Revolutionary Study Proves You Can Control Your Health and Longevity with Just Your Thoughts — Find Out How!

We’re not going to talk about nutrition, diet, sleep, rest, exercise, air, water, sunlight, or avoiding toxins, although we have covered those topics before. What we’re going to talk about is something that most people who talk about optimizing health don’t discuss much: our thoughts. Many people believe that our thoughts are out of our control, but that has been proven to be false. We can actually control our thoughts, and who better to introduce this topic to us than William Shakespeare himself? In Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 2, he writes a famous quote: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” He brings up a truism here, which is that we tend to remember the evil things that people do rather than the good things. This raises the question: does our mental approach to life affect our body, immune system, and health? I think you’ll be surprised at what the research shows.

Let’s get to the topic at hand. For that, we’ll look at an article that was published in 2016, titled “Optimism and cause-specific mortality: A prospective cohort study.” Here, they looked at a number of patients, primarily women, in what they called the Nurse’s Health Study. They found that positive psychological attributes, such as optimism, are linked to a lower risk of poor health outcomes, especially cardiovascular disease. It has also been demonstrated in randomized trials that optimism can be learned. If associations between optimism and broader health outcomes are established, they may lead to novel interventions that can improve public health and longevity.

In this study of 70,000 women, they looked at dispositional optimism in 2004 and then looked at all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates from 2006 to 2012, using various hazard models. They found that women in the highest quartile of optimism had the best health outcomes, specifically mortality, with a 95% confidence interval between 0.66 and 0.76. On average, they found a 0.71 reduction in all-cause mortality, which is like a 30% reduction. This association was maintained even after they added health behaviors that could be associated with these health conditions. Depression attenuated but did not eliminate the association, so there was still a 9% reduction. Associations were maintained for various causes of death, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, and infection. Given that optimism was associated with numerous causes of mortality, it may provide a valuable target for new research on strategies to improve health.

However, association does not necessarily mean causation. It could very well be that there’s a third factor that’s not only improving optimism but also affecting mortality. What we really need is a randomized

These were actually students who were seeking psychotherapy. The majority of them were women; I think it was around 60 to 70 percent. In this case, there were 293 adults, so a fairly sizable study, although not huge. The median age was 22 years old, and they were seeking psychotherapy at either a counseling center or a community-based training center at Indiana University.

"Change your thoughts and you change your world."

They randomized these students into three different groups. The first group received only psychotherapy; this was the control group. The second group received psychotherapy plus expressive writing about their stressful experiences. Essentially, they were reliving their stressful experiences and putting them down on paper. This is kind of like the “evil lives after them” according to Shakespeare. The third group received psychotherapy plus something called gratitude writing. This is where they wrote a letter to someone in their past whom they felt gratitude towards for something they had done or for a connection they had felt. They wrote a letter each week for three weeks, so just three letters in total.

They looked at these three groups in a number of different ways after a follow-up period of four to 12 weeks. Four weeks after they had written their letters, they found that the group that received psychotherapy plus gratitude writing had significantly better mental health than either of the other two groups. In fact, these two groups were pretty much the same.

Let’s take a look at the data. We have Time 1, Time 2, Time 3, and Time 4. We’ve got the gratitude writing group, and then everybody else: the expressive writing and the control. If you notice here at 4 and 12 weeks, let me tell you how to interpret these scores. 2.78 on a scale of zero to four with this GMH scale is the cutoff between clinical anxiety and stress versus non-clinical anxiety and stress. Four is the best, that’s where you want to be. As the number goes up, that’s good. 2.78 is the clinical cutoff, so below 2.78 is not good.

Before they were randomized, the scores were 2.31 versus 2.24 in the gratitude writing group, but then notice what happened. Everybody goes up because they’re all getting psychotherapy, so we would expect them to go up. However, the gratitude writing people went up faster and higher. By week number four, the gratitude writing group had actually passed the clinical cutoff, whereas the expressive writing and control had not. The gratitude writing group was even the highest towards the end. In the gratitude writing, there were more positive emotions than there were in the expressive writing. There were also fewer negative emotions than there were in the expressive writing, and there were more what they call “we” words, so inclusiveness incorporation, than there were in the expressive writing. They found that the difference between these two groups was statistically significant. You can see here, .03 and essentially 0.03 as well in both of those conditions.

