Join Eddie Reece and Bill Courtright for a fascinating exploration of the mind-body connection! Discover how pushing yourself too hard, disrupting your routine, and even your surroundings can drain your body’s resources and weaken your immune system, but don’t worry, they’ve got you covered! Learn practical tips for self-care, active meditation, and cultivating kindness to navigate the challenges of modern life and boost your well-being. This episode offers practical tips and insightful perspectives on how to live a healthier, more balanced life.
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Boosting Immunity Through The Mind-Body Connection
We’re about to talk for 20, 30, or 40 minutes about something that I’m incredibly interested in. There is something to be said about the mind and the body and the connection that exists between the two. Perhaps it stands to reason. Perhaps you’re not sure how it works. Eddie’s going to counsel us. We’re going to have a spirited conversation about that exact topic.
I’m on the backside of what was a pretty nasty sinus infection, viral infection, or what have you. It drove me to the doctor. I had to get a script. As we record this episode, it is January 8th, 2025. Eddie and I haven’t recorded an episode because of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. Halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I brought my family up to Chicago, saw a lot of folks, interacted with a lot of multi-generational families, had a few drinks, didn’t eat so great, and didn’t sleep so great. I probably didn’t take care of myself. I didn’t exercise as much as I would’ve liked.
That got us right into the week where the kids entered their break and then it was Christmas Eve. The Saturday before Christmas Eve, my family hosted our neighborhood Christmas party so there were 75 people running through our house. That led to a nice, quiet, intimate Christmas Eve and Christmas day with my immediate family and my mother-in-law. That led to the week later, which was New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. My family and I charted up to Blue Ridge to jump into a cabin with five other families.
All this to say, I got to a place where my body cried uncle. If there was a white flag waving, I would’ve believed it. I needed to be in bed for two days until I could speak, breathe, and feel somewhat normal. In having this conversation with Eddie and telling him what I’ve been through, and I used the term the ringer, I thought, “What is it? What’s going on as I’m running 100 miles an hour, not sleeping so great, and a lot anxious at times?”
How Mental Health Impacts Immunity And Physical Health
We decided to have a conversation about a topic that I’m fascinated with, which is the mind-body connection. The question after that verbose and wordy intro and setup is, first of all, was it possible that I became immunocompromised or susceptible to a cold or an infection? If so, why? Can you help us understand the connection between what’s going on in our brain and our nervous system and how the actual physical rest of our body reacts?
What this brings to mind is college. A lot of people had this experience that we were on a quarterly system instead of a semester. As soon as the break happened between quarters, a whole bunch of people would get sick. When it is time for the next quarter to start, they’d be well by then. That happened every time we changed. That demonstrates that if you run yourself hard, you are using up your body’s resources. Your body needs a lot of resources. One of those is for your immune system to be working and working well and for pathogens to get into your body and then it’s dead. If you use up too many resources, then your immune system might not quite know what’s going on.
There are two biggest factors in your story. One is that you get around a group of people. Anytime you get around a group of people, you’re going to be passing back whatever’s going on with other folks. That’s part of it. We’re going to be around people so you want to have as healthy a body as you can. The other thing that plays into this is that you broke your routine. All of us are routine-based. We all have a routine. You might be saying as you are reading this, “Almost every day is different.” That’s your routine. If we make every day the same, we lose it.
We have a routine because that’s about survival. The survival part of your brain said, “We did that today and we didn’t die. Let’s do it again tomorrow.” When you get off of your routine, your nervous system is higher alert than normal, burning up more glucose. You’re uncomfortable. Your routine is important to stick as close to that as you can when you go through the holidays.
Wear a mask. Have I said on the show that I have long COVID? I do. This past January 1, 2025, it’s my 3rd anniversary of getting COVID. I’ve stopped calling it long COVID when I can remember because that doesn’t mean much to anybody. What I say is I have some mysterious illness that makes me tired and is causing me to lose muscle mass. Early on in this mess, I lost my ability to sing. It’s odd but if you talk to somebody else who has had problems after covid, you’ll hear all sorts of things going wrong with them.
All of that’s to say my immune system, I treat it as a compromised immune system because it’s working hard, and that’s part of why I’m tired all the time. Wear a mask. It might be 50 or 100 years from now but wearing masks and protecting ourselves will be part of our routine. Wait until we get a big fungal outbreak and you’re around people. We’re always going to get sick and get something.
