The biology of belief
written and researched by Bruce H Lipton M.D
This book was first published in 2005 and has been updated with stunning new scientific discoveries about the biochemical effects of the brain’s functioning of cells in your body can be affected by your thoughts.
New science of epigenetics is revolutionizing our understanding of the link between mind and matter, and the profound effects on our personal lives within our collective species.
Learning about our conscious minds and life itself is always going to keep you intrigued within a book, and this one certainly does.
If you’d like to learn more about the connection of the mind and body, then this book needs to be on your list..
Here are the highlights from the book, which I have paraphrased…
NOCEBOS: The power of negative beliefs
If positive thinking can pull you out of depression and heal a damaged knee, consider what negative thinking can do in your life.
When the mind, through positive suggestion, improves health, it is referred to as the placebo effect.
Conversely, when the same mind is engaged in negative suggestions that can damage health – the negative effects are referred to as the nocebo effect.
In medicine, the nocebo effect can be as powerful as the placebo effect, a fact you should keep in mind every time you step into the doctor’s office. By their words and their demeanor, physicians can convey hope-deflating messages to their patients, messages that are completely unwarranted.
Example of a true story: “you have 6 months to live”
A Shoe salesman was told he had cancer, and after a few weeks after his diagnosis he passed away.
The autopsy found that he had very little cancer in his body, a few spots on his lungs, not enough to kill him.
He died with cancer – not from cancer…. He died because he believed he was going to die.
Everyone around him thought he had cancer, but the doctor is still haunted by this because he feels he removed his hope in some way…
Troublesome nocebo cases suggest that physicians, parents, and teachers can remove hope by programming you to believe you are powerless.
It’s true: Our positive and negative beliefs not only impact our health but also every aspect of our life.
While we cannot readily change the codes of our genetic blueprints, we can change our minds and in the process, switch the blueprints used to express our genetic potential.
You can live a life of fear or live a life of love.
You have the choice. If you see to choose to see a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health.
If you choose to believe that you live in a dark world full of fear, your body’s health will be compromised as you physiologically close to yourself down in a protection response.
Some great quotes:
- Positive perceptions of the mind enhance health by engaging immune functions, while inhibition of immune activities by negative perceptions can precipitate dis-ease.
- Those negative perceptions can also create debilitating, chronic psychological stress that has a profound and negative impact on gene function.
- Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. Simply stated, success doesn’t bring happiness; happiness brings success.
Genetic expression
Changes in genetic expression are associated with faster physical recovery from stressful situations and prove that mindfulness practices can lead to health improvement through profound epigenetic alteration of the genome.
Growth and protection
Evolution has provided us with lots of survival mechanisms.
They can be roughly divided into two functional categories: growth and protection.
These growth and protection mechanisms are the fundamental behaviors required for an organism to survive.
You obviously understand the protection part, but even as a fully grown adult, you still have to manage growth as in:
Everyday billions of cells in your body wear out and need to be replaced.
EG: the entire cellular lining of your gut is replaced every 72 hours. In order to maintain this continuous turnover of cells, your body needs to expand a significant amount of energy daily.
Cells gravitate to nutrients, like humans gravitate to breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Gravitating to a life-sustaining signal, such as nutrients, characterizes a growth response; moving away from threatening signals such as toxins, characterizes a protection response.
Some have a neutral effect neither growth or protection responses.
Dr Bruce Lipton research showed that these growth/protection behaviours are also essential for the survival of multicellular organisms such as humans. But there is a catch to these opposing survival mechanisms that have evolved over billions of years. It turns out that the mechanisms that support growth and protection cannot operate optimally at the same time.
In other words, cells cannot simultaneously move forward and backward.
The human blood vessel cells exhibited one microscopic anatomy for providing a protection response. What they couldn’t do was exhibit both configurations at the same time.
Protective mode
In a response similar to that displayed by cells, humans unavoidably restrict their growth behaviors when they shift into a protective mode.
If you’re running from a mountain lion, it’s not a good idea to expend energy on growth. In order to survive – that is, escape the lion – you summon all your energy for your fight-flight response.
Redistributing energy reserves to fuel the protection response inevitably results in a curtailment of growth.
In addition to diverting energy to support the tissues and organs needed for the protection response, there is an additional reason why growth is inhibited.
Growth processes require an open exchange between an organism and its environment.
EG; food is taken in and waste products are excreted. However, protection requires a closing down of the system to wall the organism off from the perceived threat.
To fully thrive, we must not only eliminate the stressors but also actively seek joyful, loving, fulfilling lives that stimulate growth processors.
How your system shuts down..
- Once the adrenal alarm is sounded, the stress hormones released into the blood constrict the blood vessels of the digestive tract, forcing the energy providing blood to preferentially nourish the tissues of the arms and legs that enable us to get out of harm’s way.
- Before the blood was sent to extremities, it was concentrated in the visceral organs.
- Redistributing the viscera’s blood to the limbs in the fight -or-flight response results in an inhibition of growth related functions; without the blood’s nourishment the visceral organs cannot function properly.
