There is a radio ad where Barbados’ comedian laureate Mac Fingall talks about the danger of hopelessness.
This is no joke. I take Mac seriously. Hopelessness can make you sick and even kill you.
It might be a quick end in a matter of seconds or a long-drawn-out end over decades. But when hope fails yuh done. A positive mental attitude can keep you afloat in a boatful of holes.
In my experience, it is harder to have a positive mental attitude when you’re sick. When I feel bad, I feel bad. Anybody coming around me who is too cheerful is liable to get positively verbally abused.
Despite my allergy to positivity when I am not well, this may be the head time I need to wake up and smell the roses. Modern scientific research and thousands of years of spiritual teachings suggest that even though it may be harder to have a positive mental attitude when you are sick, it is also harder to be sick when you have a positive mental attitude.
Saints, gurus, shamans, holy books and research scientists swear it works; not all the time, not every time, but often enough and well enough to make it a good idea to develop the habit of a positive mental attitude. According to The Bible you don’t even have to be that good at it. Your faith just has to be the size of a mustard seed and you can move a mountain.
I can feel my atheist friends cringing and skinning up their faces at the mention of the five letter F-word: faith. If you have more faith in peer reviewed studies than inspired passages, research shows that optimism improves everything from blood pressure to heart functioning, recovery from surgery, immune response and life expectancy.
It may be mind over matter, mind behind matter, or mind inside matter. Whatever it is, what is clear is that mind matters.
A friend I had not seen in a while recently showed me the scar in his neck where he was stabbed. He thought he was deaf when he could not hear himself speak, until he reasoned his assailant must have slashed his vocal cords. It happened in Bridgetown. Blood was gushing from his neck. My friend wrapped a piece of cloth around the wound and walked to the hospital. It was late. He had to climb a locked gate to reach inside.
I said to him, “You are a strong man.” He replied, “It was my mind. I tell myself I ain gine down so.” Was it just not his time? Was his throat not slashed that badly? Or was it really his strength of mind that pulled him through?
The Bible also says “Faith without works is dead.” Whatever it was, he didn’t just sit and have faith that the ambulance would reach him in time. Having the faith and hope to get up and move your tail is easier than moving a mountain.
There may be nothing supernatural about it. It may be as simple as this: positive expectations make you more likely to take positive action which increases the likelihood of positive results. That doesn’t explain the placebo effect though.
The well-known placebo effect is when a patient gets real benefits and positive results after taking fake treatment that they’ve been told will work. No action necessary. The belief alone is somehow healing. Apparently it works in both directions.
There is also the lesser known nocebo effect. This is when a person is given a harmless substance, but told it is a poison, and they show symptoms of actually being poisoned. The belief alone is somehow harmful.
It gets deeper. Give a patient medication that is proven to work but tell them it doesn’t. This has been shown to lessen the effectiveness of the medication. The belief that it doesn’t work somehow makes it not work.
This is good news or bad news depending on what you have negative and positive beliefs about.
Some of my more spiritual or New Age friends are cringing at the belief talk. They don’t believe in belief. They say that to believe is to admit doubt and doubt weakens you. Doubt is not positive and they are all about positivity, so they say you can’t simply believe, you have to know.
Fair enough. Let’s just agree that in the future, we will know that some things we now know to be true were not, even though we knew it to be true at the time. The point is, what I believe or “know” to be true has an effect on what I truthfully experience.
Somebody may read this and go and quit their job, talking ’bout “I know I gun win de lotto.” Who knows the limits of the mind and a positive mental attitude? Just don’t say Adrian Green tell you do it.
As the saying goes, “Trust in God but tie your horse.”
There is an old prank that people play. One by one everybody who is in on the trick goes up to a chosen target and tells the person that they look sick. The aim is to influence the target to actually feel ill. I never tried it but I can see it working. We are not only influenced by our own expectations but also others’ expectations of us.
For those who need institutional validation, there is research that suggests that teacher expectation affects how well students perform in class.
What expectations am I communicating to the people I come into contact with? More importantly, what expectations am I communicating to myself?
In the radio ad Mac also talks about the importance of how a person sees herself. It makes sense that who I see myself as, influences my expectations for my life.
Lehwe look at that next week.
Adrian Green is a creative communications specialist. Email Adriangreen14@gmail.com