As we enter 2022, this self training approach may just turn out to be the best way to boost the immune system and the happiest decision you ever make
The following written content from Jo Marchant
Researchers have struggled to identify how certain states of mind influence physical health. One biologist thinks he has an answer
When Steve Cole was a postdoc, he had an unusual hobby: matching art buyers with artists that they might like. The task made looking at art, something he had always loved, even more enjoyable. “There was an extra layer of purpose. I loved the ability to help artists I thought were great to find an appreciative audience,” he says.
At the time, it was nothing more than a quirky sideline. But his latest findings have caused Cole — now a professor at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California, Los Angeles — to wonder whether the exhilaration and sense of purpose that he felt during that period might have done more than help him to find homes for unloved pieces of art. It might have benefited his immune system too.
At one time, most self-respecting molecular biologists would have scoffed at the idea. Today, evidence from many studies suggests that mental states such as stress can influence health. Still, it has proved difficult to explain how this happens at the molecular level — how subjective moods connect with the vastly complex physiology of the nervous and immune systems. The field that searches for these explanations, known as psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), is often criticized as lacking rigour. Cole’s stated aim is to fix that, and his tool of choice is genome-wide transcriptional analysis: looking at broad patterns of gene expression in cells. “My job is to be a hard-core tracker,” he says. “How do these mental states get out into the rest of the body?”
With his colleagues, Cole has published a string of studies suggesting that negative mental states such as stress and loneliness guide immune responses by driving broad programs of gene expression, shaping our ability to fight disease. If he is right, the way people see the world could affect everything from their risk of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease to the progression of conditions such as HIV and cancer. Now Cole has switched tack, moving from negative moods into the even more murky territory of happiness. It is a risky strategy; his work has already been criticized as wishful thinking and moralizing. But the pay-off is nothing less than finding a healthier way to live.
“If you talk to any high-quality neurobiologist or immunologist about PNI, it will invariably generate a little snicker,” says Stephen Smale, an immunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is not affiliated with the Cousins Center. “But this doesn’t mean the topic should be ignored forever. Someday we need to confront it and try to understand how the immune system and nervous system interact.”
The best medicine?
In 1964, magazine editor Norman Cousins was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a life-threatening autoimmune disease, and given a 1 in 500 chance of recovery. Cousins rejected his doctors’ prognosis and embarked on his own program of happiness therapy, including regular doses of Marx Brothers films, and credited it with triggering a dramatic recovery. He later established the Cousins Center, which is dedicated to investigating whether psychological factors really can keep people healthy.
At the time, mainstream science rejected the idea that any psychological state, positive or negative, could affect physical well-being. But studies during the 1980s and early 1990s revealed that the brain is directly wired to the immune system — portions of the nervous system connect with immune-related organs such as the thymus and bone marrow, and immune cells have receptors for neurotransmitters, suggesting that there is crosstalk.
These connections seem to have clinical relevance, at least in the case of stress. One of the first researchers to show this was virologist Ronald Glaser, now director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at the Ohio State University in Columbus. “When I started working on this in the 1980s, nobody believed what stress could do, including me,” he recalls. He and his colleagues sampled blood from medical students, and found that during a stressful exam period, they had lower activity from virus-fighting immune cells, and higher levels of antibodies for the common virus Epstein–Barr, suggesting that stress had compromised their immune systems and allowed the normally latent virus to become reactivated.
The field of PNI has grown hugely since then, with medical schools worldwide boasting their own departments of mind–body medicine, of which PNI is just one component. It is now accepted that the body’s response to stress can suppress parts of the immune system and, over the long term, lead to damaging levels of inflammation. Large epidemiological studies — including the Whitehall studies, which have been following thousands of British civil servants since 1967 — suggest that chronic work stress increases the risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes, for example. Low socio-economic status increases susceptibility to a wide range of infectious diseases, and there is considerable evidence that stress increases the rate of progression of HIV/AIDS. But researchers have a long way to go before they will understand exactly how signals from the brain feed into physical health.
