Excerpts from interview with Joe Dispenza, D.C., author of the book Evolve Your Brain.
 
Q. What does stress do to the body? Can Evolve Your Brain help people to overcome stress?

A. As a doctor of chiropractic, I’ve seen first-hand the effects of stress on my patients. It is not short episodes of acute stress, but chronic, long-term stress that most weakens the body.

Most of us rarely face the immediate threats to physical survival that our ancestors had to deal with, so we may fail to realize the impact on us of years spent worrying about job security, credit card debt, whether our kids will experiment with drugs, and so on.

When we chronically live in high-stress mode, or when we are constantly looking for problems that may affect us at some future moment, we engage the body’s emergency response to stress all the time.

Why is this such a problem? The chemicals that continually flood our body when we are under long-term stress are the culprits that begin to alter our internal state and pull the trigger of cellular breakdown.

Moreover, when we’re always on high alert or in emergency mode, our body doesn’t have the time or the resources necessary to repair and regenerate itself. The body can even become addicted to the chemical state of being under stress.

Q. But as we will demonstrate, the ability to overcome stress lies right between our ears.

A. Most stress ends up as emotional/psychological stress, and that means it’s the autosuggestions of our own thinking that affect the body so intensely.

In other words, we can turn on the stress response by our thoughts alone, and they can have the same measurable effects as any threatening stressor in our environment. In Evolve Your Brain , we will learn how to overcome the thoughts that initiate stress responses.

Q. Can evolving the brain help people to overcome emotional addictions?

A. Aside from dealing with physical ailments, this book is also intended to address another kind of affliction--emotional addiction, which always accompanies high stress levels in our life.

We’ve all experienced emotional addiction at some point in our life.

Among its symptoms are lethargy, a lack of ability to focus, a tremendous desire to maintain routine in our daily life, the inability to complete cycles of action, a lack of new experiences and emotional responses, and the persistent feeling that one day is the same as the next and the next.

What was once scientific theory now has practical applications for us to heal our own self-inflicted emotional wounds.

The methods I suggest are not a wouldn’t-it-be-wonderful, self-help miracle cure. Be assured, this book is grounded in cutting-edge science.

How is it possible to end this cycle of negativity? The answer, of course, lies in you. And in this case, in a very specific part of you.

Through an understanding of the various subjects we will explore in this book and a willingness to apply some specific principles, you can heal yourself emotionally by altering the neural networks in your brain.

Q. Can you explain the mind/body connection? What is the relationship between thoughts and the physical body?

A. An emerging scientific field called psychoneuroimmunology is demonstrating the connection between the mind and the body, and is beginning to help us understand the link between how we think and how we feel.

We now know that our every thought produces a biochemical reaction in the brain. The brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body, where they act as messengers of the thought.

In this way, the thoughts that produce these chemicals in the brain allow our body to feel exactly the way we were just thinking.

Essentially, when we have happy, inspiring, or positive thoughts, our brain manufactures chemicals that make us feel joyful, inspired, or uplifted.

For example, when we look forward to a pleasurable experience, the brain immediately makes a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine, which turns the brain and body on in anticipation of that experience, and we feel excited.

If we have thoughts of hate, anger, or insecurity, the brain produces chemicals that the body responds to in a comparable way, and we feel hateful, angry, or unworthy.

Another chemical that our brain makes, called ACTH, signals the body to produce chemical secretions from the adrenal glands that make us feel threatened or aggressive.

When the body responds to a thought by having a feeling, the brain, which constantly monitors the status of the body, notices that the body is feeling a certain way.

In response to that bodily feeling, the brain generates thoughts that produce corresponding chemical messengers, so that we begin to think the way we are feeling.

Thinking creates feeling, and then feeling creates thinking, in a continuous biological feedback loop.

This cycle eventually creates a particular state in the body—what we call a state of being—that determines the general nature of how we feel and behave.

For example, say a person lives much of her life in a repeating cycle of thoughts and feelings related to unworthiness.

The moment she thinks about not being good enough or smart enough or enough of anything, her brain releases chemicals that produce a bodily feeling of unworthiness.

Now she is feeling the way she was just thinking. Her brain notices that, and she begins to have thoughts of insecurity that match the way she was just feeling.

Her body is now causing her to think. If her thoughts and feelings continue, year after year, to generate the same feedback loop between her brain and her body, she will exist in a state of being that is called “unworthy.”

These repeated chemical signals cause the cells of the body to function in undesirable ways, making us sick.

This starts to explain how the mind can physically modify the body.

In the book I talk about a man I called Tom, who developed one digestive ailment after another. This finally led him to examine his life, and he realized he had been suppressing feelings of anger and desperation over being in a job that made him miserable.

Tom’s mind and body were in a feedback loop of thinking and feeling that amounted to toxic attitudes that his body just “couldn’t stomach.”
 
He had been living in a state of being revolving around victimization. His healing finally began when he paid attention to his habitual thoughts and realized that his unconscious attitudes were the basis for the person he had become.

There is significant scientific evidence suggesting that the mind has a direct effect on the body…both for better and for worse.

Research demonstrates that we can cause our bodies to be sick just by the anticipation of a future event or the memory of a past experience.

In both cases, it is our thoughts that are creating powerful chemicals of stress to alter most of the systems in our body.

So what we think about and the intensity of these thoughts directly influences our health, the choices we make, and our quality of life.

Source: hci-online