Let’s use holiday blah, like depression or anxiety, and then you get yourself into a holiday situation. Maybe you get anxious being around a lot of people. You go to a holiday function and you’ve been fearing it for a day or two. You get there, and then the next day, you feel like garbage. Is it as simple as having a low white blood cell count and being immunocompromised anyway that when you walked in, you had a germ infestation and didn’t have what it takes to fend it off, or was it truly something in the brain that attracted that ailment?
There’s nothing in the brain that’s going to attract it. What you’re describing sounds like somebody who is at least somewhat introverted doing something out of their routine and getting around a crowd of people. That causes anxiety. That causes a high alert in your nervous system and it burns up your resources. Don’t worry so much.
The happier I am, the less sick I feel. I believe that’s true. I’m one of those guys that says, “I don’t get sick,” and then I got sick.
I didn’t get sick before this but I’ve had all kinds of weird. I don’t call it sick. Sick, to me, for some reason in my upbringing, is cold, flu, or lying in bed. Having whatever I have, I don’t call it sick.
If you’ve had something for three years, it’s certainly not. We’re going from a sickness or an illness to a condition or disease.
There’s something weird going on. Think of the cells in your body. They’re all working. They’re all doing something and they need resources to do that. We have cells in our immune system that can find a cancer cell and eat it up. A lot of that cell movement, what they do, and how they do it, they do it completely on their own. We’re not up here. We’re everywhere. Our cells know what to do but they have to have the resources. That’s why in taking care of yourself, you’re taking care of this cellular mechanism that keeps you going.
The Connection Between Emotional Stress And Physical Illness
There was a study quite a while ago looking at the relationship between people’s general attitude about things, whether you are more optimistic, less optimistic, or whatever, and how that affected those cancer cells, particularly the NK cells. They found that in the people that were more optimistic, the cells worked better and in the less optimistic, the cells didn’t work as well. Attitude has a lot to do with it.
We had an awful lot of one-on-one experience with people with cancer. The people who have a good attitude toward it have a much better chance. I believe that. You don’t feel that great but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy something or yourself and other people. There’s more of an upbeat temperament is what it’s about. Anytime we have a thought, which is a billion times a day, there’s a little bit of chemical neurological something going on. It makes sense to me that if you’re more of an upbeat person, the chemical process of being that person is going to produce chemicals that would be good for you. Your NK cells or Natural Killer cells and go after it.
If you’re more of an upbeat person, the chemical process of actually being that person is going to produce chemicals that would be good for you.
If you’re the person who’s down and pessimistic, you’re pumping chemicals in there that say, “I don’t care.” That gets to that NK cell and it’s like, “Here’s your cancer cell. I don’t care. It’s just one.” There’s a little bit of scientific stuff to back that up. It sounds preposterous but it makes sense to me in terms of as a therapist, I understand how the nervous system works well in terms of people’s behavior, how they feel, and how they succeed at something or fail at something. It’s the same thing that we’ve got to rewire this. There’s something to it.
As you say that, I’m reminded of Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. For those who haven’t read it, it’s brilliant. You should. It’s about someone in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and watching people give up and this idea that he could predict after being in there for a while to a fairly accurate degree when someone wouldn’t wake up or when they mailed it in. He could almost see the light go out, as how he describes it. Frankl survived and wrote the book. He became a brilliant thought leader on psychotherapy if I’m not mistaken, but I could be wrong.
There’s also a similar reference in the 1700s at the time of our founding fathers when the average male age in this country was 42 or 44 years old, and yet if you look at a lot of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and a lot of the early leaders of our nation, the statesmen, if you will, a person all lived to be 60, 70, or 80 years old. The same thing was happening in Europe with some of the greats throughout the Renaissance and so forth. It was tied to this evidence of this purpose-driven existence, this idea of, “I have something left to accomplish. I feel like I am of value.” Am I correct to presume that it’s that purpose and that value that lends itself to the attitude that creates the better environment for fending off a cancer cell, in your example?
The Dangers Of Ignoring Negative Emotions In Pursuit Of Positivity
This is tricky. You don’t want to ignore any parts of you who don’t want to be upbeat or are not upbeat. We say this a lot in the show in one way or another. If you’re not a highly optimistic person, let’s say, and you decide, “I’m going to be more positive,” what’s going to happen is you’re going to more than likely crash hard in some not-so-good way to get you back to where you were, which is homeostasis. In my mind, it’s Carl Jung’s idea that when we create 1 side or 1 part of us, we also create the opposite of that. That’s called, in Jungian words, as our shadow self.
