.

Some people handle a canceled flight better than others. Just as we gave you the “baby solution” for acute stress, here’s the “airport solution” for low-level everyday stress.

The “Airport Solution” to Chronic Stress

Detach yourself from the stressor. At the airport people do this by reading a book or finding a place to be alone.

Become centered. At the airport people do this when they shut their eyes to meditate.

Remain active. At the airport this means walking around instead of slumping in a chair and waiting.

Seek positive outlets. At the airport this might mean shopping, getting a chair massage, or going to a restaurant.

Rely on emotional support. At the airport the usual way to do this is by calling a friend or family member on the phone. (A short call announcing that you’ll be late won’t give you emotional support. The key is a conversation with someone meaningful in your life that lasts at least half an hour.)

Escape if you must. At the airport, if the airline’s behavior gets too outrageous, it saves your psychology to reschedule and go home. (Of course this not always practical or affordable.)

All of these things are positive adaptations, as opposed to the negativity of worry, complaining, and pessimism. They bring awareness into a situation where falling back on passive acceptance isn’t the right answer. Beneath the attitude of “I have to put up with it” lies stress. In most everyday situations you have the option of turning the situation around by interpreting it not as bad luck but as a non-stress, to which you respond by doing things you actually want to do, like meditating, connecting with a friend, or shopping. When you become adept at this turnaround, chronic stress is nipped in the bud. You cut short a process that otherwise would have affected your body and mind negatively.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, and Super Genes. He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”