- The visceral organs stop doing their life-sustaining work of digestion, absorption, excretion, and other functions that provide for the growth of the cells and the production of the body’ energy reserves. Hence, the stress response inhibits growth processes and further compromises the body’s survival by interfering with the generation of vital energy reserves.
- The body’s second protection system is the immune system, which protects us from threats originating under the skin, such as those caused by bacteria and viruses.
- When the immune system is mobilized, it can consume much of the body’s energy supply.
How your brain responds
When the HPA axis mobilizes the body for fight-n-flight response, the adrenal hormones directly repress the action of the immune system to conserve energy reserves.
Activating the HPA axis also interferes with our ability to think clearly. The processing of information in the forebrain (conscious mind), the centre of executive reasoning and logic, is significantly slower than the reflex activity controlled by the hindbrain (subconscious mind).
In an emergency, the faster the information processing, the more likely the organism will survive. Adrenal stress hormones constrict the blood vessels in the forebrain, reducing its ability to engage in conscious volitional action.
Constriction of forebrain blood vessels redirects vascular flow to the hindbrain.
The increase in nutrition and energy enhances the hindbrain life-sustaining reflexes to more effectively control fight-or-flight behaviour.
While it is necessary that stress signals repress the slower processing conscious mind to augment survival, it comes at a cost… diminished conscious awareness and reduced intelligence.
Showing your love
“In a healthy relationship, holding your partner’s hand is enough to lower blood pressure, ease stress responses, improve health, and diminish physical pain.” (Coan; 2006)
When it comes to stress the creation of loving bonds assures the mind that when we are threatened, there will be somebody there to throw us a life preserver.
That frees us, and we no longer need to live through fear, because we know we will be supported unconditionally.
Individuals who are disconnected from social relationships and community, on the other hand, perceive they are alone and adrift in an ocean where no one ever comes to their aid.
You know why it’s hard to be happy – it’s because we refuse to LET GO of the things that make us sad.
Human programming when good mechanisms go bad.
Researchers were left to conclude that infants can pick up complex skills solely by observation and don’t have to be actively coached by their parents. (Science 2001)
In humans as well, the fundamental behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes we observe in our parents become “hardwired” as synaptic pathways in our subconscious minds.
Once programmed into the subconscious mind, they control our biology for the rest of our lives…or at least until we make the effort to reprogram the.
Anyone who doubts the sophistication of this downloading should think about the first time your child blurted out a swear word picked up from you. I’m sure you noted its sophistication, correct pronunciation, its nuanced style, and context carrying your signature.
Given the precision of this behaviour-recording system, imagine the consequences of hearing your parents say “you are a stupid child”, “you do not deserve things”, “you should have never been born”.
When unthinking or uncaring parents pass on those messages to their young children, they are no doubt oblivious to the fact that such comments are downloaded into the subconscious memory as absolute “facts” just as surely as bytes are downloaded onto your hard drive..
During early development, the child’s subconsciousness has not evolved enough to critically assess that those parental pronouncements were only verbal barbs and not necessarily true characterizations of “self”.
Once programmed into the subconscious mind, however, these verbal abuses become defined as “truths” that unconsciously shape the behaviour and potential of the child through life.
Nature’s head start program
Genes are important – but their importance is only realized through the influence of conscious parenting and the richness of opportunities provided by the environment.
Conscious mothering and fathering
You are personally responsible for everything in your life, once you become aware that you are personally responsible for everything in your life.
One cannot be “guilty” or be “blamed” for being a poor parent unless one was already aware of the above-described information and disregarded it.
Once you become aware of this information, you can begin to apply it to reprogram your behaviour.
It is absolutely not true that you are the same parent for all of your children. Your second child is not a clone of the first child.
Survival of the most loving
Use the intelligence of cells to propel humanity one more rung up the evolutionary ladder where the most loving do more than just survive, they thrive.
Spiritual
- Research studies concluded that people who hold more spiritual beliefs fare significantly better in mental health and adapt more adapt more quickly to health problems than those who are less spiritual.
- The benefits to mental health and well-being provided by spirituality have physiological consequences that impact physical health reduce risk of disease, and influence the healing outcomes of treatment.
- Spiritual beliefs have a direct, positive influence on the activity of the immune and endocrine systems that are critical for health maintenance and disease prevention.
- Spiritual patients exhibit significantly better indicators of immune functions, such as higher white blood cell counts and antibody levels and experience significantly lower than infection rates.
They also exhibit lower levels of adrenal stress hormones, such as cortisol and epinephrine (secretions that directly repress the activity of the immune system) than non spiritual patients. (Koenig 2012).
Coaches words:
I got a lot out of this book to help me understand how to change thoughts for the future.
To stop being stuck in a world with negativity and really reached for some positive outlooks and ways to help parent my children.
When you understand that you can change epigenetics from small simple information and be aware on how to apply this to your behaviour, you feel relieved [especially in the world we live today with so many expectations].
I have no doubt your growth and belief in positive perceptions of the mind will help your health as you read this book.
If you find these notes interesting enough to read more into this book, please leave a comment or review after you read this book..
To your health and happiness and growth in 2021 and beyond.
