WHAT IT IS
WHAT IT CAN DO TO YOUR HEALTH
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
A few important highlights that I took away from this book. It wasn't just about how you create stress in your mind - but physical influences as well, this book was so informative!! Take a look over, it doesn't take long but it will change your life and how you live day to day with this knowledge. *Page numbers are in brackets!
Illnesses hover constantly about us, he said, their seeds blown by the wind, but they do not take root in the terrain unless it is ready to receive them. (3)
Try to make your life worth living, for as long as it lasts. (8)
The body was designed for physical use, marvellously designed - in fact it is probably the only piece of equipment in your life that improves with work. (9)
Stress is indeed a genuine disease of our time. (18)
"Bernard was right. The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything. (18)
He tells his patients who must travel long distances to never take east-west flights on the same day they have to do business, but to allow three days because of the time difference. (31)
"At night keep away from business. Wander about the city aimlessly." (31)
"Compulsive striving. They would rather die than fail." (32)
Migrane
"The art of life is the avoiding of pain." (40)
Perhaps the truth is that the average migrant patient doesn't know what to do with leisure: for him, as for the coronary type, the meaning of life is work. (41)
Digestive System
The lining of the stomach is tougher than the exterior skin: stomach acid, when mixed with pepsin (one of the stomaches digesting enzymes) can actually burn a hole in the skin of the arm. (45)
"the excrement becomes associated with the concept of possession." (52)
Constipation goes with depression and dullness, diarrhea with panic. (52)
Constipated people are often going through a period of dejection. They are discouraged, bored, and rather grim. (52)
Suffering from chronic diarrhea own more flaming feelings: anger, resentment, hospitality, sometimes vague guilt, a terrible touchiness toward being slighted by people or events. (53)
Stress and the Immunity Screen
Psychologists have been claiming that allergy is at heart an emotional disease. (69)
Many asthma patients find it hard to express their feelings. Their longing to be taken care of prevents them from acting rebellious, and their rebelliousness prevents them from acting dependent, so they can become almost immobilized emotionally. As a medical group they are notorious for their inability to weep. Some psychologists cry for Mother, and it can often be broken up if the patient bursts into tears. Others feel it is more a protest against maternal donation - the patients way of saying he feels smothered. (71)
The Skeletal-Muscular System
Everyone expresses feelings muscularly. (81)
"Sitting tight" describes the state of the typical patient with chronic functional backache. (81)
When a person feels like acting but does not allow himself to act, his muscles remain tenses in readiness. (82)
It must contract extra hard to make up for its permanently shortened condition. (82)
Chronic muscle spasm - recurrent backache. (82)
At heart most of them are action types. (82)
Accidents
both groups are doers - busy, on the go, interested in challenging and mastering their physical environment. (88)
A psychologist might suggest that underneath Jeff's feelings lies a deep and unspoken fear0 of helplessness, of mutilation, of death - and perhaps also certain inner doubts about his manliness: and that Jeff fights down these fears and doubts by acting aggressive and daring. (89)
A suicidal person wants three things: to kill, to be killed, and to die. (92)
Twenty percent of all fatal car accidents involve drivers who have suffered an upsetting experience within six hours before the crash, and one out of three accident victims was depressed. (92)
HOW IT HAPPENS: The Pathways of Stress
"The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact we know about the process of life." - Franz Alexander (95)
Two basic forms of human behaviour. One is aggression. The other is dependency. (99)
Emotion does out, one way or another. We have got to say what we feel and mean; when we cant say it in words or actions, we say it physiological. (114)
WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
People were born to fight, and when they don't permit themselves to fight others, they usually end up fighting themselves. (129)
Diet
In short, ones weight depends less on the output than on intake: it is not insufficient exercise, but over sufficient food - particularly certain kinds of food - that makes so many Americans overweight. (140)
Endomorphs - large stomachs, general softness of body, small bones and muscles.
Mesomorphs - spare, hard, resistant builds, big muscles and bones.
Ectomorphs - thin all around, with small muscles, but large heads. (143)
a pound of body fat equals 350 calories (146)
What does move the fat out of storage and into action is a marked reduction in the kind of calories contained in carbohydrate foods - the worst of them being sugar, alcohol, bread, candy, cereal, milk, potatoes, ice cream, pasta cornstarch, and certain vegetables and fruits - with reliance for energy instead on high-protein calories - lean meat, poultry, fresh fish (but not shell-fish), eggs, salad, and some cheeses) (147)
Meditation
Weill points out that many people lost interest in drugs when they take up mediation - because, he says, meditation fills the same need, only better. (185)
Hypnosis
that the mountains and the sea and the starts are part of one's body and that one's soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures... (195)
This is especially true of the emotions. Like arms and legs, fear and anger are part of the basic human equipment: exercise develops them and makes them useful. A person who is good at solving problems is a person who knows how to be angry. He has learned to use anger to change a situation. (210)
Dr. Sony (212)
Habit is essential to sane living. (213)
In these circumstances habit, designed to protect us from stress, becomes stressful itself. (213)
Habit seldom solves problems, and almost never seizes opportunities. (213)
Anger, is what rouses you to challenge a situation. (215)
The business of life is to keep changing. (215)
Life is a unique gift and challenge, not to be measured in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to the question whether it is "worth while" living, because the question does not make any sense. (216)
EPILOGUE - A Second Chance
A word about medicine: don't use it unless you have a real reason. (218)
In most illnesses the symptoms indicate that the body is at work fighting disease, and the best strategy is not to interfere with its efforts. (218)
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