The lovely Dr Egg, Give A Brick treasurer and all round nice guy, has been rather quiet on here of late. However, he’s written a fascinating article about how science really does prove that being happy is good for you. It’s a little longer than our average post but is really worth taking the time to enjoy so if you’re in a rush, be sure to bookmark it Over to you Dr Egg …

I thought I’d drop a line on this subject as I have been very conscious while reading quite a number of the posts and comments on the Give a Brick website that many relate to individual well-being. Examples include “How to bottle what makes your heart sing” “How to keep going when your world falls down” and “5 easy ways to live in the moment.” There is a common theme running through here and believe it or not it’s psychoneuroimmunology.

A bit of background: my day job (the one that pays the mortgage) is in health protection, a branch of public health and to do with the prevention and management of incidents and outbreaks, primarily communicable diseases. As a microbiologist by background, who spent his formative years in the Royal Navy and a couple of years at the Royal Marine training establishment, I became very interested in the, “Mind over matter” attitude of super fit young men or those aspiring to be super fit.

Now that’s not, “I don’t mind and you don’t matter;” military training is an expensive and serious business and having selected those who will be offered training, all branches of the services are desperate for their recruits to succeed. I was fortunate therefore to spend some time when working out of the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar and the Institute of Naval Medicine, to be part of a project looking at whether there were any additional measures that could be taken to identify those Royal Marine recruits who were more likely to fail. This would allow for more discriminative selection, reduce wastage from the programme and provide advice on improvements prior to re-application to the service.

We were looking at a whole series of biochemical, haematological and immunological markers, way out of the comfort zone of a microbiologist. However, when I started reading around the issue, I discovered there were plenty of microbiological examples, as well as more sinister effects associated with various cancers. In “How to bottle what makes your soul sing” Eleanor talked about focussing on events that had a positive effect on you.

The world of psyconeuroimmunology has tended to focus on the effects of the negative and in particular within the realms of Major Life Events. The reason for this is that science can be a pretty blunt measuring instrument and needs to look at big things to see small changes. By concentrating on major life events, such as bereavement, job-loss, house moving, divorce, researchers were able to study people who had been traumatised and measuring the effects in terms of illness.

One study I remember (this is not a scientific treatise so please don’t ask me for proper references) looked at three groups of women, one group happily married, another who were widowed many years previously and a third group whose husbands had recently died. They found that this third group were more likely to die a cancer related death in the follow-up period of the study.

The group who were widowed many years previously, were of course the survivors from the past bereavement while those happily married equally had no major current stressors in their lives. The group that was recently widowed, as a group, were suffering all sorts of psychological traumas as they tried to come to terms with their loss.

As researchers studied the various medical markers, they found that the psychological effect of the stressors were influencing the immunological response to both infections as well as cells that were becoming cancerous. Now the positive side of this effect is the accounts you will read of people who are taught to think positively in response to their cancers; something that has been advocated very well by many women’s magazines in relation to breast cancer.

One of the most wonderful accounts I read of this was of how some paediatricians working with children with leukaemia, got them playing on one of the earliest computer games ever invented – Space Invaders. I’m sure you will remember; those funny little blobs moving down the cathode ray screen as you fired at them to destroy them. After the children had got to play for a while, the doctor’s told the children about the cells in their bodies that were invading them. They told them how they had a wonderful body with special weapons (the various cells and constituents of the immune system). They said how they needed to think about those abnormal cells invading their bodies and fire at them with their special weapons.

As in any such study, there were inevitably two groups, those who were on regular treatments and those who were also on identical regular treatments but also went through the space invader programme. No guesses at the result – the group who had been taught to fight their leukaemia had a far better survival rate.

So go on, smile, think positive thoughts and be positive to others – it’s good for your health and probably for theirs also.

photo credit: HowardLake

Tagged as: happy, science