Does mental health affect physical health and vice versa? Dr Amber Johnston – a clinical psychologist specialising in neuropsychology – says it absolutely does

Are we missing what’s underneath our noses? 

I’m Dr Amber Johnston, a Clinical Psychologist in Neuropsychology, on a mission to assist people meet their brains and use them in a way that works with, fairly than against them. 

To accomplish that means braving into neuroscience to explore why we predict, feel, learn, and behave as we do- after which, how we are able to make individualised lasting change.   

We’re flooded with health and well-being suggestions, from cutting-edge science to health hacks and top practices for fitness and youth.  Yet despite that, the statistics show a bleak picture for the state of most people’s mental and physical health. 

Despite abundant, sometimes conflicting advice, how will we use this information to actually enhance our emotional and physical well-being? What are the barriers that appear to forestall us from doing all of the things we all know we must always? 

Let’s begin with review of the elemental misunderstanding that also permeates each most people and the medical community alike – that of the separation of mind and body. 

Mind vs Body

In my clinic, I see person after person coming to me for various difficulties around stress, low mood, anxiety, or simply a general unease with none label to go along with it.

Most need to feel higher and prioritise healthy lifestyles but feel thwarted by failed change attempts. Lots of these clients suffer with health symptoms like diabetes, cardiovascular irregularities, chronic pain, insomnia, auto-immune disorders, and fatigue.

Or much more commonly, they speak of medically unexplained (undiagnosed) issues – general sleep problems, stomach upset, headache, sore neck, fogginess, appetite changes, lethargy, and chest or respiration issues. 

I notice and enquire about these health conditions, however the client is commonly surprised; in spite of everything, they’re in my office to tackle their emotions. They view their physical state as just irrelevant small talk. 

That is where medical reductionism, separating psychological and physical, might be seen at its pinnacle; most paradoxically, inside the healthcare system designed to best understand our brains and bodies!   

The mind/body dualism is the term used to explain the separation our culture has created between the workings of the mind and the processes of the body, which reduces each to a separate pathway that should be explored and treated in isolation. 

Freud and William James used medical cases to indicate the impact of emotion state and the unconscious mind on physical illness

Culture has altered this view over time, perhaps in an unhelpful direction.  The good minds of Aristotle and Hippocrates were pioneers for the roles of the soul, mind, and humours on the physical body. 

Rene Descartes separated the mental from the physical together with his mind/body dualism within the seventeenth century, likely in response to the church deeming illness as an indication of God punishing one’s naughty soul. But later, great thinkers similar to Freud and William James used medical cases to indicate the impact of emotion state and the unconscious mind on physical illness. 

As we moved into the twentieth century though, with the invention of penicillin and germ theory, the 2 separated again. The led to an increase of the biomedical model specializing in bacteria, virus, musculoskeletal conditions, and medicine or surgeries for treatment. 

If no such condition might be identified, the ailment can only be explained through a woolly, less-understood area of abstract mental state or psychological illness, traditionally less respected and historically, not at all times treated humanely (consider the horror stories of old psychiatric facilities). 

The dismissal of psychogenic explanations (meaning developing from psychological or social processes), left a certain fear in lots of folks that they too may need symptoms that forged them except for access to the more revered biomedical healthcare professionals. 

Mental health DOES affect your physical health

To today, when my clients enter my office, the conflict continues to be palatable. I see some patients hellbent to clarify that their pain is ‘real’ and their fatigue and cardiovascular state is a ‘diagnosed’ condition… so there’s definitely nothing that a little bit psychology treatment can do about that. 

I sympathise with the fear of rejection by medical doctors, facing unclear symptoms alone, with clients reporting experiences of implied blame that an individual ‘should feel higher by now’ or the treatment ‘must have made a difference if followed properly.’  

All of the things in your head have ‘real’ and dramatic influences across our body system

Others have felt misunderstood and abandoned when a consultant says, ‘excellent news, there may be nothing mistaken with you!’ (when clearly there may be) and even the dreaded, ‘it’s probably just stress, in your head.’ 

Yes, after all it’s.  All of the things in your head have ‘real’ and dramatic influences across our body system.  Our thoughts and emotions do impact our physiology and may create illness over time; and in return, the signals from our body are utilized by our brain to grasp our inner and outer worlds, creating emotions and thoughts for us to then manage. 

It’s a remarkable figure of 8 interaction- signals travelling from brain right down to body and back as much as brain again.  So meaning a thought can influence a heartbeat, or a digestive response, and even impact our aging process over time. 

It’s time that your complete healthcare field catches as much as rewrite this antiquated medical narrative that sees body parts in isolation fairly than holistically. 

The amazing brain

The brain is the orchestrator of the whole lot that we perceive and all of the processes that our body must survive and thrive. And due to this fact, to make sure we enhance its functioning, it’s paramount to grasp how our thought content, emotion state, behaviour react to the interior and external world from our senses and have direct impact on our physical health. They can not be separated. 

But the good news is that we are able to harness the ability of our brains to boost overall wellbeing. On this upcoming series, I intend to deep dive into a few of the details of how our brains detect threat, learn, and make mistakes. 

The brain is the orchestrator of the whole lot

Understanding these processes will lead you to higher understand where our stress originates and gets reinforced, despite our greatest efforts to minimise it. There are skills to learn with managing these processes, they usually should not quick hacks, however the rewards feel great once they create lasting change. 

Include me to get to know the you that perhaps you’ve been missing, the brain behind your individual nose….

Stay tuned for the subsequent article on this series – ‘Is stress our friend?’, next Thursday where I discuss why some stress responses are essential. 

Dr Amber Johnston is a clinical psychologist specialising in neuropsychology (healthymindpsychology.co.uk)