The Science Behind the Mind-Body Connection
The idea that emotions are linked to cancer has been around since the 1940s and has been well studied in research studies for a long time.3–9 Temoshok from UCSF showed that cancer patients who didn’t express their anger had slower recovery rates than those who were more expressive10, while Spiegel’s study showed that expressing emotions like anger and grief improved survival rates of cancer patients.11,12 As Candace Pert states, “Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotion can be stored in a body part, thereafter affecting our ability to feel that part or even move it.”13 Dr. Hamer developed testicular cancer after his son was shot dead and after investigating over 15,000 cases of cancer, he found that every cancer could be traced back to a traumatic event such as a loss of a loved one, rape, or other traumatic event in the patient’s life, which Dr. Hamer calls a conflict-shock-experience. He, interestingly, further noticed that the theme of the psychic conflict correlated with a specific location of the cancer.14
Some emotional risk factors for cancer include chronic exposure to stress hormones, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alexithymia (inability to express one’s emotions), attitudes/beliefs/nocebo effect, and lack of meaningful connections. Bruce Lipton, PhD, presents in his book “The Biology of Belief” that it isn’t our DNA that control our biology, but our environment, thoughts and beliefs that can turn our genes on and off through epigenetics.15 When someone falsely believes that they’re getting a medication and gets better symptomatically, when in fact they’re getting a sugar pill, it’s known as the placebo effect. 16,17 This placebo effect or belief effect as Bruce Lipton calls it, stresses that our perceptions, whether they are accurate or not, impacts our behavior and health. When a person perceives love, it was found that the growth genes were activated through the placebo effect. Similarly, when a person perceived a negative environment such as fear, anger, or hatred, the body went into fight or flight mode and the immune system and vital organs were neglected. Just as much as someone could get better with the placebo effect, the opposite can happen through what’s called the nocebo effect, when someone believes that they will get worse or will die from a disease. A study found that patients who thought that they were going to die from cancer were more likely to do so than those who didn’t have these thoughts.18,19 Therefore, a patient’s belief and perception of their diagnosis is very important in the course and outcome of their disease.
It wasn’t known until after 1973 when Candace B. Pert, PhD, discovered the opioid receptor, that the body makes its own opioid called endorphins that act like morphine. Known as the mother of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) and someone who brought the gap between the mind and body closer, Candace Pert calls these neuropeptides the “molecules of emotion” due to the fact that these molecular peptides have an effect on our mind and emotions.13 According to Pert, our emotions are what glues the body and the mind together and runs all the systems in the body since emotional expressions are always tied to a specific flow of peptides in the body and the spinal cord site that filters all incoming bodily sensations have receptors for almost all these peptides. For example, it’s through these molecules of emotions or peptides that an embarrassing thought can turn a face red.
But how do emotions have an effect on our health? These neuropeptides are in constant communication with our immune system and the immune system itself produces peptides as well to modulate our health. Interestingly, viruses use the same receptors as these neuropeptides to enter into a cell and depending on how much of the natural peptide there is present, the virus will have either an easier or harder time entering a cell. This means that the state of our emotions will have an effect on the level of neuropeptides produced and thus whether we succumb to a viral infection or not. It can be deduced from this that when one is in a certain emotional state such as an elevated mood, they may be protected against certain viruses. In 1990, Hall’s study showed that psychological factors such as relaxation and guided imagery, self-hypnosis, biofeedback, and autogenic training, could directly affect the cellular function of the immune system i.e. the stickiness of the white blood cells as measured by saliva and blood tests.20 And knowing that cancer is tightly linked with the immune system, it’s easy to extrapolate that our emotions may be linked with cancer development. The immune system is what’s responsible for the constant destroyal of erroneous cancer cells that are developing in each one of us at every moment.