Is your glass half empty or half full? Your answer may have an important impact on both your mental and physical health.
For thousands of years physicians have observed how people's attitudes affect their vulnerability to disease and illness mental and physical and their ability to recover from them. As far back as 200AD the Greek author Galen declared that melancholic women were more susceptible to breast cancer than their more sanguine counterparts. Being positive and upbeat doesn't automatically make you immune to sickness, but it does help you to stay healthy. As Alex Gardner, a specialist in the therapeutic use of laughter, says: "He who laughs lasts." In fact your attitudes dictate just about everything in your life.
The phrase 'in a world of your own' is absolutely accurate: experts agree that we each inhabit our own world created entirely from the inside of our own heads. "The world is subjective and unique to each individual," says Gardner, who is a chartered psychologist and psychotherapist. Philip Hodson is a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. "Your way of interpreting the world dictates your view of it," he comments.
Clare Moore is a behavioural specialist who works with some of the UK's leading athletes and sportspeople to improve their performance. "The way you think has a huge impact because your attitudes govern and restrict the type of information you take in about the world, which in turn has an enormous impact on the body." Moore says that how you think can affect your body at cellular level. Neurotransmitters are the brain's chemical signals that react to different emotional states. If you are repeatedly exposed to feelings, such as anger, fear and stress, you develop greater sensitivity to those chemical messengers, which means that you feel more angry, stressed or fearful more often.
When cells regenerate they are more likely to be more sensitive to those stimuli. "Basically the more angry you are the more your body gets used to being angry and the angrier you get," she says. What's more cells that are sensitised to a negative emotion are less able to take on nutrition and to perform other functions. What we tell ourselves about the world predicts how we perceive it. If you look for bad things to happen to you, they will - not because you can cause events to happen, but because you will perceive your experiences negatively. In that sense your attitudes determine how you experience the world. You are not master of the universe, but you are master of your own universe.
Not surprisingly then, the way we describe ourselves affects our self-image. Hodson says: "You might say that understatement, self deprecation and being laconic are all parts of our national character, but when you say self deprecating things you hear yourself say them and your subconscious mind believes them. There is no virtue in undervaluing yourself."
"You hear women saying that they are only a mum. Only? Being a mother is the most important job in the world - you are helping to shape our future society - so don't compromise it in your own mind." Hodson believes that anyone can benefit from learning to be more assertive and recommends Ann Dickson's A Woman in Your Own Right as a good place to start.
Negative attitudes create negative emotions, which have a negative affect on the body and a material effect on your health. Our experts agree: valuing yourself is the first step towards a happy and healthy life.
