Can your thoughts affect your health.  Can a positive mental attitude be the foundation of health and well being?

According to Janet Hilts, they can.  In her blog Healing Yourself Coaching, she writes:

Leave the complaining, the details of pain and sickness, the history of the problem — leave those to people who aren’t yet ready to feel the best they can.   You take the other path — the one that will help you to take charge of your own well-being.  Put your thinking on a strong, healthy body; a clear, focused mind; a peaceful, happy spirit.

This is not just some spiritual belief, or motivational mumbo-jumbo.  Rigorous scientific studies published in highly-acclaimed journals support this truth:  our health is affected by our thoughts.   So let’s think healthy thoughts.

We can boost those thoughts in whatever ways work best for us:  visualizing, talking out loud to ourselves or to others, writing out our ideal health goals, finding magazine or internet pictures of healthy people.  Use your imagination to move you closer to your perfectly healed self.

She’s not alone.

According to Family Doctor.org:

Your body responds to the way you think, feel and act. This is often called the “mind/body connection.” When you are stressed, anxious or upset, your body tries to tell you that something isn’t right. For example, high blood pressure or a stomach ulcer might develop after a particularly stressful event, such as the death of a loved one.

One long standing way to improving your mental health as been to pray.

The Science of Prayer writes:

Prayer is making a medical comeback. Given that 94% of Americans believe in God or a higher power (1994 Gallup Poll), it is not surprising that 75% of patients think that their physician should address spiritual issues as part of their medical care. 

Furthermore, 40% want their physicians to actively discuss religious issues with them, and nearly 50% percent want their physicians to pray not just for them but with them. In a growing trend, 43 percent of American physicians privately pray for their patients.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, May 1995) entitled “Should Physicians Prescribe Prayer for Health, discusses these trends. The mere presence of this article in this highly respected bastion of the medical profession suggests that the barrier between spirituality and health care is crumbling.

Researchers are takign this trend seriously and have begun studying the effects of prayer on healing. Whatever their findings, they will be sure to be controversial.

Do you think positive thinking is the key to health and wellness?

This is a something that I personally have battled. Here’s my story.

It was 1994 and I was expecting my third child in July. My husband was very concerned about raising three kids in a two bedroom home so the search was on for a 3 bedroom home for our expanding family. The first week of May, I declared the house hunt to be officially over, as making an offer on any home we found would put us moving too close to the birth of our 2nd son. However, my husband came home with just “one more house that you have to see to believe.” Sure enough, the previous sale on the three bedroom two bath ranch with a fenced yard and a separately fenced inground pool had fallen through and the home was miraculously back on the market. It was definitely a fixer upper but that was to be expected. After all, most of the homes in our price range were “fixer uppers”.

As I had predicted… we closed on the house the week before the baby was due. That week, while I was in the hospital, my family and inlaws were moving us into our new home.

I tell you this part of the story so you’ll understand why I wasn’t alarmed that first winter when I spent the entire heating season absolutely exhausted to the point of being ill. In my exhaustion, I totalled our car and am grateful that I didn’t do more harm to my children. Still, I plugged on. I worked and cared for my children despite my complete depletion of energy. I was also battling SEVERE headaches. When I spoke with my doctor, he prescribed antibiotics to kill the supposed sinus infection which was causing the headaches and depleting me of my energy. However, I was also patted on the head and told that part of being a working mother of three is a feeling of exhaustion.

Because I was so ill, my husband and I hadn’t embarked on one of the most pressing home improvements our new home needed which was new windows and doors. However, we had paid to have the furnace cleaned and inspected when we purchased the home, so it was a fluke that our furnace went out in March of the following year. Our old furnace guy had packed up and moved to Arizona so I found a new company to come fix our furnace.

When the new furnace guy got to work, he found the top of the furnace welded shut. It turns out the previous company hadn’t performed the cleaning or the inspection we’d paid for them to perform. Not only that, but the build up in the furnace was causing our home to be filled with poisonous CO gas! Had we replaced our windows as we had planned, it’s possible we could have died from the exposure! The furnace repair man told me that if someone had spent 30 minutes in the room where the furnace was, they would have been dead.

Turns out it we were lucky. Our exposure to Carbon Monoxide didn’t trigger the more severe MUSES (Multisensory Sensitivity).

The web site Multiple Chemical Sensitivity web site has a great article on Treatment of Chronic Carbon Monoxide Poisoning.

We now have CO alarms placed strategically throughout our home. Because we live in Florida now, when we’re without electricity and have to use our generator, we make sure to keep the generator running outside in a well ventilated area away from open windows. I’ve also read that running more than one exhaust fan at the same time can also cause a build up of CO within the home, so when one bathroom fan is running, the other isn’t! The same goes for the kitchen exhaust fan.

Carbon Monoxide is so dangerous because you can’t see it, smell it or taste it.  If you’ve been battling the flu “all winter” be sure to have your home checked for high Carbon Monoxide levels.

4 out of 5 women can expect to battle hot flashes during menopause.  During a hot flash, a woman’s body temperature can suddenly rise 8 degrees and this rise in body temperature can last 2-4 minutes on average.  Most women deal with hot flashes for 9 to 16 months before the body settles into menopause.

If ingesting synthetic hormones doesn’t appeal to you, then try these tips to tame your hot flashes:

1. Change your diet:  Avoid spicey foods, sweets and alcohol, because all of these have been shown to trigger or increase the severity of hot flashes.
2. Add soy to your diet: Switch to soy milk and add tofu to your diet.
3. Try a little elderberry:  Herbalists prescribe 25-50 drops of elderberry tincture several times a day to relieve hot flashes.
4. Dress in layers: Wear cotton and dress in easy to shed layers so when a hot flash strikes, you can respond quickly.
5. Exercise regularly: Stress relief is essential to beating hot flashes and nothing is better for stress relief than 30 minutes a day of exercise.
6. Ruffle the sheets: Studies show that women who have sex at least once a week have fewer hot flashes…. so get busy and enjoy this part of your prescription!