Since February, I’ve been fascinated to read several interviews with medical writer Jo Marchant. For her new book, Cure: A Journey Into The Science of Mind Over Body, Marchant has mined the literature on how thoughts and perceptions affect our physiology, developing a nuanced appreciation of how the mind and body interact. Her findings:
“Our mental state can be crucial in determining our experience of symptoms such as pain, nausea, fatigue and depression…Feeling stressed or afraid can cause your heart to race and your bowels to empty, and trigger an immune response called inflammation. These processes aren’t usually under our conscious control—we can’t will changes to occur—but there are indirect methods we can use to influence them.”While in no way suggesting that illnesses are “all in the mind,” Marchant’s analysis suggests that our mental and physical health is affected by the way we perceive and relate to it. Meditation, says Marchant, is one of those indirect, influencing, methods that can help, which is perhaps not surprising given that how we perceive and relate to our lives is precisely what’s trained in mindfulness practice.
The effect of mindfulness…
