Have you ever wanted to change a behavior yet found it impossible to actually do?

Here are some basics of bodymind medicine I’ve have worked with for more than 2 decades that you can try for yourself.  It all comes down to Pavlov – remember  how he got dogs to salivate when they heard a bell ring?  Well, you, too, don’t have to salivate, but can learn to change your physiology with any of your physical senses – smell, touch, taste, touch, or sight.

This work evolved from one of the most exciting discoveries in medicine  -psycho-neuro-immunology. Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) brings together the mind(psycho), our molecules and nervous system (neuro) and the immune system.

And the study that gave birth to PNI was the discovery that we can condition or train our immune system, up and down via our senses.

Here’s a bit of  ‘how to’ followed by the science.

USING  SENSORY CONDITIONING

Of course, in addition to immune activities, you can condition relaxation,the feeling of gratitude, and pushing yourself away from the table. Essentially you are pairing a new behavior with one of your physical senses. And since most of us have too much stress in our lives  I’ll use relaxation as an example.

• What relaxes you?  Is it a warm bath,  sitting at the beach, meditating, a walk in nature, humming or smiling?
• Have on hand a favorite or unique smell or taste.  You can instead, or in addition touch your thumb and index finger together.
• However you approach reaching a relaxed state -  use that strategy to start, whether it’s meditating, closing your eyes and imagining the beach, a walk, a bath – take a chance by even imagining relaxation.
• As soon as you feel relaxed, immediately smell the scent or touch your fingers for a few seconds.
• Practice this for a few days and within a week or so, you will discover that the scent or touch can bring you once again into a relaxed state.

Why learn to teach your cells other initiators for relaxation?  Here’s a personal story.  I used to travel around the country driving from one city to the next after teaching all day.  Talk about stressful having to negotiate unknown highways, traffic jams, rain storms.  I was a ‘once in a while’ meditator so decided to try the sensory conditioning for myself.  Every time I meditated and felt relaxed, I would sniff lavender.  I’d carry a little bottle of lavender with me and when I’d get stuck in traffic gridlock, I’d smell lavender and instead of gritting my teeth, I relaxed.  It’s like having a genie in a bottle.  Definitely worth giving it a try.  What do you have to lose?

The Scientific Breakthrough: CONDITIONING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
The coup de grace that launched PNI into a legitimate discipline was the controversial discovery by Robert Ader, a psychologist, and Nicholas Cohen, an immunologist, was their discovery that the immune system could be trained just like a reflex.  In other words, immune cells could be conditioned to do new things. This was a totally  new assumption and understanding for modern science: If the immune system could learn behaviorally, then it must be part of, or at least influenced by the mind. Until then, the immune system was considered to be a solitary player, outside the reach of mind or even stress.

Conditioning often occurs without conscious perception of the process. Sensory conditioning, what we’re doing in our own relaxation experiment,  can trigger an unrelated automatic, physiologic response. Pavlov’s classical conditioning of salivation by a dog by the sound of a dinner bell set the stage for this profound discovery.

Ader wasn’t interested in the immune system when he started out, he wanted to understand what made people who got chemotherapy dislike certain foods or have an unpleasant response to foods.  Sometimes a person who had received chemo one month and got sick, the next time they’d go in for chemo, all they had to do was SEE the building, or SMELL the office, and they got sick to their stomachs BEFORE getting the next round of chemo.  Ader wanted to know what was happening so set up an animal model.

His model:   rats were given saccharin-sweetened water (unique taste) along with a one-time injection of a drug that caused gastrointestinal upset – the adverse response. The association of the ill feeling with the unusual taste resulted in subsequent aversion to the saccharin-sweetened water. However, when thirst overpowered the aversion, the rats were obliged to drink the saccharin water. Unexpectedly, after about thirty days some animals began dying of infections; and those that died had consumed the most saccharin-sweetened water. What was happening?

Ader, in discussing the experiment with immunologist Nick Cohen, learned that the drug he used to cause GI upset (cyclophosphamide – Cytoxan), a cancer chemotherapeutic agent known to cause nausea also suppresses the immune system.

In this experiment, the rats were exposed to Cytoxan once and even though the rats were no longer exposed to immuno-suppressive Cytoxan, they continued to suppress their immune systems by drinking the saccharin-sweetened water. Ader and Cohen went on to confirm the unexpected, that the immune system could be suppressed through a classical conditioning paradigm. Subsequently many investigators have substantiated and expanded their work.

Other studies have shown that all the physical senses are powerful triggers for conditioning the immune system as well as other autonomic behaviors.

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Adapted  from Psychoneuroimmunology: The Bridge Between Science and Spirit, in Radiant Minds.

Download the  whole article by clicking here – Psychoneuroimmunology