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Welcome to the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Podcast where I help you navigate natural health so you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live abundantly. I'm your host, David Sandstrom. I've decided to do a series on the power of the mind. I'm going to be reading from my book, The Christian's Guide to Holistic Health. If you've read my book, I still encourage you to listen to the series because it'll be a great refresher. There's some really good content in my book and sometimes when I reread a chapter or two for myself,
I feel like I'm really blessed because I'm reminded of insights that I haven't thought about in a while, even though I wrote it. So I encourage you to pay attention to this series. You may even want to share it with a friend. My book is a 325 page comprehensive guide to holistic health from a Christian perspective, grounded in biblical teaching. If you've never read my book, I encourage you to pick up a copy. It's available on Amazon in hardcover paperback.
Kindle, and Audible. If you have read my book, I'd appreciate you leaving a rating and review on Amazon. That would be great. In this series, we're going to be covering the power of the mind-body connection. I'm going to start off reading the introduction to this section of the book, and we'll begin in Chapter 20 and finish this series with Chapter 24, a total of five chapters. My book has 46 chapters, so there's plenty of material for you to discover if you haven't read the book.
So let's jump right in with chapter 20, The Power of the Mind.
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Welcome to the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Podcast where I help you navigate natural health so you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live a better
Section three, the mind. Introduction. We've all heard of hitting the gym and working out. I suggest that if we really want to address our health concerns that we do some working in. What I'm talking about are our beliefs and self-talk. The things we allow in our minds, the thoughts we ruminate on, and the emotions we experience throughout the day have a great deal to do with the quality of our physical health and wellbeing.
I know we just left the section on the body, however, this section, while we explore the mind-body connection, we're going to spend some time on our physiology. We mustn't make the mistake of thinking we can separate any part of our trichotomous nature. To fully grasp the impact our thought lives have on our physical well-being, we must explore some neurology and cell biology. Don't check out during these chapters. Hang in there with me through some of the tactical. It'll significantly enhance your understanding of the power of the mind.
It is my firm contention that vibrant health is not just a lucky roll of the genetic dice or merely a matter of fate as some would contend. We have far more ability to influence our health than most people realize. Often that influence starts in our minds. Our thought lives may very well be the key ingredient to finding the health breakthrough we've been looking for, or it may be a useful tool for health maintenance. The point is,
As far as our health is concerned, no one can afford to neglect what's going on in their minds. We must understand that through the mind-body connection, the activity of the mind profoundly affects our physical well-being, for good or bad. Our brains are the control center for our bodies. However, to a large extent, it's our minds, thoughts, emotions, and will, that direct our brains.
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Therefore, our bodies are continually receiving conscious and non-conscious direction from our minds through our brains. These instructions have the power to build health and well-being or destroy it. Thoughts have a relentless nature to them because they're always with us. These thoughts act a lot like a dripping faucet. A dripping faucet that leaks one drop of water per second would
pour over 2,000 gallons of water down the drain in a year's time. This dripping metaphor is not a bad way of looking at it because stressful thoughts create what's called cortisol drip in our bodies. Negative thinking causes our bodies to slowly but continuously release stress hormones that damage our systems. Over time, this damage can be devastating.
I am not advocating that if we're dealing with a serious health challenge, all we need to do is think positive thoughts. That's ridiculous. I am saying that if we want to maximize our health potential, our self-talk must be addressed in the context of a comprehensive health building strategy. Our thoughts and emotions play a critical role in our physical well-being. To ignore this portion of our makeup would be foolish. Chapter 20. The Power of the Mind.
For as he thinks within himself, so he is. Proverbs 23, 7. The fun stuff. Now that we know what can be done to improve health on a physical level, it's time to move on to the fun stuff. For me, addressing the issues related to my mind was a critical component of overcoming Lyme disease. I thoroughly enjoyed researching and implementing these principles in my own life, and I want to share what I've learned with you. The mind includes our intellect,
beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and will. In short, our minds are our self-talk, or the voice inside our heads. Our minds animate our bodies while receiving instructions from our spirits. Therefore, our minds act as a bridge between our spirits and bodies. When our minds are healthy, bodily vigor tends to follow.
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The level of physical vitality we enjoy is influenced by how healthy our thought lives are. Power to reason. Our minds give us the power to reason. When we reason, we use logic and emotion to form judgments and conclusions about the events in our lives. This is how we interpret and assign meaning to them. If we're going to leverage the power of our minds in order to maximize our health potential,
We've got to make sure these meanings and interpretations are serving our healthy pursuits and not hindering them. As we're going to see, our bodies respond to repetitive thought. Quality thinking produces better choices. Better choices lead to better outcomes. Eleanor Roosevelt said, I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday. It could be said that the level of health we enjoy today
is a result of what's been going on in our minds yesterday. A complex interdependent relationship. The mind and the body have an interdependent relationship. What affects one will by necessity impact the other. For instance, who would want to take a big test or go to a job interview when they've got the flu? We all know that under the burden of this weakened physical condition, our mental performance would not be optimum.
This process is equally efficient in the other direction. When our minds are burdened with unhealthy thinking, our body's physical performance will not be optimum either. Pro golfers know all too well the power of their mental game in their performance. If you follow golf even casually, then you've probably seen a PGA player let stress get the best of him or her and fall to pieces a few holes from the end of the tournament. In these cases, what was going on in their minds had a
detrimental impact on their shop making a physical act. Make no mistake about it, our self-talk or inner dialogue can affect us physically. Fight or flight versus rest and digest. Much of what our brains do, they do without our conscious control. This is called the autonomic portion of our nervous systems. The autonomic nervous system is further categorized into two divisions, the sympathetic, fight or flight,
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or stress response, and the parasympathetic, rest and digest, or relaxation response. These two divisions work in tandem in a seesaw-like fashion. When one is up, the other is down. An important point to understand is that our bodies prefer to do repair and rebuilding functions when the relaxation response is dominant. When we're stressed, we activate our stress response, thus inhibiting functions such as immune,
detoxification, and cellular autophagy, the replacement of old worn out cells. When this becomes chronic, we experience system breakdown. We'll have more on the stress and relaxation responses in Chapter 23 this section. For now, understand that our beliefs, thoughts, expectations, and emotions exert a powerful influence over how our autonomic nervous system behaves.
