Is it possible to think yourself ill

In spite of such studies, the influence of our mind over our health has left some members of the medical community decidedly sceptical. Not only that, our thoughts can even help cure us of some ailments. Importantly, researchers are now starting to understand more about the mechanisms at work — how our thoughts are connected to our physical health.

One of her most recent studies — so recent, in fact, that it has not yet been published — involves just over 70, nurses in the US. In the research, she discovered that those who are the most optimistic have roughly 15 per cent longer lifespans than those who are the least optimistic.

In part, it is thought that differences in longevity like this are down to the fact that those with positive attitudes tend to do more exercise and smoke less. But it is not just that.

For more than a decade now, the laboratory of molecular biologist Dr Elizabeth Blackburn at University of California, San Francisco, has been investigating the influence of our state of mind on our telomeres — the chunks of DNA that act as protective caps at the end of chromosomes. Telomeres get shorter each time a cell divides and if they get too short, the cells in which they are located no longer divide and so they die.

Short telomeres have been associated with everything from heart disease to lung conditions. Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize in for her research on telomeres and telomerase, which is an enzyme that fights against the tendency of telomeres to get shorter and shorter over time. They found that the longer the mother had been looking after the child — so under stress — the shorter her telomeres. After that, they investigated other potential influences of the mind on DNA.

It turns out that, on average, pessimists have shorter telomeres than optimists. But how can the way we think affect our DNA? The good news is that we can boost our telomerase levels. In one study Blackburn was involved with, 30 volunteers spent three months at a retreat in Colorado meditating for six hours a day. Now a master practitioner of NLP, she helps train health professionals, and has recently used NLP techniques to free herself from the asthma she's had all her life.

A core belief is that our thoughts and physiology are intimately connected. I think I always knew that my asthma might have a psychological root cause, but I only began to explore it when I discovered an NLP technique called communicating with your symptoms, developed by an American practitioner Robert Dilts. The message from my asthma symptoms was that I wasn't taking enough care of myself. I had already successfully used NLP for dealing with simpler health problems such as back pain and PMT, and towards the end of last year, I felt confident enough to try applying it to my asthma.

The crunch came one day when I was in the gym, and felt the usual exercise-induced asthma attack coming on. I decided not to reach for my inhaler but to try instead talking to my body's white cells to shift the congestion I felt in my bronchial tubes. I imagined a red, inflamed blockage and there and then in my head I played some marching music and imagined the white cells marching towards the blockage and eating away at it. After a few minutes I was able to cough up the blockage of sputum that was there.

I felt tremendously excited that I had been able to manage my asthma in this way. I decided to stop using my inhaler and instead to go into the mind and body connection to cope with my asthma attacks. I also decided to step down on my steroid medication and I had the medical background to know how to do it safely.

I now no longer have asthma, but most surprisingly neither do my daughters aged 12 and Both have been asthmatic since they were small and Rebecca my elder daughter has been quite ill with it in the past.

She was using both preventer and reliever medicines and now uses neither, although she still carries her preventer with her. She simply came to me one day and said, 'Mum, I don't seem to have asthma any more. I now do 40 minutes of aerobic exercise two or three times a week without even thinking about asthma. Tel Upon hearing the news, the relieved Mr A soon recovered. We can never know whether the nocebo effect would have actually killed Mr A, though Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin Medical School thinks it is certainly possible.

If your fear and belief were strong enough, the resulting cocktail of hormones could be deadly, he says. The thought that your doctor could inadvertently make you sicker is concerning enough. But more recently, it has become clear just how little is needed to spread the nocebo effect. Even just passing gossip and hearsay can prime your mind for illness with potent effect. Last year, for instance, Benedetti offered to take more than students up the Italian Alps to an altitude of m ft.

A few days beforehand, he had told just one of them about a possible consequence — that the thin air could bring on a migraine. By the day of the trip, he found that the gossip had spread to more than a quarter of the group — and those who had heard the rumour began to suffer the worst headaches. In other words, harmful beliefs, that transmit illness, could be catching.

Indeed, another study found that simply seeing another patient suffering pain can make a treatment hurt more — suggesting nocebo could pass from person to person by silent observation. Even more worryingly, you might not need to be conscious of those thoughts to be affected ; the nocebo can apparently be triggered by subliminal cues. History is full of mysterious outbreaks that might have arisen in this way.

Most famous is the deadly dancing plague of The most chilling was the spate of mysterious deaths within the community of Hmong people who arrived in the US from southeast Asia in the s — young men, with no existing illness, who began dying in their sleep after periods of nightmares and sleep paralysis ; experts have speculated that it arose from a strong cultural belief in deadly night spirits.

Often, fear of new technology seems to be responsible: in the late 19th Century, early telephone users reported giddiness and wracking pain after using the new contraption, for instance, while Scandinavian workers in the s developed surprising rashes, apparently from their computer monitors.

Some sufferers even resort to sleeping in metal cocoons to avoid the constant ringing in their ears. Even the former head of the World Health Organisation was affected: she banned cell phones in her office , because she thought that they gave her splitting headaches.