Worried sick
PNI studies have mostly tended to look at levels of individual immune-cell types or molecular messengers — such as the stress hormone cortisol and the immune messenger proteins called cytokines — or the expression of individual genes. But Cole wanted to get a sense of how the whole system was working.
His first foray, published in 2007, looked at loneliness. Social isolation is one of the most powerful known psychological risk factors for poor health, but it is never certain whether it causes the health problems, or whether a third factor is involved: lonely people might be less likely than others to eat well, for example, or to visit their doctor regularly. Read more from SA
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Resetting your mind may not only change how your body can protect your health, but it just may be the happiest decision a person can be
The following written content from Amy Beecham
How to be happy: the psychology behind the “HEAL” method and how it helps you become happier
Fascinating new research suggests that it’s psychologically possible to train yourself to be happier.
Human emotions are complex, but we’re often guilty of oversimplifying them. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a well-meaning but misguided “Don’t worry, be happy” or “Try not to worry”, you’ll understand.
Because when we talk and think about happiness as a general outlook, we tend to sort people into two camps: “glass half full” and “glass half empty”. For a long time, even psychologists have considered personalities as one or the other, but as new research has found, this may not be the case.
According to University of California Berkeley researchers, it’s actually possible to actually learn new ways to activate your feelings of engagement in a positive experience.
Put simply: it’s technically possible to teach yourself to be happier.
According to the researchers, people’s ability to get the most out of positive experiences can indeed be strengthened through training. This means learning to savour positive experiences in order to experience them in a heightened way.
As Psychology Today explains, the idea behind the model is that by learning to engage in a positive experience, you develop a greater sense of resilience and self-worth. “These feelings help to create an “upward spiral” in which good times build on themselves, further enhancing your happiness,” it explains.
“Even when ‘external supports and familiar activities are less available’, such as those restrictions in effect during the Covid-19 pandemic, you ‘are left internally with whatever psychological resources’ you’ve managed to acquire.”
Good news indeed for anyone currently self-isolating or dealing with the continued uncertainty of the Omicron variant.
How the HEAL model works
There are four distinct steps.
1. Have the enjoyable experience.
This can be done physically, by doing it, or mentally, by conjuring it up, such as thinking about someone who cares about you.
2. Enrich the experience through these sub-steps
Then, the research suggests, the key is to enrich the experience by making it as long-lasting as possible, and keeping it active in your consciousness.
“Focus on multiple aspects of the experience, including its meaning, your perceptions and sensations, the way it feels and taking action. Increase the novelty of the experience so that it sticks out more in your mind and heighten the personal relevance of the experience by delving into your feelings about it.”
Then, the experience can be intensified through “up-regulating” your emotions, or reliving the parts that feel good.
3. Absorb the experience
This involves making a deliberate effort to internalise it so that it feels like a part of you.
“Turn attention inward to your emotional state and highlight the reward value of the experience.” For example, after a night out with friends, spend some time reflecting on how socialising made you feel, what particular parts you enjoyed and what you gained from the experience.
4. Link positive and negative material
Of course, there are plenty of experiences in our lives that we might struggle to attach positive meaning to, from a parking ticket to experiencing grief and loss.
“Focus on something positive even while you’re aware of negative material in the background,” suggest the researchers. “For example, become more involved in the film you’re watching while still noticing that your dread of the coming work day continues to persist. The positive should ultimately drown out the negative in this step.”
How to become happier in your own life
It goes without saying that no research, this included, is a magic bullet to improving wellbeing, tackling depression and helping balance our emotions in such difficult times. But it does offer the possibility of being able to learn new ways of experiencing the good times in your life.
“Fulfilment may not come naturally to you, but by letting the enjoyable experiences change you at a deeper level, those good times can become both more frequent and more long-lasting,” Psychology Today explains. Read more from Stylist
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