How Mental Health Impacts Physical Health: Can Negative Thoughts Lead to Illness?
How Your Thoughts Impact Your Physical Body
Our mind and body are always communicating and working with one another collaboratively.
When you touch a hot stove, your body lets your mind know that the stove is hot, so you quickly pull your hand away. It happens so quickly and naturally that you’re not even aware of the connection between the mind and body. This process happens through the nervous system; signals are sent through the spinal cord to help you in making decisions.
Your mind can also impact your body through thought alone. Every single thought that you have leads to a chemical reaction in the brain.
Chemical reactions in the brain alter how the brain functions. These chemical reactions can then further impact your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
This can then go on to impact your physical body in a variety of different ways.
Can Mental Illness Lead to Physical Illness?
Many people are unaware or don’t recognize anxiety or depression until it manifests physically into the body through stomach aches, headaches, insomnia, joint pain, injury, and much more.
For example, one of the ways anxiety develops (mental state) is with our body’s survival response in the nervous system, called the fight or flight response. This response raises cortisol levels to get you to react quickly to protect yourself from perceived threats in the environment (physical state).
Additionally, the body responds physically to your mental state by:
sending blood out to the limbs
limiting blood to the organs
breathing faster
Increasing heart rate & blood pressure
Suppressing the immune system
Your body responds this way in order to put all of the body’s effort into survival, escaping, or fighting. The connection between the mind and body here is that your mind perceives a threat (mental state) and your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing increases (physical state).
Another example of the connection of physical and mental health is shown on those struggling with depression; studies show that when someone with existing depression gets physically ill, this results in prolonged healing time and more severity of the illness than someone who wasn’t struggling with depression.
Depression itself can even put these individuals at higher risk of certain chronic illnesses. Depression is linked to diabetes, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, strokes, and more.
Even more sadly, the mortality rate is higher for those with heart disease and cancer if the patient also struggles with depression or other mental health disorders.
When your body remains in a poor mental state longterm, it can more heavily impact your body.
These physical impacts from poor mental health aren’t typically seen immediately, but instead gradually over time. Because the negative effects don’t happen right away, it’s easy to ignore these future consequences or not even make a connection between the two at all.
These physical impacts from mental health may start small:
Inflammation
Changes in heart rate, blood circulation, blood pressure
Digestive issues
Metabolic changes
And then build up gradually to more severe physical illness:
Injury
Heart disease, strokes
Stomach ulcers
Diabetes
These physical impacts from poor mental health, over time, lead to a decrease in overall life expectancy.
What are the Causes for This?
It’s important to understand that thought alone doesn’t appear to directly be cause physical illness, but it can lead down a path of illness if left unaddressed.
Most of the physical illnesses that develop from poor mental health come from the actions that a person does or doesn’t take in response to their mental health.
The following are some of the causes for physical illness manifesting from poor mental health.
Coping Mechanisms
Those who struggle with mental health are more prone to partaking in unhealthy behaviors that are used as a coping mechanism. These coping mechanisms are typically discovered and developed from the environment (we’ll talk about that shortly), so it’s important to also pay attention to the environment when discussing coping mechanisms.
Oftentimes the unhealthy behaviors are what leads to illness, not just poor mental health alone. Some of these behaviors may be sedentary lifestyles, smoking, drinking, and/or overeating.
That said, it is ignorant to shame others who are struggling with these poor coping mechanisms because it is our body’s natural response to find the quickest solution for mental or physical pain, even if logically these habits lead to more severe consequences down the line. Neither our brain nor our body is concerned with future consequences as much as its concerned with current pain, which is why a large number of people struggling with mental health also struggle with unhealthy habits and possible addiction.
Daily Needs Aren’t Being Met
Living with untreated mental health conditions makes it harder to take care of daily needs.
If someone who is battling poor mental health (which is also physically draining on the body), the impact over time leads to less and less ability to take care of basic needs. It may start out with skipping a shower or two to try and conserve mental and physical energy or skipping the gym a few days because leaving bed feels challenging enough. When hygiene needs, nutritional needs, and sleep needs aren’t being met, this impacts the immune system, metabolism, and essentially every function of our physical body.
Some ways that you can help yourself when struggling is to create more accountability for yourself and make getting these tasks done easier for you.
For example, if you’re struggling to get yourself up to go grocery shopping for healthy food, it may be easy to just order food delivery. But its almost just as easy to order curbside pick-up for your groceries.
If you’re struggling with remembering to take your medication or vitamins, you can set reminders on your phone or sticky notes on your mirror. You can do this with doctor’s appointments as well or just about anything you need reminded about!
If you’re struggling to get yourself to the gym, you can hire a personal trainer as an accountability step to encourage you to show up and move your body.
You can also ask a close friend, family member, or therapist to hold you accountable to self care.
Unhealthy Environment
Oftentimes part of what triggers these systems in our body to be on alert is our own environment. This can be the workplace or home life, which is challenging to just up and change.
Fortunately, there are small adjustments that can be made which can positively impact your environment (and mental state) despite this. You can add color, light, inspiring images, motivational quotes, and more to your surroundings to make the environment more uplifting.
Other environmental factors are who you choose to interact with. Choosing to spend time with uplifting people and removing yourself from toxic social circles is also impactful. An easy way to start putting yourself in more positive environments is by listening to encouraging YouTube videos, podcasts, songs, or join social support groups.
There was a study where one group of people sat in a hospital bed staring into a dark, gloomy room while the other group sat in a hospital bed with windows, sun, and scenery to look at. The recovery time for the second group with the positive environment healed quicker than the first group that didn’t have the windows and scenery. Don’t underestimate the power of your environment and who you surround yourself with.
Can Improving Your Mental Health Lead to Improvements in Physical Health?
If poor mental health can lead to poor physical health, then certainly the opposite can be true? And it is! Not only can a healthy mind lead to a healthy body; when working on improving one, it often helps to improve the other!
For example, cancer patients have been seen to consistently improve physical pain, nausea, vomiting, and mental health through guided imagery. Guided imagery is when a person uses all of their senses (taste, smell, touch, sound, etc) to imagine positive scenarios and outcomes you hope to achieve. You can use guidance through videos, podcasts, or music to help get you into this mental state. Participating in mindfulness and visualization techniques relieves both the mental and physical symptoms that come with anxiety and depression.
In fitness, we call this “mind-muscle” connection - when the act of simply thinking about performing the movement well (mental state) actually creates better activation throughout the muscle (physical state). Visualization and imagery techniques have repeatedly been shown to be powerful in strengthening both the mental and physical state of the body and is a technique used by highly successful athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.
In fact, focusing on improving your mental state can be so powerful that WebMD even stated in an article, “A study found that positive psychological well-being can reduce the risks of heart attacks and strokes.” So truly, your mental and physical health depend on one another; working on your mental well-being leads to positive impacts on your physical health and vice versa.
How to Begin Healing Your Mind and Body
Physical activity and exercise
Nutrition
Quality sleep
Meditation, visualization, and relaxation techniques
Work with a therapist
Community and support groups
If you’re struggling with both your physical and mental health, be patient with yourself as you work on making small improvements in one of the areas above. If you’re looking for a place to start, you can join our support group here: Facebook Support Group.
While struggling with mental health can lead to physical illness down the line, it’s important to know that you have the ability to take back control. Be patient with yourself and remember that even the smallest changes over time are positively impactful.
Sources:
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-happens-when-you-think-468861
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REtcF5qjm7Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REtcF5qjm7Q
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/070674379904400205
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/chronic-illness-mental-health
https://www.thedailybeast.com/you-can-heal-yourself-with-your-mind-for-real
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0702413104
