A Healthy Mind Is Crucial to a Happy Life
The benefits of prioritizing mental health over physical health
Today's reality is more material that it is natural.
Children get exposed to social media from a very young age and that adds unnecessary pressure to their mental state and social life.
The problem is most of us are either diagnosed with multiple disorders, and others have none because they haven't been named yet. But we worry about labelling and naming things far too much and are left with names for conditions very few specialists understand.
The funny thing is that in most cases, we have nothing to worry about. We read articles, relate to certain side effects and assume we understand what the problem is.
We can agree that we are unique beings and it will be impossible to know exactly what someone else is going through. We often find a connection because of similar experiences but 2 experiences are hardly identical.
If you do your research, you might even self-diagnose and feel a sigh of relief.
Doctors aren’t know-it-alls
We forget that doctors make mistakes. Good doctors love a challenge, but at times, they have no idea what the problem is and assume they know the answer. Others will experiment at your own expense in the hope of finding a cure.
15 years ago, I was handed over to a trainee that had 0 experience dealing with a dislocated finger. The same year, I had to get surgery to get it corrected and here I am 15 years later still unable to stretch that finger. I never will.
The dilemma of prescriptions
Western medicine rushes to prescribe pills for mental illnesses. What is ironic is that mainstream science excels at treating physical conditions but remains miles away from understanding the human mind.
Most prescriptions are given without any certainty to cure. The only certainty they provide is a horrific series of side effects that do more harm than good.
I've seen the world of pharmaceuticals first hand. People forget that these are corporations and their main goal is to achieve financial success. But that's not what their branding says.
Scientific studies can always be questioned. When you look at the number of subjects, they are often minimal. How can we generalize a condition using a few hundred even thousands of people and base it on 7.5 billion?
In the Netflix documentary Heal, scientists confess that they all start out as wanting to change the world and solve the unsolved. The death of that passion comes when you reach a certain level in the corporation. Your priorities change and become centred around profit. Because without rising profit, your investors will give you a hell of a time and it's better to give them what they want and keep your cushy job.
The placebo effect
Studies won’t publicly mention this: every patient in a study has an opposite patient that receives a placebo. These results are never shared because they contradict the results these researches are trying to reach.
Patients that were given placebos also get better. The number of those patients that achieve positive results is often higher than the results that are shared. Of course, scientists would not want you to see that because it hurts their sales.
Many of us have been given placebos before. Sugar pills, saline injections and fake surgeries are not myths. That shows that belief can shift your biology. The illusion of being given a cure is enough for your mind to defeat the problem if there ever was one.
The power of fear
We’ve been raised under a cloud of fear. The majority of the lessons I learnt as a child were more don’ts than dos.
A doctor can estimate that you will live for a certain amount of time but that doctor forgets that the best way to cure yourself is to strengthen your mind and your thoughts.
Your imagination is astonishing. After achieving a higher state, mindful people develop stronger feelings that make their bodies easier to read.
The body is in a constant fight against bacterias and viruses, battling for your survival at all times. But sometimes it needs our help. When we mentally neglect our physical being, we start to lose control of our avatar.
“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.” — Baruch Spinoza
Believe in the diagnosis, not the prognosis
When your diagnosis comes in, you feel a slight relief because now you have a specialist telling you that there is a problem. That’s when your mind eases up because it understands what it's been going through.
A fighter must never let his guard down, but now that you’ve answered the riddle, your guard is down and all you can think about is the diagnosis.
The prognosis is where your mentality shifts. You sit there listening to someone telling you that you're dying, that you're running out of time, that you have to do this treatment and take that pill, that many times a day.
Thank you for shattering my will to live doc!
Finding out the reason for your illness brings forth much-needed clarity. Unless it's a genetic problem, the cure often comes down to poor lifestyle habits.
In the documentary Heal, Kelly Turner spent 10 years studying radical remission survivors from all over the world. She concluded a total of 75 changes that they adapted to their lifestyles. Out of these, here are the 9 factors that all these survivors tackled:
- Radically changing your diet
- Taking control of your health
- Following your intuition
- Using herbs and supplements
- Releasing suppressed emotions
- Increasing positive emotions
- Embracing social support
- Deepening your spiritual connection
- Have a strong reason for living
You'll notice only 2 of them are physical and can be resolved by western medicine. The others are mental, emotional and spiritual.
This shows that there might be a way to activate our immune system with mental emotional work. Something western science knows very little about.
