Your Mind = Your Body

As a kid growing up with a (then) poorly-understood chronic illness, nothing could have prepared me for the symptom flare that would strike in the days following my dad's death. My symptoms went from some 10% body coverage to over 50% in less than a week; I basically just sat in an oatmeal bath and tried not to cry.

In the years since, I've learned that a great deal of research exists into this exact phenomenon. It's easy to delude ourselves into thinking of the body and mind as separate... but the interior landscape of thought can be so vivid, and can possess such potent recurring themes, that it overwhelms—or, in Freud's terminology, excites—the physical wellbeing of the patient.

In plainer terms? Your thoughts change your body.

As I've aged into an increasing comorbidity of chronic symptoms, this fact keeps orbiting my life.

When you are in constant pain, it's hard to maintain mental focus.

But, without mental focus, physical pain gets worse.

One of the effective short-term methods of dealing with the over-excited inner mind is to release, often verbally, all that is going on (in other words, "venting").

Once so released, the pent-up feelings cease to cause a physical manifestation for a time... but this is only temporary and requires continual reapplication of the cure.

This is why "talk therapy" can do wonders. You're able to release all the pent-up thoughts and feelings, and then receive trained reflection on your inner cyclone. It's more than release; it's release and introspection under the auspices of a guiding hand.

Which brings us to an important lesson about our psychology: that any permanent cure to a psychological illness requires understanding that psychological pain is personal yet systematic.

That is: your pain isn't yours alone; your pain is derived from your state of interbeing. Mind with body, self with environment.

I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!

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