This is why our thought lives and inner dialogue are critical components of a holistic health building regimen. Who's in charge? Our brains and organ are in control of our bodies. However, we must understand to a large extent it's our minds, thoughts, emotions, will that are in charge of our brains. Much of the activity of our brains is not within our direct control. However, we have complete control over our thought lives.
It's this free will dimension over our self-talk that we're going to be exploring. The human mind is a complex, nebulous entity and subject to all kinds of unhealthy distortions. Quite obviously, one could devote an entire book to the subject alone. Many have. However, in these pages, we're going to limit our discussion to the mind as it pertains to our physical well-being. We'll have more on distorted thinking patterns in Chapter 27, this section. Geeks Corner.
free will, reductionism. Some would argue that human beings are purely physical. This view would deny or dismiss the existence of the spirit. Proponents of this theory suggest that our brains create thoughts through chemical reactions. This leads to the faulty conclusion that our brains, a physical organ, are in charge of our thoughts. Therefore, we're not responsible. This view is widely popular.
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and is often the reason for the over-reliance on drugs to fix our mental issues. If we are to believe that chemicals in our brains create thoughts, it'll take us down a very unhealthy path. Simply put, it's not your fault. You just have a chemical imbalance. The answer is to correct your imbalance with the right drugs, more chemicals. Furthermore, as we all know,
Drugs come with side effects that cause even more problems. This view is reductionist and overly simplistic. I disagree with this materialistic reductionist view of the human condition. To hold this view is to remove personal responsibility for our thoughts, speech, and actions. I'm not saying there isn't a time and a place for drugs. In some instances, they may help.
although they should never be the front line or the only treatment for mental health issues. The truth is, human beings are far more than merely a collection of chemicals. We are a spirit, we have a soul, and we live in a body. This view is consistent with the biblical teaching. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete. 1 Thessalonians 5 23.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 412. We're created in God's image, Genesis 1.26, with the unique ability to step outside ourselves and analyze our thoughts. We get to choose what we believe, think, say, and do.
This is commonly referred to as free will. Free will is the essence of what it is to be human. God didn't create us as robots that merely respond to some predetermined programming. God isn't a chess player playing both sides of the board. We have a role to play. God wants us to exercise our free wills and make good choices. He primarily wants us to reciprocate His love back to Him.
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we love because he first loved us, 1 John 4.19. God's not looking for robots, he's looking for lovers, Deuteronomy 6.5. Real love cannot be coerced or taken, it must be freely given, or it's not real love, Philemon 1.14. Therefore, God gave us the ability to interpret events, discern right from wrong, and choose our responses. Stimulus,
time response. The late Stephen Covey, author of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, said that for any event we have a stimulus, a period of time, and then our response. It's that period of time between a stimulus and our response that we're offered the opportunity to separate ourselves from the animals. It's during that time we get to exercise our God-given free will and choose our responses.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian-born neurologist, psychiatrist, and Nazi concentration camp survivor put it this way, between stimulus and response there is a space. And that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Frankl's practice of choosing his thoughts carefully and mentally separating himself from unspeakable human atrocities
helped him survive his Holocaust experience. It's not so much what happens to us, although events do matter, but how we choose to respond to what happens to us that matters most. The choices we make with our thoughts and the self-talk we decide to engage in have a ripple effect on our health. Chuck Swindoll, pastor and author of 47 Christian Books, puts it this way, I am convinced that life is 10 % what happens to me
and 90 % of how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge. Thoughts can build health or destroy it. It's worth repeating. The activity of the mind profoundly affects our physical well-being for good or bad. Since our minds animate our bodies via the brain, our thoughts have the power to build health and well-being or destroy it. I know these are strong statements. In the coming chapters, I intend to explain why they're true.
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It is my hope and prayer that this section on the power of the mind will empower you and give you hope. We will not reach our full health potential without acknowledging our thought lives. So we must take inventory of our thoughts and make sure we're ruminating on health promoting ones. We need to employ appropriate filters and choose what ideas we allow ourselves to dwell on. If a thought is true and it serves our health seeking efforts, we let it in. If it's untrue,
or it hinders our health, we must reject it. When we take every thought captive, 2 Corinthians 10, 5, we can renew our minds, Romans 12, 2, and we'll be closer to experiencing the healing power of wholism. We'll have more on replacing unhealthy thoughts with healthier ones in chapter 28 this section. There's one more thing we need to discuss before we move on to the nitty gritty of how the power of the mind can affect health.
That is the idea that genes control our health destiny. Genetic determinism is a popular falsehood and limiting beliefs must be dealt with. Chapter 20 summary. Our thought lives or inner dialogue can profoundly affect our physical well-being. Stressful thoughts produce the stress response in our bodies. Peaceful thoughts produce the relaxation response.
Our bodies prefer to do healing and rebuilding during the relaxation response. We have free will. Therefore, we get to choose what thoughts we allow into our minds and what ideas we reject. That's it for now. Be sure to tune in to the next episode where I'll be covering a really important topic and that is genetic determinism. Genes do not control destiny. We'll be addressing that in the next episode. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you.
Go out there and live abundantly. I'll talk with you next time. Be blessed.
