Using Your Mind to Heal: The Power of Positive Thinking
Shaping Your Daily Mental Reel
Maybe you’ve heard the 1947 adage from Henry Ford “Whether you believe you can do a thing or believe you can’t, you’re right.” Or how about sixteenth century poet John Dryden’s potent line from The Works of Virgil: “For they can conquer who believe they can.” If not, it doesn’t matter. At some point in your life you’ve come across the notion of belief equals reality, whether it was when someone read you the book, The Little Engine Who Could when your were three (I think I can, I think I can…and he did!) or you watched little Yoda lift an X-wing fighter out of a swamp, you’ve been told all your life about the power of belief, the power of your thinking. So why don’t most of us believe it? And what if we did?
Okay, okay…sometimes it hasn’t worked. But sometimes it does work, right? Aren’t those times worth giving it a shot? This commitment to a way of managing your thinking doesn’t just apply to believing you can do really hard things. It can mean choosing how to use your mind, your cognitive thinking, to shape the vibe of your day, to decide how you want to view and respond to your world and what happens in it.
In recent years, highly regarded research departments from the Mayo Clinic to Harvard Medical School have increasingly turned their attention to the mind-body connection, and one thing became quite clear: positive thinking can play a powerful role not only in the healing process but in changing how happy you are on the daily. In can improve your relationships, your job performance and prospects…but I digress. We’re focusing on health at the moment. From physical illnesses to emotional setbacks, maintaining a hopeful and optimistic mindset can support and even accelerate recovery. In one Harvard study, scientists found that positive thinking significantly improved recovery and lowered the risk of death in multiple chronic disease outcomes:
“The most optimistic women (the top quartile) had a nearly 30 percent lower risk of dying from any of the diseases analyzed in the study compared with the least optimistic (the bottom quartile), the study found. The most optimistic women had a 16 percent lower risk of dying from cancer; 38 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease; 39 percent lower risk of dying from stroke; 38 percent lower risk of dying from respiratory disease; and 52 percent lower risk of dying from infection.” (1)
Another study found a significant increase in life satisfaction for those who took on positive thinking training. (2) A study at the University of Pennsylvania found signicant gains in the workplace from both the perspective of the employee and the employer when companies employed Positive Thinking training. Performance and Productivity went up as well as employee satisfaction and feelings of fulfillment. What is not to love here? And we’re talking about an investment of as little as 15 minutes a day! What are we waiting for right?
Oh, I know what you’re thinking: how exactly does this work?
The Mind-Body Connection
The idea that our thoughts and emotions influence our physical health isn’t new. Ancient healing systems like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine have long recognized the interdependence of mind and body. Today, both modern medicine and neuroscience have a growing body of research supporting the impact of psychological well-being on physical health.
When you're under chronic stress or gripped by negative emotions like fear, anger, or hopelessness, your body responds by releasing stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. This reaction happens in your Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS). You don’t have to be in a war-zone to experience these emotions. Some of us have primed our own minds to focus on negative thinking, expecting the worst—from the world and ourselves. Most of us don’t even realize we’re doing this. It just becomes habit, a default way of thinking. First and foremost this effects are happiness and personal relationships, which then effects everything else from our work to our Health. This can weaken the immune system, slow down the body’s repair mechanisms, and increase inflammation — all of which hinder healing. I don’t know about you, but just reading all that kind of triggered my Sympathetic Nervous system.
Fortunately, God created a Sympathetic AND a Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) and they are designed to work together. When the tiger attacks, the SNS releases all those chemicals and hormones to energize us so we have the energy to deal with immediate threats. It jacks us up. When the threat has cleared, the body releases the anit- to these jack-up chemicals and hormones, achetycholine, which breaks the others down and brings deep calm (called rest/digest) to our system.
Life being what it is, sometimes we can get stuck with the SNS in chronic activation. But the good news is, it’s more in our control than we think and we can start doing something about it today: right now. If you’ve had one of my craniosacral therapy sessions, then you know how quickly craniosacral therapy can calm your nervous system and release the tension in muscles and joints that become stuck when we’re chronically stressed. Craniosacral therapy literally works with your nervous system to help you shift from the SNS to the PNS. Sometimes all we need is a few minutes to remember how it actually feels to turn off those chemicals and be relaxed. That’s one powerful tool available to you, but it’s certainly not the only one.
Whether you book a session or not, however, there are more tools to help you counter the negative and shift your focus and some of them take hardly any time or effort—or money! Positive emotions such as hope, gratitude, and joy can activate the parasympathetic nervous system — remember: rest, repair, digest — the ideal state for healing. And you can learn to do this yourself. Yes you can and we want to help you.
There are a number of quick exercises that can help you learn to identify the triggers in your environment or in your thinking and we’re going to start posting some of these ideas on our Facebook Page so you can learn-and-do your way to a more positive mindset. We want to empower you with tools to help yourself, which translates to real, permanent change. If you want to get notified, go to our page here and follow us for these exercises or DM your email address to durangoelementaltherapy@gmail.com and we’ll send them to your inbox. Positivity is a skill that can be developed over time. Here is a short list of just a few of the upcoming weekly tips:
Practice gratitude daily: Focus on what’s going well, even the small wins.
Surround yourself with supportive people: Positivity is contagious.
Use affirmations and visualization: Imagine yourself healthy, strong, and thriving.
Limit negative media: What you feed your mind matters.
Stay present: Mindfulness and meditation can help you manage pain and stress.
Final Thoughts
Positive thinking is not a cure-all, and it certainly doesn’t mean denying the realities of pain, illness, or hardship. But by aligning your mental and emotional state with your body’s natural desire to heal, you create an environment that supports recovery from the inside out and helps you see the good in your own life and the world around you. With patience, That can change everything.
Healing is a complex journey, but your mindset is one of the things within your control. By choosing to see possibilities rather than limitations, you not only improve your chances of recovery — you transform the entire experience of healing.
(1) Karen Feldscher, “How Power of Positive Thinking Works,” The Harvard Gazette, December 7, 2016. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/12/optistic-women-live-longer-are-healthier/
(2) Taherkhani, Z., Kaveh, M.H., Mani, A. et al. The effect of positive thinking on resilience and life satisfaction of older adults: a randomized controlled trial. Sci Rep 13, 3478 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30684-y
This article was proudly written by a person, not AI. You could probably tell by the typos!
