[Neurons] 2023 Neurons # HEALTHY AGING AND BELIEFS

Sun Apr 23 15:53:09 EDT 2023

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #19

April 24, 2023

Healthy Aging #4

HEALTHY AGING

AND BELIEFS

As strange as it may sound, what you believe plays a tremendously determine
role in how you age.  In this, there are healing beliefs that you can adopt
and there are toxic beliefs-beliefs which you will want to discover and
replace.  Now when it comes to beliefs, there are many kinds of
beliefs-identity beliefs (about who you are), causation beliefs (what causes
what), equivalence beliefs (what is equal to and equivalent to what),
contributory beliefs (what contributes to something), assumptive beliefs
(what you assume without question), etc. 

           Identity beliefs: "I am a diabetic."  "I am an alcoholic."

           Causation beliefs: "Things going wrong makes me depressed."
"When you lose a loved one, you have to grieve for two or more years."  "If
there is heart attacks in your family, you will probably have a heart
attack."

           Equivalence beliefs: "A diagnosis of cancer is a death
sentence."  

           Contributory beliefs: "I smoked for years before I quit, I will
probably get lung cancer."

           Assumptive beliefs: "My grandfather smoked heavily everyday of
his life and he lived into his 90s."

What we know in Neuro-Semantics is that unlike a thought which sends signals
to your body and which can influence how your body responds, a belief is a
command to your nervous systems.  That's why a belief sets up a
self-fulfilling prophecy and begins to make happen what we fear will happen.
That's what makes a belief so much more powerful than a mere thought.  You
can think all kinds of things without doing any semantic damage to yourself.
But if you believe something that is limiting, toxic, dysfunction, or
dangerous, that belief will activate all of your many nervous systems to try
to make it real.  It is this actualization process that is the problem.

Let's peek into this actualization process for just a moment to understand
it.  The reason a mere thought will not do semantic damage is that you can
try on a thought without believing it.  It's just a thought.  So it does not
activate any commitment to the thought.  A belief is different.  Having
confirmed a thought that it is real, actual, or factual, the belief informs
all of neurology that reality is such and such.  In response your autonomic
nervous system, your immune system, your sympathetic nervous system, and on
and on all go into action to help you adjust to reality (well, to your
perception of reality).  That's why the-confirmed-thought (a belief) can get
your body to create ulcers, headaches, backaches, strokes, heart-attacks,
and on and on.

The bottom line?  Be very careful what you believe!  What you believe can
have drastic effects in your mind-body-emotion system.  One of the most
effective solutions to this is the critical thinking model in NLP, The
Meta-Model of Language.  As a thinking tool, the Meta-Model empowers you to
think critically about the things you think and believe and to quality
control your thoughts so that they are more accurate and precise.  Another
effective tool are the belief change patterns.  These are processes by which
you can transform a limiting belief into an empowering belief.

Anne Harrington wrote about a story from a 1957 psychiatric journal that
radiates questions and puzzles.  It is in her book, The Cure Within: A
History of Mind-Body Medicine. 

Mr. Wright was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma, cancer of the lymph nodes.
"Tumors, some the size of oranges, infested his neck, groin, and armpits."
He ceased to respond to conventional therapies. Then he learned of a new
experimental drug, Krebiozen, and was "persuaded that it would be his
miracle cure."  On Friday he begged his doctor for an injection.  On Monday,
the doctor was greeted by Mr. Wright "walking around the ward, chatting
happily."  The tumors had "melted like snow balls on a hot stove."

Mr Wright continued his stunning recovery until he read conflicting stories
about Krebiozen's effectiveness in the newspaper.  His confidence
undermined, he relapsed.  His doctor then convinced him that the original
injection had been defective and administered another one-actually distilled
water.  He recovered even more dramatically than the first injection and
sent home, "a picture of health."

Later when Mr Wright read that the American Medical Association had
denounced Krebiozen as a worthless drug, he relapsed once again.  He was
admitted to the hospital and died two days later.

Whatever happened there, obviously his mind played a significant role in
both his recovery and his relapses.  What he believed somehow activated his
mind-body system both to his benefit and then to his detriment.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  

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