Lots of studies show that certain people who have this habit live longer, feel younger, and rehabilitate from injury faster. We know that regular chiropractic care, healthy eating, and exercise do play a significant role in healing but the research uncovered an additional factor that plays an even more prominent role in health, healing, and longevity…
A study by the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, looked at the emotional trait of optimism, as experienced by 159,255 women ages 50-79 from a variety of racial and ethnic groups. They followed these women for 26 years.
Of the participants, the 25% who were the most optimistic were likely to have a 5.4% longer lifespan and a 10% greater likelihood of living beyond 90 years than the 25% who were the least optimistic.
Researchers found that lifestyle factors such as regular exercise and healthy eating accounted for just a quarter of the improved longevity highlighting that your habitual emotional state and beliefs could have a much bigger health impact than your nutrition and exercise habits.
I believe that this is because we feel and express our emotions through our brain and nervous system during every second of our day, yet we eat and exercise during certain times of the day. In other words, our emotions can influence our health all day and how we feel emotionally can affect what we eat and how we exercise. Despite this, I find that most people focus on nutrition and exercise a lot to improve their health yet this research suggests that focusing on improving your emotional state and beliefs may have greater value.
The Role of Chiropractic Care
Interestingly, soon-to-be-published research from the UK shows that chiropractic care helps to improve your mental health by improving the communication between the brain and body. This study highlights that chiropractic care could play a role in helping people feel more optimistic. This may also explain one mechanism in which chiropractic care helps people to recover quicker.
The trait of optimism also seems to be at play in another recent study. In this investigation, researchers set out to study whether subjective age, or how old people feel, is connected to how well they heal.
The study, conducted by Bar-Ilan University in Israel, tracked 194 seniors undergoing rehabilitation from osteoporotic fractures or strokes. Patients were interviewed about how old they felt compared to how old they actually were. The findings revealed that those who felt younger at hospital admission had considerably better physical outcomes at discharge one month later because they were more optimistic about their outcomes.
Most surprising is that how old you feel was the strongest predictor of positive outcomes, even more so than patients’ actual age and other health conditions.
Those who feel younger can maintain their health and functioning for longer periods, and as the current study shows, can recuperate better from disability. Therefore, by perceiving yourself to age successfully/gracefully/disgracefully, you can preserve a healthy, youthful, and vigorous lifestyle.
We don’t appreciate the truly powerful effect that your mindset and attitude have on how you feel and how you heal.
The mind-blowing power of the human brain was first highlighted by Dr Ellen Langer’s 1979 “Counterclockwise Study” which looked at what effects turning back the clock psychologically would have on an older adult’s physiological state. This included eight older men in their 70s who lived together for 5 days on a retreat as if they were actually living 20 years back in time (ie, in 1959). During the 5 days, the participants were instructed to imagine that it was, indeed, 1959—not to remember what it was like, but to live as if it were 1959. To prime this effect, the researchers provided physical props or elements from the prior era including magazines, viewable television programs, and movies that were popular 20 years earlier.
The results after just 5 days were astonishing showing just how much your mind controls your matter…
- Their hearing, memory, and grip strength improved.
- Photos of participants were rated as appearing significantly younger after the retreat than before.
- There were further improvements in measures of vision, joint flexibility, manual dexterity, IQ, gait, posture, and decreased symptoms of arthritis.
Understand that this all happened through a change in mindset and attitude over just five days where they pretended to be 20 years younger.
So if those health changes can occur through pretending who are you pretending to be today…
Imagine what is possible when you start with improving your brain-body communication that results from regular chiropractic care. You add Be Healthy Chiropractic’s personalised exercise recommendations, stress reduction and emotional management techniques with our recommended improvements in nutrition. Imagine what changes to your health and happiness can occur if you combine all of that with this new change in mindset.
Contact Be Healthy Chiropractic Wellness Centre at 2a/673 David Low Way, Mudjimba, Qld by calling 07 5457 0657 to book yourself in for a holistic whole body and lifestyle balance assessment. Alternatively, you can contact us online by clicking here.