When you engage in this type of activity, don’t feel discouraged if you don’t notice any changes after a week. It may still be working, but it can take up to a month or two or even three to see results. Follow-up studies were conducted using functional MRI to observe the brain and determine whether different parts of the brain were functional and working. Three months or 12 weeks into the study, participants were given money as part of a test to see which parts of their brain lit up when they gave the money to someone else. The results showed that individuals who were more grateful, as measured by a scale, gave more money and had increased neural sensitivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with learning and executive function. Those who wrote gratitude letters had even more activity in this area when experiencing gratitude. This study demonstrated that even three months after the three-week activity, the effects on the brain were significant and long-lasting. This was a randomized control study, not an association, case-control, or retrospective study.

The importance of these findings lies in the fact that these types of positive feelings can lead to measurable improvements in cardiac health and other areas. In a 2019 study titled “Positive Psychological Well-being and Cardiovascular Disease” published just before the pandemic in the Jack Health Promotion series, numerous reviews and meta-analyses evaluated the role of depression, anxiety, anger, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and chronic stress in relation to the development of cardiovascular disease. They found that depression consistently predicted an excess risk of developing coronary disease. Similarly, anxiety, PTSD, anger, and hostility were found to be equally potent risk factors for chronic heart disease as depression. Moreover, a combination of these negative factors conferred a cumulative risk. On the other hand, positive psychological well-being has been shown to positively impact health behaviors, biological functions, and psychosocial factors, as well as encourage restorative processes. Negative psychological well-being, on the other hand, leads to deteriorative processes. Stress plays a significant role as a third party, and overall, positive or negative cardiovascular health in later life is the ultimate outcome.

It may be beneficial to learn about positive psychology interventions, which aim to promote optimism, gratitude, and positive effect directly through activities such as imagining and writing about a better future, recalling positive life events, identifying and using personal strengths, and planning and performing acts of kindness, going on mission trips, helping people, volunteering your time, etc. These activities have been found to improve indicators of psychological well-being, such as optimism, in the short term, with some suggestion of sustained effect. Numerous meta-analyses of 39 randomized controlled trials have shown that positive psychological interventions are associated with significant, small effects on well-being and depression, with sustained effects for three to six months at follow-up.

In conclusion, we may be overlooking one of the essential pillars of optimized health — constraining our thoughts to appropriate things. While we talk a lot about nutrition, dietary supplements, sleep, exercise, fresh air, water, sunlight, and avoiding toxins, we rarely talk about the role of positive psychology interventions. Holding onto resentments and feelings of anger has been shown to promote poor health, specifically cardiovascular disease, especially in men. Forgiveness, empathy, and understanding are crucial components that have been extensively studied and have demonstrated a significant impact on psychological and physical health.

“Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.” — Christian D. Larson

I would like to clarify what science believes forgiveness is, and what it leads to in terms of empathy and understanding. Forgiveness is more than just moving on; somebody just shrugs it off and moves on; it is a little bit more than that. It does not mean that there is no justice, and somebody can still have forgiveness even if justice has been served outside of them, as the justice system is different from what happens internally. Furthermore, forgiveness is not a sign of weakness. While some may forgive because they are not in a position of power to take retribution, it is easier to forgive. Actually, forgiveness takes a lot of strength to move on and have empathy and understanding for the very person that may have done something very bad to you. It is linked to reduced anxiety, depression, major psychiatric disorders, fewer physical health symptoms, and lower mortality.

When people say, “What is empathy?” we usually respond with, “It’s walking in someone else’s shoes.” However, I like the quote from Brene Brown in “Atlas of the Heart” where she says, “We need to dispel the myth that empathy is walking in someone else’s shoes rather than walking in your shoes. I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.” This is really key because we experience things differently based on our circumstances. For example, during the recent pandemic, people in different walks of life experienced it in completely different ways. My experience was working in an intensive care unit where people all around me were dying, which was a very different experience from someone who works in the business sector, whose job was shut down. Their view of the pandemic may be completely different from my view. We have to realize that when we form our opinions, it’s based on our experiences. We need to treat other people’s experiences with validity, regardless of what our experiences are, if we want to have empathy for them and try to understand them.

This is important, especially if we’re worried about our own health because anger or resentment towards other people affects our health. An interesting study was published back in 2016, titled “Forgiveness, Stress, and Health: A Five-Week Dynamic Parallel Process Study.” The study aimed to examine how forgiveness, stress, and mental and physical health symptoms change and relate to one another over five weeks. The researchers hypothesized that increases in state levels of forgiveness would be associated with decreases in perceptions of stress, which would, in turn, be related to decreases in mental and physical health symptoms.

They found that levels of forgiveness, stress, and mental and physical health symptoms each showed significant changes in individual variability over time. Forgiveness leading to improved health fit better than better health leading to forgiveness, which means that the first model was correct.

“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” — Theodore Roosevelt

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