If you feel like you’re living a healthy lifestyle but aren’t achieving your desired level of wellness, it’s beneficial to evaluate the strength of your mind-body connection.
Your mind-body connection influences how your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings affect your body’s functioning. By improving the connection between your body and mind, you can optimize your physical and mental health.
How the Mind-Body Connection Works
Your mind and body communicate with one another using chemical language. Any thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs that you have cause a physiological response in your body. This response occurs whether your thought or belief is conscious or subconscious.
For example, if you consistently think about a negative experience at work, this can cause the body to produce more stress hormones in anticipation of another bleak day. High production of stress hormones can lead to depression, irritability, and problems focusing.
Or, maybe you subconsciously view a fellow employee or boss as unhelpful and difficult to work with. Your body will subconsciously respond by increasing stress levels when you’re working with this person.
What to Expect by Improving Your Mind-Body Connection
Improving your mind-body connection focuses on being more aware of your emotions, feelings, and thoughts so that you understand how they affect your body.
You can then utilize different techniques (like meditation, yoga, journaling, or using affirmations) to decrease the frequency of unhelpful feelings and emotions to improve your sense of wellness.
In the case of a negative work experience that you’re struggling to put behind you, you might decide to use meditation to enhance your ability to acknowledge the thought without judgment so that it doesn’t impact your emotions.
Or, you might reframe how you view the experience so that you feel like a powerful survivor rather than a victim. This helps you view the experience as an opportunity to learn and develop your strengths.
Instead of focusing on everything you dislike about your coworker, you may make a conscious effort to focus on their positive attributes and use affirmations to improve your interactions with them.
Learn How to Enhance Your Mind-Body Connection
Seasons In Our Life is devoted to helping patients improve their mind-body connections with holistic, therapeutic services. Visit us online to learn more.