We turn to an unusual source for our Health Notes this month, an award-winning website called Brain Pickings. Created by Bulgarian writer Maria Popova, Brain Pickings is an eclectic site that deals with literature, philosophy, history, science, health, and much more. In this article, Popova looks at health in her particularly holistic way to point out how integrated our bodies, minds, and emotions are. Focusing on the work of Dr. Esther Sternberg and her book The Balance Within, Popova explains how medicine can now measure the effect of our nervous system and hormones on diseases as diverse as AIDS and Chronic fatigue syndrome, what the feedback mechanism is, and how we can but this basic knowledge to work to make us all healthier.
The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease
How your memories impact your immune system, why moving is one of the most stressful life-events, and what your parents have to do with your predisposition to PTSD.
By Maria Popova
From the article… “…no researcher has done more to illuminate the invisible threads that weave mind and body together than Dr. Esther Sternberg. Her groundbreaking work on the link between the central nervous system and the immune system, exploring how immune molecules made in the blood can trigger brain function that profoundly affects our emotions, has revolutionized our understanding of the integrated being we call a human self. In the immeasurably revelatory The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (public library), Sternberg examines the interplay of our emotions and our physical health, mediated by that seemingly nebulous yet, it turns out, remarkably concrete experience called stress.
With an eye to modern medicine’s advances in cellular and molecular biology, which have made it possible to measure how our nervous system and our hormones affect our susceptibility to diseases as varied as depression, arthritis, AIDS, and chronic fatigue syndrome, Sternberg writes: “By parsing these chemical intermediaries, we can begin to understand the biological underpinnings of how emotions affect diseases…”
The same parts of the brain that control the stress response…play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives…”
That’s a taste, but you’ll just have to read the full and fascinating article for yourself!
