Our thoughts are what, to a large extent, have created and design our brain day by day. This statement used to be made by seers and sages, and now scientists confirm it.
Dr. Mario Alonso Puig, a member of Harvard University Medical School, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has stated in numerous interviews that self-confidence, enthusiasm, and hope favor the higher functions of the brain.
Psychoneuroimmunology studies the connection that exists between thought-word-mentality-physiology of the human being. This connection challenges the traditional paradigm, understanding thought and word as a form of vital energy with the capacity to generate profound physical changes in our organism (Sanchís and Giraldo, 2010).
Being a hopeful, committed, and self-confident person allows one to achieve many more goals and go further than expected. And to achieve this, Dr. Puig assures that we can train the mind, exercise it, and develop flexibility and tolerance. In fact, various studies show that one minute entertaining a negative thought leaves the immune system in a delicate situation for six hours.
Distress (a feeling of permanent overwhelm) produces changes in the functioning of our brain and in the production of hormones, due to its capacity to damage memory and learning neurons in the hippocampus, as well as affecting our intellectual capacity because it deprives more needed areas of the brain involved in decision-making of blood supply (Sanchís and Giraldo, 2010).
As resources against worry, Dr. Puig recommends his patients to focus attention on abdominal breathing, which alone has the capacity to produce changes in the brain: it favors the secretion of hormones such as serotonin and endorphin and improves the synchronicity between the two hemispheres. What is achieved emotionally with this is to shift the focus of attention from those thoughts that are altering us and causing anger or worry and, as a consequence, make our decision-making start from an inadequate point of view. We could say that breathing calms our mental state (Sanchís and Giraldo, 2010).
Coinciding with the Madrid-born doctor, there are always reasons to justify our bad mood, stress, or sadness… but as emotional well-being psychotherapists we must teach our patients to base our thoughts on how we want to live and that this should be our line of thought (for example, living without sadness). “What the heart wants to feel, the mind eventually shows it,” declares Dr. Puig.
The word as a form of vital energy
It has been possible to photograph (with positron emission tomography) how people who decided to talk to themselves in a more positive way, specifically people with psychiatric disorders, managed to physically remodel their brain structure, precisely the circuits that generated these diseases. This fact suggests that words alone activate the amygdala nuclei. Let’s take an example: they can activate the fear nuclei that transform hormones and mental processes. Fear prevents us from leaving our comfort zone, we tend to the security of the known, and that attitude prevents us from fulfilling ourselves (Sanchís and Giraldo, 2010).
Without prior training or will for transformation, our brain functions according to automatisms that we have incorporated over the years and, some, make change impossible. This is, perhaps, one of the most relevant tasks of the psychotherapist in consultation: to teach our patient to accept who they are and what resists them.
“Every human being, if they set their mind to it, can be the sculptor of their own brain”
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906