When I talk about things like the kindness dialogue, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s for these parts to talk to each other. Don’t go, “I’m going to be happy and upbeat,” without conferring with this part because it’s going to get you. It will. That’s why in my mind positive affirmations by themselves don’t work because this part’s over here going, “I am worthy. I am good. I am worthwhile,” and this part over here is rolling its eyes and saying, “Sure.” That causes a battle, which is burning up resources. You have to be careful about how you do those things. You don’t become an upbeat person. You examine how it came that you’re here.
Some of this optimism, pessimism, upbeat, or down is genetics. It’s how it is. I’m not naturally an optimistic person. I have to work at that to do that. I could be upbeat and happy pretty easily if I’m doing things that I’m upbeat and happy about. If I’m doing something I don’t want to do, it’s hard to be upbeat and happy. That’s one place I’d work on. I’m like, “Here’s a chore. Let’s somehow make it fun.”
This part of my rambling adds up to you’ve got to pay attention to whatever it is you want to change. What built it? What put it together? What parts are in conflict? Learn to get those parts from conflict to collaboration and share with each other. You can then work out where we want to be and how to get there and nobody’s fighting about it.
That was awesome. That was well-articulated. I’m reminded of a time when my wife and I were married a few years before we had kids. For whatever reason, we required a fertility exam and some treatment. I remember in addition to all the medicine, the chemicals, the shots, and all the things you have to do, there was a meditation that was recommended by the fertility specialists. Neither Danielle nor I were meditators more than relaxing but I do know that it was profound. It was a little bit wonky at first, the actual recognition, acknowledgment, and validation of what was going on in her body. They had wanted her to pay attention and focus on certain things. It was interesting.
The good news story to this is we ended up being blessed with two beautiful boys and all was well in the world. The thing that struck me was what I remember about that challenge was not the medicine or the shots. It was the meditation. I remember I would lay next to her in bed and she would take her earpods. She would take them out and pull out the connector so I could hear it. I listened to it a few times and it was neat.
The Power Of Focused Attention Meditation For Positive Change
It was the first time I believed in some validation and some real proof, at least from my point of view. I’m not preaching, “This is powerful. It worked for us.” I don’t know if it was a placebo but it worked. What can you tell me about that experience of combining focused attention and meditation and creating an environment maybe for a positive physical outcome to manifest?
We could go back to our episode about being productive. Our culture tells us to drive as hard as we can, achieve every possible goal, and rise to the top of whatever we’re doing. No part in all of that says, “When you get here, you’ll be cool.” It tells you, “Keep going.” Most of our tombstones could say, “He was very productive,” or, “She did a whole lot.” My guess is that was probably the first time you slowed down for a moment. As soon as you do, you feel differently. I don’t practice sitting and meditating for 30 minutes or anything. Meditation works much better for me if I do it all day.
That’s active meditation.
To me, mindfulness, which is the big meditation word, in my mind means to pay attention, be here, and be present, and most of us are not. Most of us are thinking about the future like, “After this episode, I have to do this. I only have two hours,” or the past like, “I messed that up. I got to go back and fix that.” You get this storm up there. When I teach meditation, I teach with kindness.
To oneself?
Yeah, learning to be kind. What’s going to happen if a client goes home and they try it? They’re going to come back and it’ll be some version of, “I tried the meditation thing and I’m not any good at it. It didn’t seem to help.” I say, “How long did you do it?” They’re like, “I did it for fifteen minutes.” I say, “Maybe I didn’t make it clear what the goal of meditation is. The goal is not to even relax. The goal is to be with whatever it is.”
Meditation is not about being relaxed. It’s about being with whatever it is. When your mind wanders, you bring it back, kindly.
