Many people aren’t aware of the extensive connections between our bodies and our minds. But body and mind are interacting constantly. For instance, exercising your body stimulates your adrenal glands, releasing chemicals that energize both body and brain. On the flip side, thoughts and emotions can have a profound effect on the performance of your body. Think about how much better you can perform on the playing field after listening to a song that gets you psyched up. Or how exhausted you feel physically after getting depressing news. The connections between body and mind are manifold and deep, and science has only begun to explore them. What we do know at this point is that a healthy body requires a healthy mind and vice versa. Everything we think and feel affects our bodies through our minds, and everything we do physically – i.e. the way we eat, sleep, and exercise – affects our minds though our bodies. To live the life we want to live, we cannot neglect body or mind.

Healthy Mind, Healthy Body Principles:

1. Your Immune System is Powerfully Tied to Your Stress Levels and Mood

In Emotions and the Body, we spend a good bit of time discussing neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that regulate our emotions. Neurotransmitters work in the brain through special receptors on brain cells. These receptors are like docking ports for neurotransmitters. When a neurotransmitter lands on a receptor, the receptor it hits relays a message into the cell that receptor sits on, changing that cell’s chemistry. These changes in chemistry alter the electrical signaling of brain cells, and these changes in signaling have powerful effects on mood.

People have been aware for centuries that our mood can affect our resistance to disease. Both depressive feelings and chronic stress predispose us to getting sick. But how can something as abstract as emotion affect the performance of the immune system? Until recently there hasn’t been any scientific explanation for this.

As it turns out, both emotions and the immune system are regulated by many of the same chemicals. Research over the last few decades has shown that white blood cells, the soldiers of the immune system, are covered in receptors for many of the exact same neurotransmitters that regulate emotion in the brain. Neurotransmitters like serotonin and endorphins interact with immune cells just as they do with brain cells. And sure enough, neurotransmitters that are associated with positive emotions tend to have stimulatory effects on white blood cells, where as neurotransmitters that are associated with negative emotions generally supress immune cell function. Now that we know how emotions and immunity are being regulated by the same chemistry, it helps to explain why they are so tightly related.

We're really just begining to explore all of the connections between emotions and the immune system, but one thing is certain - a negative mind set and chronic stress both supress immune function and predispose us to getting sick. A commitment to emotional health and stress reduction is absolutely critical to staving off illness, especially in winter, when immunity tends to be reduced anyway. Take a look at Stress Busting, Maximizing Emotional Health, and Food and Mood to find out more about buffing up mood and reducing stress.