How does negative thinking affect your health? Do unhealthy thoughts make you more vulnerable to illnesses?
Unhealthy thoughts become larger and more powerful when you fail to process them because you continue to pour metaphysical energy into them. When they become too powerful to handle, they can leave negative effects on your body.
Discover how negative thinking takes a toll on physical health, according to Dr. Caroline Leaf.
Physical Effects of Negative Thinking
Does negative thinking affect your health? Leaf suggests that mental toxicity has several detrimental physical effects, including:
Effect 1: Poor brain health. Recall that according to Leaf, thoughts exist as both metaphysical energy and as physical structures—so mental toxicity can adversely affect the physical structure and function of the brain. As we discussed, Leaf measures this effect using brain mapping technology that measures coherence.
(Shortform note: In Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, psychiatrist Daniel G. Amen also identifies a link between mental health struggles and poor brain health. While Leaf says mental toxicity damages your brain, Amen takes the opposite perspective, arguing that brain injuries are at the root of many mental health problems. Amen uses another type of brain imaging, known as SPECT scans, to identify these brain injuries and suggest targeted treatment plans. For example, if you’re suffering from emotional distress, he recommends healing the brain region known as the limbic system.)
Effect 2: Increased inflammation. Leaf explains that mental toxicity can cause your body to produce and circulate higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and homocysteine, which can lead to increased inflammation throughout the body. Leaf also says that physical thoughts have structural deformities that can increase inflammation in the brain. Inflammation in the brain and body can contribute to poorer physical and mental health—for example, it makes you more likely to get sick.
(Shortform note: Unhealthy thinking can contribute to physical inflammation, but neuroscientists disagree slightly with Leaf on how this happens. The stress hormone cortisol plays a role, as Leaf suggests—negative thoughts trigger cortisol, and over time, high levels of cortisol can cause inflammation. Mental stress also spikes homocysteine levels, which can lead to inflammation in the brain and eyes; however, homocysteine isn’t a stress hormone as Leaf says—it’s an amino acid. As we discussed earlier, neuroscientists agree that thoughts aren’t physical structures, so they can’t have structural deformities that increase inflammation. However, there are links between mental illness, inflammation, and physical illness.)
Effect 3: Vulnerability to illness. According to Leaf, the vast majority of illness results from mental toxicity. She explains that mental toxicity makes you more vulnerable to three kinds of illness: First, you’re more vulnerable to lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes due to the difficulty you have making healthy choices. Second, the chronic inflammation you suffer as a result of stress makes you more vulnerable to communicable illnesses like viruses. Third, toxic thoughts can unlock genetic predispositions to illness and rapid aging (which we’ll cover next) via a process called epigenetics, where your behaviors and environment influence the expression of certain genes.
(Shortform note: Medical experts agree with Leaf that there’s a relationship between unhealthy thinking and physical illness. Unhealthy thinking can create or exacerbate chronic stress, and studies suggest that chronic stress makes you sick. It contributes to lifestyle-related diseases including diabetes, makes you more vulnerable to communicable illnesses by suppressing the immune system, triggers the onset of some genetic conditions like autoimmune diseases, and shortens your lifespan by inducing more rapid aging. However, it may not be accurate to say that the vast majority of illness is caused by unhealthy thinking, since a complex array of physiological, psychological, and environmental factors impact physical health.)
Effect 4: Rapid aging. Leaf says her research shows that mental toxicity causes you to age more rapidly by shortening your telomeres (a part of your DNA whose length is correlated with biological age—in other words, how much your cells have deteriorated): Her research suggests that people with more mental toxicity had shorter telomeres than people with less mental toxicity. She also says that addressing mental toxicity lengthens your telomeres.
| The Contested Science of Telomeres Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of your chromosomes, keeping them from fraying (much like the plastic tips on shoelaces). The telomeres keep shortening as the cell divides, and once they become too short, the cell dies. Leaf says that longer telomeres are associated with longevity and that you can lengthen your telomeres by reducing mental toxicity. Let’s explore each of these assertions. In The Telomere Effect, biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn and psychologist Elissa Epel argue that your telomeres dictate how fast you age. They say that longer telomeres keep your cells youthful for longer, granting you a longer and healthier life, while shortened telomeres lead to accelerated cellular aging and are linked to age-related diseases that can hasten death. However, some studies suggest that the relationship between telomere length (TL) and longevity is not that simple. Both short and long telomeres have been linked to a variety of health conditions. Shorter telomeres may predict diseases like Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease, while longer telomeres may encourage the growth of cancerous tumors. Like Leaf, Blackburn and Epel also argue that unhealthy thinking can shorten your telomeres by causing stress. They explain that stress causes your cells to divide more quickly, which damages your telomeres—so it’s important to protect your telomeres by reducing stress and negative thinking. Blackburn and Epel add that you may be able to lengthen your telomeres by embracing optimism. However, some research disputes this idea, suggesting that optimism may lengthen your lifespan, but not by lengthening your telomeres. Blackburn and Epel’s research appears to support Leaf’s claim that addressing mental toxicity can inhibit rapid aging. However, Leaf doesn’t clarify the units of measurement she used in her study, which makes it difficult to tell if the TL changed significantly over time. Additionally, the changes in TL she reports could be attributed to natural variation: Everybody’s telomeres are of different lengths, and telomeres grow and shrink quickly over short periods. |