If you sit down to meditate and you start thinking about something else, you have to go, “I’m thinking about something else. What I want to do is meditate,” and then you come back. Meditation is when your mind wanders off, you see it, and you bring it back, and you do that kindly. Most people, after they get clear on that, come back and they go, “I can’t do it. I’m no good at it at all.” I say, “There’s no kindness there. If you wander off for ten minutes before you catch yourself, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
My kind of meditation is I got this guy who sits here. I couldn’t count it but it’s hundreds of times a day saying things like, “Breathe for me,” and the other part that he’s talking to goes, “Thanks.” Maybe he’ll say, “Slow down a little bit,” and it’s like, “Okay.” I’ll be working on a computer and I’m trying to do something on some website and it’s not working. I get crazy because, in my mind, things ought to work. I’m like, “This is silly.” I start to get frustrated and then I hear this guy go, “Step away from the computer and breathe.” It may take him three times before I’ll get up. If I wait 1 hour, 2 hours, or 3 hours and come back to it, it works easily because it was a glitch on their side that I was never going to be able to fix. That’s my meditation.
The other part of it is if you listened to the inside of my brain, you would hear conversations. That’s what I’ve learned to do. I have all these different parts and they’ve all got something to say. There are conversations going on. They’re like, “Do this and do that. I’m like, “I’ll do it.” They’re like, “Don’t forget this thing over here.” I’m like, “Yeah.” They’ll throw out 4 or 5 and say, “What do you guys want to do 1st?” I’m reducing stress and anxiety. I’m not burning up the resources in this fight between hearts. Meditation helps with that. To the best of my knowledge, it does activate what’s called your parasympathetic. What do we call that one?
Fight or flight?
Yeah. It’s about the fight, flight, flock, and freeze. It’s about how your nervous system plays parts.
Electrical parts are what we call it.
We run on electricity. You want to take care of that. There was some other point and I’ve lost it.
You were going down about the parasympathetic.
We have two nervous systems, in a sense. It doesn’t work exactly this way but sympathetic and sympathetic work in tandem. They can’t work this way. If one goes up, the other goes down. High sympathetic means low parasympathetic. It means you’re on alert. You’re going to cut off blood supply to your frontal lobe. You won’t be able to think straight. You’re going to cut off blood supply to your gut. You don’t have time to digest food. All sorts of changes are going to happen.
If you have countless arguments going on inside your head, you’re doing this. If you get those parts together to where they’re friends and they support each other, this happens. It’s a matter of being able to navigate your nervous system and regulate it in a way that you want. Sometimes, you want to be like this. Learn to move that, which means you have to be present in your body even though where it is. What was the topic of all this?
If you have countless arguments going on inside your head, it’s a matter of being able to navigate your nervous system and regulate it in a way that you want.
We started a conversation based on us, or at least me personally, and the mind-body connection. We stated enough evidentiary facts to conclude that it certainly exists in some context. I learned a lot.
If somebody wants to talk to me about the mind-body connection, I end the debate pretty quickly. I go, “There is.” You’re speaking of what’s up here, the mind, and then everything down here being the body. I go, “Does the mind look connected?” Everything affects everything else. That’s the butterfly effect. Everything works as a system.
What I learned in this episode is that in order to feed one thing, you’re likely taking from another thing.
If you’re taking good care of yourself, you’re going to have enough resources to get you through the day. Few people are taking good care of themselves in terms of keeping enough fuel in the tank. They’re burning it up chasing this golden ring that doesn’t exist and/or along with that, they’re burning up their resources by trying to figure everything out, do it perfectly, and get people around them to like them. You’re worrying about what’s going to happen when they go home because you had a fight. You’re burning up that fuel.
That’s a great analogy. I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Chicago. Eddie and I live in the Atlanta Metro. There was an acknowledgment or an awareness around this seasonal attitude disorder that would happen in the winter months where the sun doesn’t come up till darn near 8:00 and it’s dark at 4:15. You’re going to school or work in the dark and coming home in the dark. It’s cold and wet. During the holidays, there’s a lot of running around. People would legitimately get depressed. That’s why that acronym’s SAD, Seasonal Attitude Disorder. That was something that was recognized. I don’t recall an explanation as to what was going on physiologically, but the attitude was you were depressed.
The Importance Of Connecting With Nature For Well-Being
I’ll tell you one thing that happens. Researchers were trying to figure out how birds knew it was time to migrate. They did all kinds of stuff to them trying to get them to not migrate because then, they would know what they did. The thing that kept them from knowing when to migrate was they painted the top of their heads black. The reason that affected them is because what a bird is doing is they’re measuring the length of the day, not the sundown. They’re like, “When the day gets this long, we go.”
