How Your Thoughts Impact Your Health

As I navigate my own healing journey and as I work with clients to help navigate them, I’ve become more and more fascinated by the role the mind plays on physical healing.

So often, even in functional medicine, we tend to focus on the physical illness. While I practice and firmly believe in the methods of functional medicine aimed at treating the root cause of an illness, we’re often not addressing the role of thoughts and feelings.

You may be wondering how your thoughts and beliefs could have any relevance to a physical ailment, but the connection is stronger than you would ever imagine. The mind is a powerful thing. In fact, there’s cutting edge research supporting the fact that negative thought patterns can manifest as physical illness over time.

We are energetic beings, and our thoughts and feelings are energy as well. They have vibrations, and these vibrations can impact our body in different ways. Negative vibrations (fear based) create a heaviness in you, while the positive vibrations (love based) create a lightness.

If you have experienced more negative vibrations than positive vibrations throughout your life, you will feel an imbalance somewhere in you. When the negative becomes so overbalanced, something finally has to happen to make you aware of this imbalance. In many cases it manifests as a physical ailment.

One of the more obvious indications that your feelings and thoughts are inharmonious is when health problems appear. Pain and discomfort of any kind lets you know that you are out of tune with natural laws.

Illness is the result of imbalance. Imbalance creates thoughts and actions that lead to an unhealthy lifestyle and eventually to illness. Thoughts and feelings create emotions that cause effects.

Positive emotions create bodily sensations of openness and expansiveness. They invite the world in. The body feels relaxed, even though some emotions such as joy are very energizing. In contrast, negative emotions create a tight, contracted feeling. Everything pulls inward. The world is pushed away. Positive feelings invite unity. Negative feelings invite isolation.

The place to start is to become mindful or conscious of what you are feeling, what you are thinking, what you are saying, and what you are doing.

Become aware of any incident, comment, situation, or person that triggers in you some kind of discomfort. Take notice when you feel something you don’t enjoy feeling, or think something you don’t enjoy thinking.

Ditch the blame mentality

In order to remedy the negative effects any feelings or emotions have had in our lives, it is necessary for us to take responsibility for them and become accountable to ourselves for them.

To deny feelings doesn’t mean they are dead or no longer exist. On the contrary, if feelings are not resolved, their energy remains stored inside you, and, like a yeast, this energy continues growing and expanding, gathering more and more energy— resonating and joining forces with all similar feeling vibrations that are still inside your body.

These energies create blocks like a dam in a ditch of water and short-circuit your system in more ways than you can imagine. If the feelings remain unresolved, this process continues to compound, and you may experience any number of disturbing effects.

Negative feelings, thoughts and attitudes eat at your body. Positive feelings, thoughts and attitudes feed, nourish, and sustain your body.

What is it that we need to change?

As you become aware of the negative thoughts and beliefs, you can start to make changes. You need to change negative feelings you may have buried for years to positive feelings.

No matter how much you may have suppressed these feelings, they are still resonating on some level. These unresolved feelings are energies that are still alive, and they will manifest at some point. Rather than trying to kill them, you can transform them. Any negative on-going vibrations you are storing inside you can be transformed into permanent, positive, healing energy vibrations.

These negative feelings can be permanently resolved, and healing can take place. How do you accomplish this resolution? When you tune into your feelings and recognize what you are feeling, you can start to transform these feelings. You can do this through practices like mindfulness meditation, prayer, and positive affirmations. You can take the negative feeling or emotion and start speaking its positive counterpart.

For example, if you’re dealing with a lot of worry and anxiety, then you can start affirming, “I am trusting. I am confident. I am peaceful.”

Worry is negative and faith is positive. Faith and worry cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

Using essential oils in combination with these practices can be very supportive. Certain oils like lavender and vetiver are very relaxing and calming. Diffusing them can help reduce worried, anxious thoughts.

This is just one example of transforming emotions. We can also work on physical illness by recognizing the negative emotion tied to that area of the body. For example, the liver is the anger center. In this case, you would use affirmations, mindfulness, and essential oils to transform anger. You can affirm, “I am forgiving. I am loving. I am calm.”

Using biblical truth and reciting bible verses is another great practice.

You are exactly where you need to be at this time.

What you are going through is perfect. It will cause you to move toward the growth you are to experience, gaining the understanding or learning the lessons that are necessary for you to learn in this life. With this frame of mind, your life becomes more fluid, more flowing without you feeling the need to always run things your way, thereby blocking God’s way.

This is difficult to do (it’s even difficult for me to write), but “we need to love our illnesses because love heals. It allows wellness to move in (to take place). Trying to change things without first accepting them as they are is like wearing Chinese handcuffs. The harder you try, the more resistance you create. Relax. Let the energy flow. Accept the perfection. Feel the love. Now you can manifest anything.” (Jackie Pratt)

Discomfort does not last unless we resist it. “That which we resist, persists.”

Miracles happen when you express gratitude to God. Praise Him and give thanks in all things! Joy is preceded by gratitude. Another helpful exercise is keeping a gratitude journal. Every day write down 3 things that you’re grateful for.

Remember, beliefs equals behaviors equals results. Our very own feelings and thoughts are what create the circumstances that bring our life to us.

I’d love to hear from you! What are some ways you promote health through your mindset?

References:

Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, Karol K. Truman