The value of a healthy attitude: how faith, anger, humor, and boredom can affect your health

Vibrant Life, March-April, 2003 by Peggy Rynk

Does your attitude affect your health? Does a positive, happy one keep you healthier? Or a negative, unhappy, even angry, one hurt you? The answer to all these questions is yes. The mind and body are snugly interwoven, and this connection affects you in more ways than you might be aware of.

It used to be thought that the mind and the immune system existed independently of each other. But research now shows that they may act as a single unit. Feeling stressed, for example, can make you more susceptible to whatever virus is going around. On the other hand, when you feel joyous and lighthearted, your immune system has a better chance of protecting you from it.

It's been shown that even pretending to feel something can affect you. In a study at the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers found that actors could influence their immune systems simply by the emotions they portrayed.

It's a good bet that expectation also plays an important role. If you expect to be healthy, you increase your chances of enjoying good health. If you expect to be ill, you increase your chances of that.

This doesn't have to do just with whether you come down with a cold or a bug. Attitude influences whether you get--and even die from--more serious illnesses. Heart disease is a good example.

Anger is an emotion that's directly related to illness. It has its place in life, and there are times when feeling angry is an appropriate response. But chronic anger or anger that's out of proportion to the situation at hand is another matter. A study in Boston gave a questionnaire to 1,300 men to measure their tendencies toward anger. The study concluded that those men who scored the highest were three times more likely to develop heart disease than the men who scored the lowest.

This knowledge is not brand-new. John Barefoot, Ph.D., a research professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, did a 25year follow-up study of a group of medical students. "These were students in the 1950s," he says, "and we followed them up through 1980, I believe." What he and his colleagues discovered was that the ones who were hostile initially were the ones who were more likely to have died by the time of the follow-up study.

What he calls hostility, he says, is "an attitude of cynical beliefs and lack of trust in other people.... If you believe people are mean-spirited and bad and untrustworthy, that leads to a negative world outlook.

"That was one of the first studies," he adds, "but there have been several other studies, larger studies, that have also confirmed that."

In a study conducted at the University of Chicago, on the effect of attitude on health, 200 telecommunication executives were observed as their companies were downsized. The health of the executives who saw change as an opportunity for growth fared much better than those who saw it as a threat. Fewer than a third of the executives who had a positive attitude contracted a serious illness during or soon after the downsizing. But executives who saw downsizing as a personal threat had mare than a 90 percent likelihood of becoming severely ill.

Feeling stressed is something everyone can relate to. What's stressful, though, is an individual matter. A situation that stresses one person may feel exhilarating to someone else and go entirely unnoticed by another.

Boredom has negative effects on your health, also, because of its lack of challenge and mental stimulation. Fatalism has a negative effect too. According to an article published recently in the Washington Post, researchers "stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views.

"The high risk of death, in other words, had nothing to do with the usual heart disease culprits--age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight," the article states. "Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick."

If we convince ourselves that we're going to develop a particular illness or that we're going to die, we increase our chances of doing exactly that. The article further points out that surgeons are wary of patients who are convinced they're going to die, because almost 100 percent of them actually do.

It may seem that your health is at the mercy of your feelings, but the fact is that you have greater control over them than you might suppose--and there are definite ways you can exercise that control. One is to spend as much time as possible around positive, happy people. Another is to spend as little time as possible around negative, anxious, or angry people.

Support groups can make an enormous difference in your life too. And there are a variety of them around that deal with various problems and illnesses. In a study at Stanford University researchers found that cancer patients who were in support groups stayed in remission longer and lived longer.

When you feel overwhelmed by anxiety, anger, depression, or lack of interest in what's going on around you, it helps to know that you can talk to someone who will listen, someone who may be able to point you in a better direction--a friend, a member of the clergy, or a doctor or therapist. Sometimes what you need most is simply to know that you've been heard, that someone cares, and that you are not alone with your problems.