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Getting Back to Normal: This past weekend, New Zealand rock band Six60, played what may be the largest live concert in a year when they performed in front of 50,000 fans at Eden Park Stadium in Auckland, New Zealand with no masks and no social distancing. Their Tour continues in November to locations in France, Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, and Ireland. New Zealand had a low Covid rate because they responded rapidly on the initial shutdown and screening. Targeted vaccinations to high Covid locations such as Prince Rupert, BC are accelerating our returning to “the good old days”. The vaccines are working! Hopefully, soon we can be hugging each other again! Many people are really missing the magic of human contact and touch.
The Counter Clockwise Study – Mind Reset and Regaining Youth:
In the early 80’s, social psychologist Ellen Langer conducted an experiment. Eight elderly men in their 70’s, walking with canes, shuffling feet and stooped went into a converted monastery in New Hampshire to enter a kind of Twilight Zone into the past. A vintage radio played old songs, a black/white TV played old TV shows and all the reading materials were from the late 1950’s.
The eight men were told to really live in the past, to be the person they were in their late fifties, just as an actor would, living the part. (Imagine how easy and even more powerful this would be if these people were hypnotized to believe they are younger). There were no mirrors, no 80’s clothing. The movies they watched, activities and conversations were all about “current” 1950’s events and spoken of in the present tense. Their actual life of the 80’s was put aside.
As they regained vitality, many of their health measurements improved dramatically. Following the five days, all the men were reported to have had a more erect posture, better manual dexterity, improved vision and looked younger. A control group did not have these positive results. Although it was a small study, it showed another link of the mind and body connection.
More Observations from Other Related Ellen Langer Studies:
- In a reverse experiment, Langer wanted to determine if healthy people could use a mind power mindset to weaken their immune system and make themselves unhealthy. The participants watched movies of people sneezing, coughing, imagined they had a cold and Kleenex boxes were everywhere. As a result, 40% developed cold symptoms and higher levels of elevated immune-system responses in their body, activated to fight the cold. Similarly, if you imagine sucking on a sour, juicy, bitter, tart, yellow, lemon, you will likely salivate. Our imagination, positive or negative thinking, beliefs and even will-power can create thousands of different chemical reactions in our brain and body, thus affecting our happiness, feelings, behavior, addictions, healing capacity, immune system, etc.
- Another Langer study showed that giving seniors plants to care for and the freedom to make their own daily schedule decisions, for a feeling of control in their life, led to mental and physical improvement.
- In 2010, six aging celebrities were sent to a rural area in a home decorated to the year 1975. After a week, they too showed dramatic improvement in mobility, flexibility, improved posture, and other test measures including a more youthful appearance. Again, there was evidence for a strong connection between mind and health. Langer has been called “the mother of positive psychology.”
- Langer studied the importance of placebo effects. If you believe something will help you, it is likely to do so. She also discovered that the more expensive the placebo, the stronger the effect. (Hypnosis and the right instructions can make pain vanish because you can be conditioned to believe it. Also, hypnotic instructions can help to release natural chemicals manufactured by the body and brain that can help with pain, sleep, stress and just about anything else.) Psychoneuroimmunology and psych endocrinology studies investigate the powerful connection between psychological and physiological processes. Placebos are not just sugar pills in a bottle. Positive and negative influencers are all around us. For example, in the mind of the patient, the treatment by a therapist appearing in a white lab coat is likely more effective than if he were wearing a shirt and tie.
- The nocebo effect is the opposite of placebo, as negative mind sets may create ill health. Sometimes a medical doctor may label a patient with an incorrect diagnosis and the patient can develop the symptoms of that diagnosis because of the power of belief. Langer discovered that breast-cancer survivors who said they were “in remission” showed poorer health and more pain than patients who considered themselves “cured.” When I had thyroid cancer in 1996, instead of owning it as “my cancer”, I distanced myself saying “that cancer”. Beyond that, I used healing imagery that it was “already gone and I am stronger than ever now”. When medical students read about all the different diseases, they often think they have many of the symptoms.
- Langer also found that women who thought they looked younger after visiting a hair salon had reduced blood pressure.
- Another of Langer’s studies suggested that if you think of your daily household cleaning as exercise (in this case chambermaids), you will lose more weight than if you do not think of it as exercise. Dr. Peter Lindner speculated, based on years of clinical experience, that using your mind in hypnosis to imagine and feel inside that you are already slim, you are far more likely to lose weight.
This mind power machine inside of us is a gift from the Creator. Sadly, few people use this inner power. The steady focus and concentrated mindset of a hypnotist himself also has a strong effect on their patient’s success. Hypnotists who believe the treatment will be successful have superior results with clients. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. From Hamlet, William Shakespeare.
Another study reported that 30% of women in a placebo group who thought they were receiving chemotherapy, but were not, lost their hair. From: Field, J. “An Interim Report of a Prospective, Randomized, Controlled Study of Adjuvant Chemotherapy in Operatable Gastric Cancer”: British Stomach Cancer Group, World Journal of Imagery, Vol. 7, 1983, pages 390-399.
As a teenager, I hypnotized my Winnipeg friend Cliff Corrigan who had just broken his arm, which was in a cast, and painful. I gave him a sugar pill from a bottle that was labeled “HYPNOTIC” and told him that he would quickly become totally relaxed, drowsy and then hypnotized. Within seconds, he became wobbly on his feet, had to lie down, and went into deep hypnosis. Following my hypnotic instructions, his pain quickly vanished. I simply stimulated his imagination, focused his thinking in a new direction and his own body created the pain numbing chemicals.
Some important factors include hope and a strong feeling of control in your own life. If we start thinking that nothing can be done to help, we give up and nothing positive happens. When people believe they still have a feeling of control in their life, keeping hope and positive visualizations of their future, they will carry out positive actions that may bring about success. A feeling of control, hope and positive expectation encourages following their physician’s instructions and treatment. If they have been told nothing will help or they do not think anything will help, they give up, take no action to do anything different and a solution is unlikely. Lastly, have you been good to yourself today and done something just for your own pleasure or fun?
Enjoy every day,
Vance Romane