I tell you that story to answer your question because we need to get outside even if it’s cold or even if it’s cloudy. As clocks, we don’t have a clock. There’s a whole lot there too. Your clocks get set by being outside. They’re constantly checking where the day is. We stay inside all the time with artificial lights. We get all screwed up, and then we’re off of our routine. We’re starting to feel that.
The basics are to eat as healthily as you can and eat the amount of calories you burn. Do that. Get some exercise. I’m not talking about going to the gym for two hours. Walk down to the end of your street if it’s 200 or 300 yards. That’s it. Go outside even if it’s for a few minutes to let your body go, “This is what time it is.” Those three things very few of us do well. Those are the basics. If there was some class on being a human before we were born, that would be right there. Do this.
Eat as healthily as you can, get some exercise, and go outside. These basics are the foundation of being human.
No doubt. As I become more aware, a lot of this is due to the way social media has changed the way we become aware based on preferences, algorithmic activity, and so forth. I have become more aware of the mind-body connection, circadian rhythms, grounding, letting the sunrise hit your retina, and being outside barefoot, which is another topic for another day.
I’ll be 50 in February 2025. I’m learning this. None of this was taught to me in school. My perception, and maybe it’s the bubble that I’m in, is there seems to be a lot more awareness and an appreciation for what was maybe understood. Time has gone by. It seems to me that we’ve developed this way of living that contradicts what the body wants.
It started with the railroads.
Do tell.
That’s a whole story there, how we got away from it. Imagine living in what would be considered a modern time but there were no clocks. If you live in a regular town and you have a farm out here and you’re going to go see the doctor, you don’t call the doctor and work through 47 times of pushing the button to get to the wrong person. You get on your horse and ride down to the doctor’s office. You’ll get there when you get there. If you run into some friends, you’ll sit and chat with them as long as you want to before you go to the doctor and then you walk into the doctor’s office. There’s your doctor’s appointment. He does something and then you ride your horse and go home.
When the sun comes up through their windows, they get out of bed, if not before that. When the sun goes down, they’re ready to go to bed. They’re winding down. We’re not even close to that. Most of the deaths in this country are caused by poor lifestyle habits, things that you have control over. We get pushed so hard and we buy into it that self-care isn’t even on the list.
The Role Of Therapy And Self-Awareness In Personal Growth
Your lips to God’s ears. I know we’ve made a commitment and have been trying to inform as many people as we can through the work of this show of the benefits of the acknowledgment, the recognition, and, hopefully, some outreach for those who think, “Maybe I could be a little kinder to myself. Maybe I don’t have to feel this way,” or, “Maybe there is a better path,” or, “Maybe someone can show me a different way.” One thing I’ve learned in the conversations that we’ve had is the interconnectivity of life, relationships, the human experience, self-talk, and self-care. The more I learn about the science behind it, the more captivated I become. The reality is awareness, in my opinion, precedes progress.
If you’re experiencing something that you would like to experience less or if you’re not experiencing as much of things that you might want to experience more and you’re overwhelmed perhaps with life, one thing I know to be true, and Eddie would agree, is to have a conversation with a licensed psychotherapist to delve a little bit deeper into what you had referred to earlier in this episode, which is, “What brought that about. What caused that feeling?”
Be kind to everybody. You don’t know what they’re going through. Everyone is battling something, so be kind when you can.
It is then acknowledging that feeling with compassion, curiosity, and kindness and getting to a place where we can not ignore or disregard but at least have an awareness about why you are feeling the way you’re feeling and recognize it. Perhaps through the consistent counsel of an excellent therapist who receives therapy, you can start to acknowledge and recognize a new path forward, and it may resemble, ironically, an older path. I don’t know. It warms my heart every time we get to this place in the episode where it’s common sense to a person like me and, hopefully, someone tuning in that you don’t have to suffer in silence.
There are way too many people doing that. There are people who aren’t counselors who know how to comfort you. Sometimes, that’s monumental because no one comforted us after they were mean to us. We were all alone. If someone comforts you, that’s a new experience. Be kind to everybody. You don’t know what they’re going through. Everybody struggles. Everybody has worries and things that they’re battling with so be kind to them as best you can. Make the world a little bit better place.
I’m with you. This has been another stellar episode of the show. That’s your therapist, Eddie Reece. My name is Bill Courtright. We’ll keep coming back. Our next episode will launch soon. We’ll see you soon.
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